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What is text? This blog post reminds me of the time 10 years ago when I tried to do away with Linux's desktop environment because it seemed overly complex and hard to wrap my head around. I had a lot of trouble running wifi without the desktop environment, and it left me quite bitter. Linux had seemed like a hacker's OS when I first started out. But it was trying so hard to compete with Windows that it was starting to seem like Windows in all the wrong ways, it seemed. That experience contributed to me walking off into the wilderness to build Mu. I've gone back and forth between two tendencies in my life. On the one hand, I used to brag about a minimalist setup living in text mode, only running startx as needed, long after the world had moved to fully graphical desktop environments. On the other hand, I was frustrated early on with the limitation of pure text, creating a little bit of Vimscript to view and edit drawings inside a code fold inside code comments. (I don't remember what format I used for the drawings. Maybe Inkscape? I always liked its format and found it quite easy to hack manually.) And these poles have continued to attract me in turn. I wanted to build Mu with just text mode for a long time, and now in the past couple of years I seem to have tried to minimize my use of terminals, with all their ugly historical and path-dependent hacks, and to do more on a graphical canvas (of a game engine). Trying to look back dispassionately, I seem to operate by: Structured data. Not too much. Mostly text. But then, last year, I had a fascinating and also slightly frustrating conversation with a friend where we realized we had very different associations for the term "text". When I said I wanted to keep something as "just text" I meant "viewable with cat on a vt100." (But with Unicode.) When they said they wanted text they meant, "everything you could do in the tradition of book publishing before the advent of computers." (But maybe not images? Equations and line drawings, certainly. And video is right out.) Another dimension of our disagreement: I was thinking of text in terms of compatibility. What can you do regardless of what device you have on you right now. They were thinking in terms of "what's possible with an extremely low-power reader without regard to compatibility." Also, I imagined authoring text and reading it as happening on the same device. Perhaps they imagined authoring on high-powered devices and reading on low-powered ones. So, 30 years after I started programming, I still don't really understand what I want. I try to clear my mind of the cobwebs created by the hacky, historically path-dependent past. But I'm not there yet.
As I start teaching the kids programming, I’ve been thinking about how to motivate it to them. They do a lot of drawing, so that seemed like a potential hook to show how drawing on the computer may make some things easier (erasing, manipulating, repeating) and other things harder (e.g. drawing well). Demo of a little bare-bones fork of Lua Carousel for a computer with a large screen and a mouse. The large screen is divided up between a code editor and a drawing area. There are a few drawing tools. When you make a stroke the code for it is inserted above the cursor in the code editor. You can also edit the code directly and run it to make changes to the drawing area. There is no support for grabbing points or shapes in the drawing area. All you can do there is emit shapes with coordinates. Everything else you gotta program the old-fashioned way. Download (120KB). Inspired by Ronin and Sketch-n-Sketch.
An experiment involving scrollbars Keeping scrollbars easy to acquire even in large files. Demo of an idea for a scrollbar with a shadow or "penumbra" which makes it easier to acquire to drag around, even as the conventional and smaller central object continues to be visible to give an accurate sense of file size and our position in it. Thanks Artyom Bologov and Mary, though I ended up taking their suggestion in a different direction…
As an experiment, I've machine-translated the help docs in Lua Carousel into 7 languages: Spanish (Peninsular and Latin American) German French Japanese Chinese Portuguese Hopefully it is helpful for someone to no longer have to put up with English. I put each language in a separate download to reduce the amount of data you need to download. Other languages are machine-translated from the English version. I've had friends spot-check it for obvious issues, but there are likely to be problems I missed. Please report any issues you spot. If you want to manually translate pages to improve wording and tone for your culture, contributions would be most welcome. No support yet for right-to-left languages, or languages with combining characters. Lua Carousel still assumes every character on screen is atomic. For example, I can support Chinese and Japanese but not Korean, Arabic or Indian languages. I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to multilingual keyboard support. My rough sense is that that's something to configure for your device. But if there's something I can change in Lua Carousel to make your life easier, please let me know. I've included different fonts for Chinese and Japanese, which blow up the download size for these languages. The source code inside each zip file download is exactly the same, only the font files are different. The larger font files also seem to take up to 10 seconds to load.
