Skating with my Fothon illuminated wheels

Despite the blister on my foot I couldn't resist going out and trying out my new Powerslide Fothon wheels for my inline skates. I got a 4-pack of wheels with red LEDs:

The wheels contain a small generator that uses the rotation of the wheel to generate electricity for the LEDs, so they come on when the wheels turn. Because all of this slows down the wheels a bit, I'm only using one on each skate. They also come in white, blue and green.

And as always, iPhone slow motion video for the win!

Customize Safari Reader font

I think yesterday's WWDC was the longest one I've seen at nearly 2.5 hours. Still, there wasn't much to get excited about. Apple Pay is coming to the UK, but not to the rest of the world. Apple Maps transit directions are coming to two handfuls of cities and all of China, but not to Holland. Apple's new news app is also limited to the US, the UK and Australia. The music stuff may or may not be interesting, but I'm afraid it's going to get in the way of simply playing the music I have on my computer and my iPhone.

But... reading the fine print, there is one thing I can get behind:

A customizable font for Safari Reader!

I must be getting old, but I really can't stand what the web has become these days. The trend to have fixed banners at the top and/or bottom of pages gets on my nerves, because that way you can't scroll a webpage one screen at a time. It's also visually distracting. As are the attention-grabbing ads, which are often animated or video. So there's hardly any text I read on the web without invoking Safari Reader.

However, Safari Reader itself isn't all that great: the width of the text is fixed, so in order to get avoid having too many words per line, which makes it hard to land on the next line, I need to keep the text size bigger than I'd like. (Funny, because 95% of web pages use text that is way too small.)

Safari Reader uses the Georgia font, which isn't terrible, but largish serif fonts just don't take advantage of high resolution displays. So I hope that in addition to the ability to configure a nice sans serif font, we also get to adjust the margins in Safari Reader.

DAB: mijn eerste digitale radio

► Alles in het leven is tegenwoordig digitaal, maar de radio is eigenlijk niet veranderd sinds de invoering van FM in de jaren '50. Maar als we dit promotiefilmpje van een jaar geleden mogen geloven is de radio nu ook hard op weg om digitaal te worden! Dat wilde ik zelf wel eens horen, dus gister heb ik mijn eerste digitale radio gekocht.

→ User agents of change

Allen Pike, "crafter of fine software", writes about how insane browser user agent strings have gotten. Case in point, the mobile version of Edge, Microsoft's new cutting-edge browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 10.0; Android 4.2.1; DEVICE INFO) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Mobile Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0

That is to say, Microsoft Edge claims to be every computing platform ever conceived - except for Internet Explorer.

The nasty thing with all this useless nonsense that the browser sends to the server for every request is that it takes up often precious upstream bandwidth. On a slow DSL or 3G link this can really slow things down.

The hell that is Disk Utility

► A while back, I gave my sister a 1 TB 2.5" USB HDD for backing up her Mac using Time Machine. But somehow she couldn't perform backups anymore lately. The drive contained two volumes: a regular one and an encrypted one. The regular one wouldn't mount and Disk Utility wouldn't repair it.

No big deal, just wipe the drive and start from scratch, I thought—assuming it's not a hardware problem. That was easier said than done. I ended up spending half the day yesterday just trying to repartition that stupid USB drive.