Happy New Year 2018! Καλή Χρονιά! Guets Neus!
Passing the 13th year
Happy New Year to all my (few) readers! May 2018 be the best it can be.
I'm not expecting much. I've been cycling the last day of 2017 and the
first day of 2018, I think it's a good way to spend the change of years.
The last two New Years we had snow here on Naxos. This time definitely
nothing like that. Yesterday it was windy and a bit cold, but nowhere
near freezing (except when riding downhill in the mountains). Today it
was sunny and warm, with no wind at all.
As usual, this change of year is also the birthday of this weblog. The
blog has been around for 13 years now, quite some time. Thinking back
about those days back then, it's as if it was a different me, and it was
definitely a different time. I'm definitely not saying the old times
were better though, just different.
The theme of the blog this year seemed to be: "Ups, it's almost the end
of the month, better post something now, or else there will be a month
without a post!" I had only two months with more than one post. Most
posts were about cycling, then a few general posts. But then, the weblog
is still around!
Portrait Monitor... and tablets
No, this is not about framing a photo, neither is it a tablet
Since my computer work consists mostly of writing code, I find it very
convenient to use a monitor that is "upright", or in portrait mode. That
way I can see more code in the file that I'm editing. Typically the
width of the code is limited to a few under 80 characters wide (and it's
common to use a fixed width font). In my case I use a monitor that can
rotate. I guess there was some "driver" software that came with it to
automatically tell the operating system on your computer in which
orientation you have it rotated. I don't use anything of that sorts, I
simply tell my operating system how I want my external monitor to be
configured.
So much for the navel gazing at my work habits. What is more fun is what
happens when I browse on the World Wide Web with this monitor. Because
nowadays, many websites seem to "sniff" somehow the screen dimensions,
and when they see it's portrait, they assume I'm browsing on a tablet.
So I tend to get huge font sizes, menus hidden behind the "hamburger
menu", and sometimes really minimalist pages. Quite often I can fix
things by playing with the zoom level or slightly resizing the browser
window. Most of the times I can live with this latest trend in web
designer stupidity.
An award for extra stupidity goes to the designers of the website of
spanish bicycle brand Berria though (or maybe to whatever framework
they use) at http://www.berria-racing.com/. Going to their site, I'm
informed to please turn my tablet into landscape mode. With no choice to
override this, with no way around it or a button "give me the desktop
site". (See picture.) Somebody wasn't thinking this through. Well,
actually I can override it, by using only part of my screen and reducing
the browser window to a landscape-shaped slice, but that's very unconvenient. Interesting enough, when you have a deep
link to one of their pages, it works anyway, so why put in this stupid blocker? Facepalm.
