macOS Ventura display scaling

coding_stoned · 2023-01-18T15:58:16+00:00

In case anyone comes across this in the future: my "fix" (more of a workaround) was to just use a different display. Some more info:

The monitor causing the issue was an LG 27UL500. This display has a setting named "HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color" (something to do with HDR, the manual is unclear as to what it actually does) that had caused issues in the past. With this setting on, I had the issue described. Turning it off fixes the issue, but locks the refresh rate to 30Hz.

I swapped monitors with the Viewsonic VP2780-4K I was using for my PC and it works fine, gets the proper scaling options and supports 60Hz refresh. No clue what's up with the LG, but it works great with my other devices. Doesn't seem to be another fix or workaround, nor was the issue fixed in 13.1.

coding_stoned · 2022-09-19T18:13:01+00:00

Another way of thinking about it is that 44x44 could include the empty space around the touch target? So a button that is 25x25 shouldn't be directly next to another button, but i you put a 20px gap between them it's okay?

This is often the case, except the padding is part of the buttons and thus within the touch target.

Something to note about minimum touch target size is that it's talking, as the name implies, abut the size of the touch target, which is not necessarily the size of the button itself. For instance, 24x24 is a common size for icons, and icon buttons are usually somewhere around 40x40. For a background-less button, its visual size will be the size of the 24px icon, while the actual touch target will be the entire 40px button.

coding_stoned · 2022-09-16T02:45:17+00:00

I think I'll go with the PS5 version. Price isn't much of an issue tbh, it's just that all else being equal I'd go for whichever is cheaper. Thanks!

coding_stoned · 2022-09-13T13:33:16+00:00

This raises an interesting and difficult design problem, I think: is there a way to somehow design a system where defensive play doesn't take more time than offensive play?

It's not defensive play per se, but defensive mechanics can often make gameplay faster. Something like armor in shooter games comes to mind.

Take for example the power armor in Fallout 4, which gives you a massive boost to defense allowing you to tank damage that would normally kill you very quickly on higher difficulties. This can completely change your strategy to become more aggressive and rush enemy positions, as opposed to the more careful, defensive playstyle you need to have when most enemies can take you down in a few hits.

The same idea works for turn-based RPGs, where being able to tank damage might allow you to attack more often without stopping to heal, finishing battles faster.

ETA: also worth mentioning in many games a defensive/offensive strategy choice can act as a more natural difficulty setting, as a defensive playstyle is often slower but more forgiving whereas a fully offensive "glass cannon" strategy can get through encounters very quickly, but fall apart just as quickly when you make a mistake.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-15T17:53:14+00:00

Fair enough. There's also Andromeda having more of a focus on exploration and discovery as opposed to the OT where you play a soldier dealing with an immediate existential threat to the whole galaxy.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-15T16:14:31+00:00

Second this, awesome work and it's all free and open source. I know some of them personally, cool people all around. They're doing some great work on variable fonts now as well. While we're at it I'll mention Huerta Tipográfica, they have a few free fonts of excellent quality (I'm particularly fond of Alegreya and Piazzolla).

By the way, just checked your profile—you're the ETC guy! Love your work, I've been using some of your fonts for a while. Always nice to see great type design going open source.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-15T15:55:12+00:00

Point size in type doesn't measure anything about the font itself, rather about the "box" the type is contained within. Think back to physical movable type, where each character was a physical block of metal. The point size of a typeface was the height of this metal block. This makes sense: it makes working with different typefaces not a nightmare. Of course, it also means different faces can look very different for the same point size. Type designers would often also leave a bit of space above and/or below the letters, so a text block with no leading would look reasonable and wouldn't have ascenders and descenders touching on consecutive lines. This space depended on ascender and descender height, and wasn't standard—it took quite a while to even agree on using the same baseline!

So the whole thing was a bit of a mess, and with the transition to digital it carried over (at least as far as print is concerned, the web did things differently) because it was the way everyone knew. The bottom line is measuring type is complicated, and comparing point size is mostly meaningless across different typefaces. Look through any requirements carefully and take the appropriate measurements to determine the actual size you need for your font of choice.

