zerosleeps

It appears that ABC News has completed it’s transition to utter shit. Our main sources of news in Australia have always been crap (“always” being “at least since I moved here in 2010”), but the ABC was the best of a bad bunch.

As I type, the top story on abc.net.au is:

One golf club benefitted from a multi-million-dollar Labor grants scheme. It was in the PM’s electorate

It’s in a big blue box and it has a photo of a golf club and a sub-heading that contains the phrase “pork-barrelled”:

That is, according to the ABC, the thing on the planet that we need to know about the very most.

This post was actually triggered by the ABC’s report on yesterday’s 21 Air flight that overran the runway at Miami Airport. The opening paragraph in the ABC’s article:

At least five people are dead after an Amazon cargo plane barrelled off a runway at Miami International Airport, striking multiple vehicles and bursting into flames.

Look at the language. “barrelled”, “striking”, and “bursting into flames”. And “at least” five people are dead - surely there will be more! This is a huge disaster!

Compare with the opener from BBC News’s story:

An Amazon Air cargo plane overshot the runway while attempting to land at Miami International Airport, killing five people and seriously injuring five more.

No theatre. No spectacle. Just the facts.

David Bushell:

Sublime Text is still around. The last stable build was released May 2025. There are dev builds as recent as July this year. I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care. All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.

It’s developed by an Aussie shop isn’t it? Anyway I’ve spent several hours in Sublime Text almost every working day for well over a decade and it has never annoyed, confused, or disappointed me.

PS that is a beautiful looking website!

A thousand times yes to this post from Lukas Mathis regarding toggles in user interfaces, especially if all toggles shown are in the same state:

Is this toggle on or off? If you don’t already know that “left” means “off” and “right” means “on”, you have absolutely no way to tell.

My favourite is this one that’s in a hideous bit of enterprise software I have to use every day:

It’s been like this for years and I still have no idea which thing is active.

Ooh I uncovered this report on Bugzilla this morning and yeah I reckon there’s something to it. I have many gripes with Firefox at the moment but energy consumption is probably number one.

Here’s my M4’s CPU history as reported by Activity Monitor when watching a full-screen YouTube video in Firefox with ProMotion (Apple’s name for variable refresh rate) enabled:

And here’s the same setup, same video, but with my screen’s refresh rate set to 60Hz:

I’ve owned a couple of M-series MacBooks now and the efficiency cores are magical wizardry that use almost no energy at all. You can pin ‘em all day and your Mac won’t get warm and it will sip electricity. Not so much with the performance cores.

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in my dismissal of Orion. I’ve been driving it this week and it’s really good. I haven’t encountered any real negatives.

Let’s run through my list: it’s very Mac-assed. It seems delightfully energy efficient. And it hasn’t done anything remotely creepy or annoying. Quite the opposite in fact - its built-in content blocker is plenty good enough for me, and so the only extension I’ve got installed is 1Password which seems to work just fine (once you change a couple of things). And you can install extensions without requiring a fucking account with anyone.

The developer tools are as you would expect from a WebKit browser as well.

Nice!

I kind of wish Kagi made it more obvious that this is a thing they make. And that it’s free - the whole Orion+ thing is a bit confusing, but I’ve already signed up for it because as I stated in my last post, I am happy to pay money for a browser if it means no bullshit.