Of Tennis Elbow and Forced Downtime
I’m on my final day of three weeks off. I had sort of aimed to spend a substantial portion of my xmas/new year vacation time alternating between learning Go and playing Minecraft. My right arm had other ideas though and an issue that had been niggling at me for quite a few months (in reality, since I moved in April) flared up substantially in my first couple of days off, leaving me with a fairly substantial tennis elbow issue. So Minecraft, any significant mouse work and any substantial weight-bearing activity was suddenly out. That did leave some time for learning Go, but mostly resulted in a lot of forced downtime during the break. It did however let me catch up on some reading.
Design and UX
A few design and UX related articles grabbed my attention during the break:
- The State of UX in 2025 published at the end of 2024 captured a lot of the challenges I see the UX industry facing into the new year. Since my husband works in more traditional design I also see a lot of parallels to challenges his industry is facing. I would note that “do more with less” has been a mantra across all businesses for decades, but we must be diligent in making sure, moving into 2025, that it is tempered with Wisdom rather than Greed.
- “Dignity by Design” – Dr Patricia Moore on true inclusivity is an eye-opening read into the history of how accessibility in design has been pursued over the decades. Inclusive design is important in all products, across all industries. Regardless of whether you permanently need assistance, gradually develop the need, or temporarily have the need, inclusive design benefits everyone. For example, from the article:
- “Low lighting in restaurants means people use the flashlights on their phone to read the menu. That’s situational inability. And what about the volume on restaurant sound systems? It’s not a disco.”
- The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism was an interesting insight into some of the various trends in UI element design. Almost anyone tech or design related who used early versions of iOS were probably familiar with skeuomorphic design, but I’d not been exposed to the term neumorphism before and found this more recent history of named UI trends fascinating.
Exodus: The Archimedes Engine
Without a doubt, my favourite science fiction author is Peter F. Hamilton. I was stoked when his latest book came out in late November and I managed to finish it during the break. I’ll still say that I believe his Commonwealth universe is without a doubt the fictional universe I’d most love to live in (even more so than 32nd century Star Trek), such is the level of detail in his world building. Exodus was certainly not a let-down for world-building and I’m looking forward to the sequel, whenever that may be.
Haiku Progress
The Register has an article about the ongoing development of Haiku, which tries to provide a BeOS like experience. BeOS was one of those operating systems that I always wanted to get to play around with, but never found it in the wild, so Haiku is about the closest I’ll ever get. By the looks of Beta 5, it’s getting pretty damned close to a sufficient level of stability, so I can see myself installing it in a virtual machine again some time soon.
Of Moral Vacuums
In addition to some vile moderation policy changes, Facebook has stepped further into the abyss by terminating its diversity and inclusion (DEI) programs. This egregiously willing step into a moral vacuum is sad and pathetic.
I’ve already closed my blog’s presence on Facebook (admittedly that was in progress before this – Facebook had been making it increasingly difficult to post links), but the various acts of moral turpitude by Meta over the last couple of weeks have me preparing to leave it behind entirely.
I’ll be blunt: people who campaign against “wokeness” use that word because even they know that speaking out against the real thing they’re campaigning against (empathy) will see them rightfully castigated.
Shut up, Siri
Apple is paying out a privacy lawsuit over it’s Siri system recording and sharing content with advertisers. The gist of it is that Siri would accidentally get activated, conversations would be recorded and then shared.
I admit I filed this under “no s**t, Sherlock” when I saw it – over the years my iPhone and/or my Apple Watch has periodically interrupted me in meetings to either chirpily tell me it didn’t understand what I was asking it (when, obviously, I wasn’t), or to interject with some random factoid or piece of information that it thought I wanted. Supposedly many word combinations sound sufficiently like “Hey Siri”, and this problem is now only getting worse with Apple abandoning the need to say “Hey” first.
Intelligent assistants are a great idea. Maybe one day someone will invent one. For now, we’re all stuck with the mediocre trash provided by Apple, Amazon, and Google.