Firefox Minimum Print Font Size

I've been frustrated with font sizes when I print documents and playing games with zoom level, etc. But it turns out Firefox has a good, general solution: no more playing around.

Firefox allows one to set minimum print font size. In limited testing, it works well, as it should, since the browser should be able to re-flow text for changing font sizes. Other browsers probably have some similar mechanism, but this is for Firefox:

Preferences | Content | Fonts&Colors | Advanced | Minimum Font Size

I set mine to 11. It does sometimes use more paper, but several times I've seen a printout, and tossed it directly into recycling and tried again.

Alternatively for nerds: Open about:config, find the variable font.minimum-size.x-western, and set it to your preferred minimum font size.

See also: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-increase-size-of-web-pages

Trying to be a Mac User--Decision to Give Up

In November I went all-in on switching from Linux to the Mac. Linux quality is ever-declining, and I had a laptop on which Linux Mint was almost completely unusable. But Mac usability is surprisingly poor, and I expect to return to Linux, mostly completely.

This is the first of a series of short articles on Mac usability deficiencies. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_and_click#Fitts.27s_Law:

------------------------------------------

Fitts's Law

Fitts's law can be used to quantify the time required to perform a point-and-click action.
where:

• is the average time taken to complete the movement.
• represents the start/stop time of the device and stands for the inherent speed of the device. These constants can be determined experimentally by fitting a straight line to measured data.
• is the distance from the starting point to the center of the target.
• is the width of the target measured along the axis of motion. can also be thought of as the allowed error tolerance in the final position, since the final point of the motion must fall within of the target's centre.

------------------------------------------

Why is this important? Regardless of where a window is on the screen, OS X places the menu in the far upper left. Mousing to the menu is more time-consuming than if the menu were attached to the window itself, putting OS X at a disadvantage compared to other popular desktop operating systems, especially those with large screens.

Considering a Chromebook? Get Something Better

This is a draft in progress.

The old Samsung netbook I'd been using for delivering lectures recently died, and I replaced it with an Asus C200 Chromebook with 4 GB RAM and 32 GB flash. For a week or two, I thought I just had to acclimate. Since then, I've known it was simply a mistake.

The C200 itself is a nice piece of hardware. Chrome OS is a bad idea poorly-implemented.

What I like:

• Long battery life.

What I dislike:

• Storage management is inflexible. I wanted to store a bunch of documents on my machine prior to a long meeting in a room with questionable Wi-Fi. Chrome OS does not support storing files locally in anything resembling a modern file system. Flash is treated as a cache, and does not preserve directory structure.
• In said meeting, I discovered that I was unable to open a number of DOCX files and any RTF files. Some DOCX files opened fine. So, in the middle of the meeting, Chrome was suggesting that I install extensions. Seriously?
• No Java SDK, so I cannot run simple programs from the command line. I need to ssh to a remote server and run them there. This is an extra time step I'd rather not take at the beginning of class each day. And it presupposes network connectivity.
• The provided command line has none of the standard Unix network tools, making another class of examples I often give in class awkward at best.
• There is no good PDF viewer. I want to go full screen and advance a page at a time. Is this so hard or unusual?
• There is no way to modify the screen timeout. Sometimes in the middle of a lecture, the machine will go to sleep. Then, unless one is quick, it may be necessary to log back in to the machine. In the middle of a lecture. There is an app, Keep Awake, that can keep the screen on, but one has to remember to enable it at the beginning of a lecture and disable it at the end. Forgetting to disable Keep Awake can result in a very low battery the next day. Can't they automate this?
• Google loves light characters on gray backgrounds. Very often from an angle or at a short distance, items on the screen are much less readable than they could be.
• No Haskell or Scala, meaning the Chromebook is useless for simple software development. Somehow when I heard it was based on Linux, I didn't investigate further--I was in a hurry.
• The charger runs very hot. This is an Asus C200 issue, though, and not specific to Chrome OS.

My path from here (probably after exams end and post-LamdaConf 2015):

• Blow Chrome OS away and install Linux.
• Problem: if I'd bought a cheap laptop, I'd have a hard drive much bigger than 32 GB to work with.