Saturday 15 June 2019

Vivaldi

Installed, tried and uninstalled. What use is a browser which doesn’t allow a multilingual literate guy disable spellchecking?


(originally posted on Tumblr)

Thursday 13 June 2019

(untitled)

Seems like the recent weeks, when the combination of frustration from my new laptop’s slowness, a fair amount of extra hours at work, and too frequent pub visits, is finally over, and I’m (however slowly) beginning to try and catch upon the backlog this caused.

And frankly I enjoy it; in fact I was becoming surfeited not only with the extra worktime, but even with the pubs, and missing the online world.

But it took the worst withdrawal I’ve had for a couple of years to actually start doing something about it.


(originally posted probably on Tumblr, or maybe on WordPress)

Sunday 9 June 2019

New laptop

It’s been two months now since the day my Acer Aspire died. I never liked it all that much, although it wasn’t its own fault (it had Windows 8 pre-installed like the others at that time, and I found that a step back rather than an improvement in comparison with Win7), and in fact it served me reasonably reliably for more than five years – longer than any of its predecessors.

It’s been two months now since the following day, when I bought a new device, a cheap HP, and I still can’t get used to how slow it is. Even opening a 20KB .rtf file takes it as long as the Acer needed to open a 1.3MB .odt file, and as for opening a few browser tabs at once … sometimes it feels like the sod thinks that multitasking simply means doing one task at a time, but remembering what to do next. I’ve learned that if I want to watch an iPlayer programme, I need to close almost every other programme to have at least a chance at avoiding a stop-start execution. (And of course, Win10 is even worse than Win8.)

But I was always good at finding the silver lining of a cloud. I console myself by admitting that like this I’m becoming less addicted to the internet. Readier to accept that I simply don’t have the time to read, watch, listen to, edit, write &c&c this or that.

I even began spending more time reading books again. For a lifelong bookworm, not such a bad deal.


(originally posted on Tumblr)