The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

Logbook #computers

This little corner of my website is where I collect things from the everyday goings-on in my life. It’s a chronicle, exhibit, and junk-drawer all at once. I have not had a social media profile in quite a few years now, so this part of my website fills a similiar purpose to what those places did for me in years past.

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Getting old is wanting to redesign your website because the text you yourself wrote a week ago is too small to read in the early hours of the morning.

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The Proportional Web

Oskar Wickström applying Bringhurst to the web: rem proportions, justified text with actual hyphenation, one typeface doing all the work. I tried the vertical-rhythm half on my own site and backed it out; the per-element discipline cost more than it returned.

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Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Alexander Obenauer on rebuilding the Canon Cat’s document interface. The bit I keep coming back to is from the Cat’s own How-To Guide:

When our designers created the Cat they threw out all the junk that makes computers clunky and held onto the personality and immediacy of a typewriter.

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Sometimes trying to run Linux feels like being one of those historical reenactors who pretend to live as life used to be, all while living a life that in no way meshes with the real world.

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Sometimes I do get nostalgic for things, but you know what…? Old software is just as buggy and unusable as all of these here-today-gone-tomorrow web apps.

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An unease about where I fit into things is a thread you can follow throughout my entire time of making a living by doing things with computers. But I’m not sure I’ve ever had more questions about where I fit into all of it than I do now.

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I like to watch this video every once in a while to remind myself that there was once a time when we thought about how humans interact with computers. We used to put a lot of thought into how computers exist to support a human’s interests. Now it often feels like computers exist to make money for everyone other than the human using the computer.