disassociated

Code is code, what difference does the font you choose in whatever app you use for coding possibly make? As long as the code works as intended, what does appearance have to do with it?

But the conversation I found on the topic — which in fact started months ago — actually relates to a writer’s favourite font for writing — as in copy, not code — which is kind of intriguing.

Intriguing, because I’ve never given the matter the slightest thought. Obviously on my website I have chosen a particular display font, but when it comes to drafting my posts, no, I pretty much use one of the fonts the app offers.

These fonts are certainly not monospaced fonts (for all their virtues), which is where the discussion seemed to later turn. I write all my posts, together with the necessary HTML tags, on a word processing app, and when ready, copy and paste the text into WordPress.

I know I’m missing something using this process, because I read about the way other people use (what sounds like) a number of apps, before their blog post drafts are fed into their blog publishing software. But when it comes to a favourite font for drafting, whatever that might be, there isn’t one.

Literary writers at The Sydney Morning Herald canvassed critics, editors, and writers, including Jane Sullivan, David Free, Gyan Yankovich, and Beejay Silcox, to determine the best ten books of this century, or the last twenty-five years.

Producing such a small list from a relatively long time frame, will doubtless generate discussion.

Anyway, Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (winner of both the Stellar, and Miles Franklin, literary awards in 2024), along with Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, are among notable — to me, that is — inclusions.

I’m talking about the Australian downtempo electronica music act, not the public broadcaster of India. In the hubbub of the silly season, I forgot to mention a new album, Tranquil Motion, was released earlier this month. Track it down on Bandcamp, or your favourite music streamer.

I could use some tranquil motion right now…

Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:

Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.

disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.

The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.

As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.

And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.

Dark energy does not exist, and the universe, while continuing to expand, is not doing so in a uniform fashion. In other words, the cosmos may look more like a potato, rather than a sphere. This according to recent research by astronomers and scientists at the University of Canterbury (UC), based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

As if that’s not startling enough, things become truly mind boggling when we look at the nature of time in a universe that may be devoid of dark energy. Time, you see, is moving at different speeds, depending on the location. Within our galaxy, the Milky Way, a clock ticks more slowly than one that might be situated elsewhere in an empty region of the universe, say the mid-point between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, which is two and a half million light years distant.

The model suggests that a clock in the Milky Way would be about 35 percent slower than the same one at an average position in large cosmic voids, meaning billions more years would have passed in voids. This would in turn allow more expansion of space, making it seem like the expansion is getting faster when such vast empty voids grow to dominate the universe.

Because there is more gravity inside a galaxy than outside, clocks will be slower. This is a concept called gravitational time dilation, which Albert Einstein predicted when he published the theories of special relativity and general relativity, early in the twentieth century. Differences in clock speeds may not be surprising then, but the UC research illustrates just how stark these variations might be.

The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacqueline Maley, for The Sydney Morning Herald. This as 2025, and the greater uncertainty that many people are anticipating, looms:

In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration’. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.

Let’s flashback a year. Australian telecommunications company Telstra might have hit the right note with its Christmas theme advertising in 2023, by way of this ninety second commercial. The song excerpted in the ad is Oh Christmas, by Brisbane based duo Zefereli. Listen to the full length version here. It may not happen often, but sometimes the big corporates get it right.

Weather that is fine and not too warm seems to the Christmas Day weather forecast for most of Australia. But the days either side will be a different matter, writes Tom Saunders for the ABC:

The tumultuous week of variability will commence with a wintry Monday for the south-east, even cold enough for brief snow on the Alps, followed just days later by a blast of hot northerly winds and potential catastrophic fire danger.

Presently, day time high temperatures on this part of the east coast are forecast to be relatively mild. With the exception of Friday when the mercury is predicted to reach thirty-six degrees Celsius. I think we’ll be spending most of that day deep in the shade somewhere.

Hamburg, Germany, based web developer and long distance triathlete, Tim Teege is super keen to run a marathon the Moon. So much so, he wants you to ask any space agency worker type acquaintances you may have, to help him achieve his goal. Ask, and you shall receive, and the like.

Not to put a dampener on Teege’s aspirations, I wonder if he’s read Rhett Allain’s Wired article on the subject:

You can’t go out and jog around the Sea of Tranquility—you’d just start bouncing and floating.

But, as they say, where there’s a will, maybe there’s a way. The laws of physics notwithstanding. Yet here, at the quarter way point of the twenty-first century, the act of somehow being able to run on the Moon, should really be Teege’s only significant challenge.

Getting to the Moon — in this post 2001: A Space Odyssey world — should be as easy as boarding what ought to be regular commercial flights to Earth’s satellite.

The journey might cost a pretty penny, but that’s what crowdfunding is for. Instead, however, in what’s almost 2025, about all we have in terms of reaching the Moon, is NASA’s troubled Artemis program, which seems like a re-run of Apollo, yet appears not to be going anywhere fast.

With 2025 essentially only days away now, I shouldn’t be so indifferent. Big shoot for the stars ambitions and goals are what we need right now. Especially for this particular new year.

A statement of twelve guiding principles for an ethical web, recently published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to ensure that the web serves as a platform that benefits people and delivers positive social outcomes. As we continue to advance the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work.

Comparable, to a degree, to the IndieWeb community’s core tenets. To me, the W3C’s ethical web principles seem like web standards for a more mature, established web, of the third decade of the twenty-first century. One objective of web standards was to build a web (specifically websites), that everyone could view and use uniformly, regardless of their browser, or platform (operating system). We have the technical side of the web down pat, hopefully, now it’s time to focus on ethics.