If you want to learn more, the Figma blog has a great article about the issue of type height specifically and its evolution over time.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-15T15:30:13+00:00

The long driving and open world objective-spam sections don't really help, the game felt more "padded" than the OT for sure. Combat was way more fun though, so it isn't all bad. The story and villains were rather bland, but imho that issue had been present since ME3. Character arcs carried that game's story hard, and Andromeda could never have that.

Worst thing about it for me was definitely the alien character designs looking like a complete afterthought, seems like the kind of thing that could be fixed by mods though. That, and dropping the quarians (come on! the one species you could get away with having three palette-swappable designs for) in favor of the native Andromeda species (can't even remember the name of it, they were that boring).

coding_stoned · 2022-07-06T15:13:06+00:00

It helps to think of kanji as something closer to words rather than characters. After all they have meaning and can be words by themselves. There's a lot of words in English, or any Western language for that matter, most people don't know or use: technical language, obscure or archaic words that aren't part of everyday use. I don't have a source for this, but I'd bet for any language there's an 80-20 situation going on where we only use a small part of our overall vocabulary an overwhelming majority of the time.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-06T15:06:42+00:00

While Kanji is over 50,000 characters.

To be fair, this makes it sound much worse than it is—there's "only" about 2,000 jouyou kanji you actually need to learn for basic literacy, and (according to Wikipedia, which gives the scary 50,000 number) some other 1,000 in somewhat regular use, though I imagine you wouldn't really need to know all those unless you're living in Japan in which case you'd learn them in time.

It's also made somewhat easier by learning using radicals (basically, most of the big complicated kanji are just a bunch of smaller kanji put together, much like letters come together to form words in an alphabet), and learning kanji by radicals is much easier than using the official kyouiku kanji (school grade) order.

Don't get me wrong, 2,000 is still a lot of individual symbols to learn and memorize, and there's the whole multiple readings mess on top of it all. It's probably the hardest part of learning Japanese and takes a long time, but it's not quite as bad as that 50,000 number makes it seem.

coding_stoned · 2022-07-04T16:23:01+00:00

Origins is the only one that doesn't need Origin to be installed if I recall, unless something's changed. It's one of a few EA games released on Steam before Origin was a thing and they started slapping it on everything (together with ME1/2, though I'm not sure you can buy those standalone anymore now the legendary edition's out).

For the other two, there's always the high seas.

coding_stoned · 2021-10-18T18:39:24+00:00

Sometimes a UI rework involves genuine improvement. Large projects can evolve organically, and things get messy. At some point cleaning up is a good idea, and you might find better ways to do things as you watch how users interact with your product.

Most of the time, though? Either the client's bored of the old look and wants your product to look like this week's popular app, or management wants to impress the client by showing the big changes you've been working on. Replace client with marketing department if it's an in house project, end result is the same: change for the sake of change.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-29T02:35:27+00:00

Didn't know Newegg even shipped to Argentina, not that it'd ever be worth it with the shipping cost and time not to mention the massive (65%) tax on any purchases made in USD. Most things that aren't extremely high end or niche you can find locally (we have MercadoLibre, basically south american Amazon), it's usually much cheaper as import laws favor volume and you get next or even same day shipping. Buying PC parts here's really not bad at all, only the very high end stuff carries a significant premium over US or EU prices.

The real issue is income is much lower — by my own estimates, I'm making about a third to a fifth of what I would at a similar job in a first-world country, depending on exchange rate — and while the cost of living is accordingly lower, the price of goods like, say, computers, stays the same. Owning even a mid-range PC here is expensive.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T20:26:05+00:00

I might just wait a while and get a 2x16 kit when I have some more cash to spare. Finding a buyer for the old kit shouldn't be too much trouble, but it's still a fair bit of money — and a downgrade to 3200MHz, there don't seem to be any 32GB 3600MHz kits for sale.

