#oneaday Day 483: I regret buying an expensive keyboard and mouse

A while back — probably a few years back at this point — I discovered the joy of a mechanical keyboard and a good quality mouse. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say I rediscovered it; growing up, after the Atari ST, we had a couple of "proper" IBM PCs, complete with Model M keyboard, and I have fond memories both of using that keyboard and of being able to hear it all the way downstairs when my Dad was typing on it upstairs.

But yeah; I started with a relatively cheap "Tecknet" wired mechanical keyboard and liked the feel and sound of that, so a little while later I decided to spend a bit of money and treat myself to some pricier models: specifically, a Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro keyboard and a Razer Basilisk X Hyperspeed mouse. I chose the Blackwidow V3 Pro specifically because it was a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless — for a while, that was a hard combination to find — and the Basilisk X Hyperspeed because it seemed to be decent without being overcomplicated.

I regret my purchases.

Not because either of them are unusably bad or anything, but because both of them have just enough little annoyances about them to make me wish I'd just stuck with the cheaper kit I was using before — or going with another manufacturer. Razer is very much the basic bitch of PC pimping — although I will say their Kiyo X webcam is genuinely excellent, and I have absolutely no regrets there.

Let's start with the names. If I hadn't told you the Blackwidow was a keyboard and the Basilisk was a mouse, would you have been able to determine which was which? I still have to look it up every time, which is very unhelpful when Razer's software (we'll get onto that in a moment, believe me) informs me that the battery is low on one of them. It doesn't have a helpful little icon showing whether it's the keyboard or mouse; it just says the battery is low in the Blackwidow or the Basilisk. And I'm fucked if I can remember which is which. (Although writing this blog is, annoyingly enough, probably going to help me remember.)

Okay. So the Blackwidow. It's a nice keyboard — feels nice to type on, makes a nice clicky sound when you do so. But it has an eminently stupid design that causes it to get filthier than any keyboard I've ever used. Rather than having the keys in a slightly recessed cutout from the main body of the keyboard, which is easy enough to clean if you take all the keys off and then Hoover it or something, the keys "float" slightly above the keyboard case, which is otherwise solid. This means all manner of disgusting crap gets caught in between and beneath the keys within about five seconds of you starting to use it, and cleaning it seems woefully ineffective because immediately after doing so, it attracts filth again.

Possibly related to the perpetually filthy status is the fact that the volume knob on the top right of the keyboard is a real roll of the dice on whether or not it'll actually do what you want it to do. A significant portion of the time, it will do the exact opposite of what you are indicating you would like it to do, and sometimes it will just judder back and forth between two values. The particularly annoying thing about it is that I generally don't use it to adjust the volume, so any time I have to use it, it is because I have knocked it accidentally. And on multiple occasions it has taken several minutes to revert it to 100% after it had dropped to just 80% or so.

The Blackwidow has the obligatory RGB lighting that everything vaguely "premium" has to have on PCs these days, and this is all very nice, apart from the inexplicable fact that the hash key refuses to light up when the keyboard is in wireless mode. It's not broken, because it lights up when the keyboard is connected via USB, and it's not a faulty profile, because I've tried changing the profile and even setting the options for that key individually. It's just… fucked somehow in a non-mechanical way. And it's little annoyances like that which make you realise how surprisingly often you want to use the hash key in the dark.

Speaking of wired versus wireless, I discovered a while back that the keyboard will not charge its battery unless the Razer software is installed. This was something of a problem when I determined that the Razer software was causing my PC to freeze up. (It transpires that something else was wrong on a deeper level, because a complete reformat and Windows reinstall fixed the freezes, but still.) It's also just fucking stupid. What other USB device does not charge unless you are running a specific piece of software? One of the main benefits of USB is that you can just plug a thing into a socket and it charges, even if the computer doesn't know how to talk to the device otherwise. But no! Not the case with the Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro. So pro that it can't handle charging without its special software to hold its hand. Real fearsome.

Now, onto the Basilisk, which I think I hate significantly more than the Blackwidow, which at least is 98% reliably functional, wireless hash key aside. I have never had as many connectivity problems with a wireless mouse as I have done with the Basilisk. I don't sit an unreasonable distance away from my computer — basically the computer is under my TV, and the keyboard and mouse are on a coffee table in front of the sofa — but this goddamn thing will not stay connected if there is any form of obstacle in its path. And I mean anything. Put a box of biscuits in front of it so you can stuff your face while idly browsing YouTube? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a glass of drink vaguely in front of it for mid-game refreshment? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a discarded lunch plate on the table near it because you'll take it to the kitchen the next time you stand up? Flashy light, lost connection.