More in technology
Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.
We keep reading scary reports of swarms of AI agents breaking into computer systems and doing other untoward and perhaps illegal things. To what degree do these agents influence each other? And is there anything we can learn from human behavior that would help mitigate these problems? That’s the heady backstory behind [episode 46](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology) of [_Traction Heroes_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/). Harry brought a short reading from David McRaney’s [_How Minds Change_](https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasion-ebook/dp/B093R2CP2V/) about the impact of our groups on our thinking and behavior. Here’s the key fragment: > the latest evidence coming out of social science is clear. Humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right. So much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers. We never lack evidence for this: just tune in to the news. People do stupid things to remain in good standing with their milieu _all the time_. (I know I have!) And apparently, so do AIs. (Although as I pointed out in the show, we mustn’t anthropomorphize technology.) But more importantly, knowing about the perils of tribal psychology can help us be more effective when working in groups — and therefore, to gain traction. [_Traction Heroes episode 46: Tribal Psychology_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology)
There's a chance, slim as it might be, that things won't go the way the've gone the last 30 years with digitization the moving to rental models for everyhing.
Three years ago, I bought an Asus laptop, specifically the Zenbook Pro 17. It's a powerful machine and works just fine for my needs, but it had one problem that made me want to either return it or throw it out the window. I would work on projects for hours on end and close the lid when I was done. I haven't manually shut down a computer in more than 10 years. I only do so after a forced update or during a debugging session. So I would close the lid, and a couple of hours later I would open it back up. Instead of waking from sleep, the computer would start from scratch as if it had been turned off and the battery was nearly dead. That meant everything I had open was closed. I'm lucky that most of the applications I run can restore a previous session, but it was extremely annoying. I had a similar issue with my previous Asus, and I had blamed Windows for it. The computer often woke from sleep just so Microsoft could perform an update, which used up all my battery. Sometimes I would open my backpack to find a dead laptop that was warm to the touch. I've written this blog post at least five times. Each time I thought I had solved the issue, but then it came back. This time, though, I think I have finally resolved it. So if you have an Asus laptop running Windows and you experience this very annoying issue, you are not alone. In my case, the culprit was the Wi-Fi adapter, specifically the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922. The Solution On Windows: Open Device Manager. Expand Network adapters. Right-click the MediaTek device and click Properties. Click the Advanced tab. In the Property box, select Power Saving. In the Value field, select Disabled. That's it. After three years of annoying restarts, this finally solved my problem. Now let me explain what was going on. What Was Happening (based on Windows Event Viewer) When the laptop lid is closed, Windows initiates "Modern Standby." In this state, the screen turns off to save power, but the system remains partially active to maintain background network connectivity. Shortly after, Windows attempts to transition into a deeper low-power state and disconnects the network adapter to conserve battery. However, the MediaTek Wi-Fi driver (mtkwlex) fails to handle this low-power transition properly. About a minute later, it generates Event ID 1033 errors referencing a network device path (specifically \Device\NDMP3 in my logs). Because the driver's error message resource is missing or corrupted, Windows Event Viewer cannot interpret the error and displays a generic warning instead: "The description for Event ID 1033 from source mtkwlex cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted..." Because the Wi-Fi driver fails to sleep, it keeps the system partially awake. This causes abnormal background battery drain and heat buildup, which is exacerbated when the laptop is in an enclosed space like a bag. In response to this abnormal drain, Windows triggers Event 507: "Austerity Battery Drain Budget Exceeded." It's important to note that this event is Windows intentionally waking the laptop up to prevent the battery from dying completely. However, because the Wi-Fi driver is already in a crashed or unstable kernel state, the system fails to recover from this forced wake-up. The result is a silent system crash or thermal shutdown, followed by Event 12 ("The operating system started"), which confirms the laptop rebooted. The Result With the fix in place, the Wi-Fi device no longer attempts to enter its power-saving sleep mode, so it never crashes. The ultimate solution would be a fixed MT7922 driver, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find one online. It's been three weeks so far, and I've been able to resume my work without coming back to a crashed computer. I hope this helps someone else.