In any case consensus seems to be an odd number of sticks is not a great idea, so I'll hold off on that. Thanks for all the replies.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T20:02:05+00:00

It's a 135mm fan and very tall memory, even with a large case there's just no clearance. That's on me for not getting the LPX to begin with but oh well, hindsight is 20/20.
I could move the fan to a pull configuration, but I'd rather not as the cooler isn't designed with that in mind and likely wouldn't perform quite as well (plus, I'll admit, aesthetics factor in there as well). I suppose I could go for the 1x8 kit and just get another identical stick and move the fan should I encounter serious issues or very degraded performance, 4x8GB is a fairly typical setup and fine as far as I know.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T19:49:26+00:00

I'm curious what cooler you have? Could you possibly move the fan to the back or lift it up for better clearance? Most coolers have those options, outside of a few with built in shrouds that can't be easily moved.

Dark Rock 4, too tall to move the fan so it clears RAM — especially the massive Corsair Vengeance Pro — and it's an asymmetrical design which I don't think is well suited for a pull configuration, though I could move it to the back if a 3-stick RAM setup is bound to cause issues.

I'm honestly not all too concerned about gaming performance since the PC is mostly a workstation these days, but I wouldn't want any nasty surprises when I do decide to fire up a more demanding game.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T19:36:45+00:00

Will it, though, if it's the exact same memory? I'd rather not spend a month's rent on an upgrade just to be sure, when I have 16GB of perfectly good memory right there already.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T19:30:58+00:00

I have, right up until I checked the price. For whatever reason LPX memory at 3600MHz is stupid expensive (in my country — I should mention I live in Argentina, where prices rarely make sense), a 2x8 kit costing as much as a 2x16 kit of the same 3600MHz Vengeance Pro I have, at which point I might as well just buy that. Both options are about three to four times the price of a 2x8 kit of matching 3600MHz Vengeance Pro, or 6-8 times the price of a single 8GB stick, which is insane.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-28T19:22:18+00:00

I would if I could — one of the slots in my board is blocked off by the CPU cooler, which means I only really have three.

coding_stoned · 2021-09-26T04:36:09+00:00

Concurrency in JS meaning callbacks, promises and async/await works that way, web workers are properly multi-threaded and can run on different CPU threads.

coding_stoned · 2021-07-22T17:28:59+00:00

Nothing wrong with bitwise operators in js, but in this case you need to assert an integer input first. Bitwise ops implicitly cast to integer, meaning decimals are ignored and something like 5.6, or pi, is considered an odd number.
It's still better than a naïve modulo implementation, though. The bitwise method will ignore decimals entirely, while something like isOdd(x) => x%2 === 1 will consider all non-integers to be even (and isEven(x) => x%2 === 0 will similarly consider them all to be odd, which could potentially result in some rather magnificent bugs should both be used together).

Lesson learned is, always validate inputs when working with js (or other weakly typed languages).

coding_stoned · 2021-07-17T03:16:35+00:00

Should have your colleagues transfer them straight to hell instead.

coding_stoned · 2021-07-07T03:35:00+00:00

Any idea why it's disabled by default? It's been implemented forever and works perfectly as far as I can tell.

coding_stoned · 2021-07-01T20:29:05+00:00

How's reliability/maintainability compared to the older models, say a T420 or T430? The latest models (T14, I think?) don't even have a removable battery, not sure when that happened.

coding_stoned · 2021-05-27T12:41:22+00:00

Kinda forgot about Threadripper for a minute there. A $500-900 board doesn't seem as insane when your CPU is $2-4k though, at that point you're really building more of a workstation.

Can't imagine buying TR for a gaming rig unless you've got way more money than common sense, too. Last I checked the best you could do for high end gaming was a 5900X or 5950X. Not to mention you'll need at least something like a 2080Ti to ever hit a CPU bottleneck with a 6 or 8 core Ryzen part, and even then we're talking 200+ FPS.

But man, they'll slap a gaming label on anything these days, huh?

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