It's annoying, because other than this fairly glaring issue, the Basilisk is a nice mouse. It has a good, comfortable shape, nicely clicky buttons and a scroll wheel that, so far, does not appear to have suffered the same fate as the volume control on the Blackwidow — or, indeed, the fate every single Apple mouse I have used has succumbed to. You can actually scroll with it, in other words. It has a couple of side buttons that default to forward/back buttons when web browsing, but I don't really use them. As a basic mouse, it's comfortable, and were it not for the connectivity issues, I would like it a lot. Unfortunately, the connectivity issues happen frequently enough for it to be massively irritating.

"So just replace them!" you might say. "Reader, I spent £250 on the pair of them," I will reply. "I am going to at least attempt to get my money's worth."

And then, sotto voce, "And then never spend that much on a keyboard and mouse ever again."

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 431: It ain't our photos and emails causing a water shortage

Here in the UK, we are suffering something of a water shortage. Several areas are in full-on drought status, and many areas, including hours, are subject to what is colloquially known as a "hosepipe ban", more officially known as a "temporary use ban" or "TUB". In other words, we're not supposed to use our hosepipes to water our garden (or, indeed, anything else) for the duration of the ban — which, of course, is exactly when our gardens and plants could actually probably do with a bit more water than usual.

There was an insultingly stupid press release that went out today from the government. Amid all the obvious advice like "fix anything that's leaking" and "don't leave your shower running all night" they had the gall to offer this nugget of wisdom:

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

Yes, that's right; people hanging on to their online memories, because no-one saves things locally any more — and that's a discussion in itself, I'm sure — are to blame for this drought! All those pictures of your beloved pets and family members, some of whom are likely no longer with us? They are, apparently, hoovering up all the water! Those precious emails from your first contact with someone special? Glug, glug, glug! And that draft of your novel you're never going to finish almost certainly drained half of Yorkshire's reservoirs just by existing.

I jest, obviously, because cloud storage on an individual scale is — no pun intended — a drop in the ocean in terms of water usage for these data centres. Even for all the people in the UK. Even for all the people in the world.

You know what actually is sucking up all the water in a completely wasteful, pointless way? All that shitty AI that is continually being foisted on us! ChatGPT-5 doesn't know how many letter B's are in the world "blueberry" but it's guzzling up water like nobody's business.

Per 404 Media, a report from the USA earlier this year estimated that the 250 million AI queries generated in America every day by people who think talking to the lying plagiarism robot is somehow "productive" consumes enough water to fill roughly 1.67 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That's every day. The World Economic Forum claims that AI datacentres will be responsible for consuming up to 1.7 trillion gallons by 2027, which is more than 4-6 times the total annual water usage of Denmark. From the same report, a "medium-sized data centre" (regarded as 15 megawatt) consumes "as much water as the yearly consumption of either three average-sized hospitals or more than two 18-hole golf courses".

Yeah. My Google Photos library isn't the problem. My email archive isn't the problem. The fact that we are blundering headlong into an environmental, economic and societal catastrophe by going all-in on the demonstrably idiotic and useless thing that is generative AI is the problem.

I say "we". I don't know a single person who actually wants this AI-powered future. Even from the most delusional AI glazer, I'm yet to hear any concrete proof that any of this is in any way helpful or desirable. (That is not an invitation, by the way.)

And now we, the people, are being punished for something we apparently have no control over. We, the people, are being given the responsibility of being more "frugal" just so we can watch the world's most useless corporations continue to incinerate billions of dollars an hour, contaminate our water supplies and take advantage of the most vulnerable people in society.

God. I fucking hate the future. It wasn't supposed to be like this. It has been said numerous times before at this point, but this is the worst possible cyberpunk future. And it seems so obvious that everything is terrible, and yet no-one with any power to do anything about it appears to want to do anything about it.

If you need me, I'll be emailing all my photos to myself.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 392: Never forgive them for what they have done to the computer

[Recommended reading: Ed Zitron's "Never Forgive Them", from which the title of this post is taken.]

This evening, my computer inexplicably ground to a halt while I was doing… nothing in particular. Browsing a few webpages, doing a bit of research in preparation for some videos I'd like to make, if I'm being specific, but it really wasn't anything the slightest bit demanding. For whatever reason, though, everything just stopped, nothing was responsive, and the only thing I could do was force the power off and restart.

