'Airsoft flashlight'

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When asked for purchasing advice by friends, family or colleagues, especially those of whom are novices in said hobby or field, I always give the following warning: When shopping online, be careful not to restrict your searches by adding arbitrary keywords specifying your use case, when the item has a more general purpose.

I coined the term 'airsoft flashlight' after being approached by a friend who was lamenting his difficulty finding a high quality flashlight for use during his airsoft matches. After asking how he was searching for one, he explained he had simply searched for 'airsoft flashlghts'. I asked him what differentiated a generic flashlight from an 'airsoft flashlight', and was met with reticent pause.

This advice can also extend to general web search queries (especially in light of how dismal Google search has become). For instance, instad of searching "Synology NAS compatibility Seagate ST22000NT001 22TB HDD", I might instead broaden my search to "Synology NAS compatibility 22TB HDD".

This may be obvious for some, but I find myself forgetting this trick when shopping for, or troubleshooting very specific things.

Discord

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Given my age, I had the unique opportunity to grow up on the internet during they heydays of both the forum / bulletin board, and the much newer Discord chat client. As the dust from this massive transfer of usership has now mostly settled, I reflect upon my time participating in (and hosting) legacy forums, and the much sleeker (and more volatile) Discord.

My assessment: The internet will eventually experience a massive withdrawal as a result of abandoning forums in favor of discord. Completely ignoring the unique social cohesiveness and sense of community that they offer, legacy forums / bulletin boards are a very well optimized means of documenting problems and processes. Discord is an inferior means of hosting a technical community in almost every possible measure- except for perhaps speed and polish.

Microsoft Edge rant

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I am frequently asked by my friends and colleagues which web browser I use. Inevitably, my answers to this question always seem to result in a furious rant of some sort. Reflecting upon this, I concluded that Web Browsers are the perfect microcosm for terrible interface design choices and user interface pitfalls- such as feature creep (Zawinski's Law), bloatware, refinement culture, and the innovation paradox, to name a few. Of all the major web browsers, the biggest fall from grace is undoubtedly Microsoft Edge: a browser I vigorously shilled around 2018, but nowadays avoid like the plague.

Though I enjoyed a few happy years with Edge, I eventually found myself waking up every few days to a new 'feature', that either took up space in the context menu, in the toolbar, or a new space entirely, like that awful 'AI' sidebar - a HORRIFIC misgiving of user interface design in my eyes, and the last straw forcing me to finally jump ship. When they weren't dumping an unnecessary new feature, updates would frequently and completely arbitrarily alter CRITICAL functions, like the location of copy/paste within the context menu, or revamping the spellcheck to require five more clicks and a mouse over into a submenu.

And before you ask: No, constantly disabling wave after wave of unwanted feature is not tenable for me, since I work for a living, and don't have time to undo the kindergarten spitball scrabblings of Microsoft's UI / feature team. In addition to Microsoft deliberately making it harder to disable new features as time went on, maintaining a group policy-like registry of all the tweaks I needed to make Edge palletable was simply not feasable. All of these items are design sins, and reminded me of how little Microsoft cared about the usability of their product, over how "clever" it appeared. Edge was once the fastest, cleanest and best looking browser, but now it is none of those. Back to firefox and librewolf for me.

SATCOM conundrum

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I want to be able to keep a satellite phone in my trunk for a rainy day, and know it will work without having to keep track of it's subscription status or pay monthly. Since I will not be using it often, I am looking for a prepaid SIM card with NO expiration or monthly fees. I was surprised to find that no such option exists.

I have found several good prepaid SIM options who do not have service expiration dates until activated (fine for me), however these plans frustratingly require SIM activation through a WEBSITE! -rendering the benefit of this flexibility worthless in an emergency!

You would think, given the massive popularity of the burgeoning Starlink, that legacy SATCOM providers would be doing everything in their power to appear more consumer friendly. Perhaps it's time for these rapacious legacy services to gracelessly expire.

The coming war on general computation

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Give this a watch if you have a free hour. It perfectly summarizes a premonition I've had since around 2015 having watched applications and the web itself become paradoxically more bloated and more restrictive at the same time. In my opinion, we are living in the twilight of the best version of the internet we will ever have.

Micro blog

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I decided to throw together a micro blog, as I've felt inclined in the past to post things to my site, but have refrained from doing so out of reluctance for creating a whole new page for just one small topic.
Individual posts can be linked using anchors: http://samg381.com/about/blog/#1