When the computer restarted, it took 10 solid minutes to become responsive because a piece of software for a controller that isn't connected decided to spontaneously uninstall and reinstall itself, while at the same time popular chat app Discord decided to install 18 updates that were apparently essential, despite the fact I'd updated it yesterday, Steam updated itself (which, all credit to it, it did without complaining or holding anything else up) and, of course, Windows is bugging me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

At the same time, my phone has been repeatedly sending me notifications telling me it "needs optimising" and "must restart", despite everything working absolutely fine, and despite it never having insisted on this process before. (It does, however, insist on "Optimising Apps" every time you turn it on or restart it, though, which makes what should be a very simple, quick process — turning it off and on again — take a good few minutes.)

This is what people mean when they say "enshittification". All of the above is unnecessary. All of the above are examples of tech deliberately making itself worse, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user, but which I'm sure are "providing shareholder value" via some means or another. This is what Ed Zitron means when he says "never forgive them for what they have done to the computer".

I love that description. I feel like people don't say "going on the computer" any more, because most of us spend pretty much our entire waking life joined at the hip to one form of computer or another, be it a PC, phone or tablet. When I was a kid, "going on the computer" was a discrete activity. You'd come home from school, do your homework, have some dinner, then go on the computer. And the computer would oblige. You'd turn it on, and there it was. If something went wrong, you turned it off, waited a moment, then turned it back on again, and nine times out of ten, the problem would be gone.

Now, granted, "the computer" that I'm talking about here is several orders of magnitude less sophisticated, powerful and, arguably, useful than the PC I'm typing this post on. But it still feels like we've lost something. Things have been taken out of our control. I could literally do nothing while those stupid update processes were running on my PC, because they were so badly programmed that they monopolised the system to such a degree that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to stop them. And, as I discovered, turning the PC off and on again wouldn't have helped, because they'd have just started again — or, perhaps worse, fallen over because of the half-finished job I switched them off in the middle of.

I appreciate that updates are sometimes necessary to add new features, fix bugs and, in the case of operating systems, plug security holes that could be exploited by malicious actors. But man, do I ever miss turning on the Atari 8-bit, booting right into BASIC and being able to just get on with things. Those "things" may have been considerably less elaborate than what I can do on "the computer" today, but was that really so bad…?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 372: In which my neighbour determines voice assistants are useless

I was having a poo earlier, as you do, and since our toilet is like sitting inside an actual blast furnace during the summer months, I had the window open as wide as it could go to let some air in. A side-effect of this is that I can hear what is going on outside (and quite possibly that anyone outside can hear what is going on inside the toilet, but I've never tested that theory) and, more often than not, I hear my neighbours going about various business in their garden.

Our neighbours have a couple of kids, and the kids are often out the back using their trampoline. This evening it sounded like there was some sort of family meal or gathering outside, and there was music playing, evidently via some sort of Alexa-based smart speaker, because every couple of minutes — and inevitably well before a song had played to its conclusion, because who has time to listen to music in its entirety any more? — I heard one of my neighbours going "Alexa, next one". And, on multiple occasions, repeating this command at least once before Alexa actually played the "next one".

After several failed attempts to get Alexa to stop playing the Electric Light Orchestra, I heard some frustrated-sounding swearing coming from the garden, then the music stopped suddenly. A few moments later, it started again, but with no voice commands required. I imagine my neighbour had given up on trying to control the music with his voice and just gone back to good "old-fashioned" streaming from his phone.

I honestly have never seen the point of voice assistants. It is several orders of magnitude less convenient to do things with your voice than it is to just click on something on a computer or tap on it on a phone — with one of the chief reasons being, as demonstrated by my neighbour's frustrations, the fact that on a statistically significant number of occasions, you probably have to correct the device's misunderstanding of what you said, by which point you may as well have just fished your phone out of your pocket and typed what you were looking for into Google (not that Google is a great help these days with those fucking AI summaries) or opened your music app and pressed "Next".

I don't know. It's been said many times before, but it feels like a lot of today's tech is being built to solve problems that never existed in the first place. If I run out of milk, the last thing on my mind is telling a robot that fact; I either go out and get some milk myself, or I do what a normal person does and write it on a bit of paper on the fridge, forget about it until 10.48pm, then have to brave the mean streets of Southampton to walk to Tesco Express just so I can have a coffee the following morning. If I tell Alexa, or Google, or whatever, that I'm out of milk, sure, that fact is recorded somewhere, but it doesn't achieve anything. I could probably make it so that it ordered some milk from Amazon or something, but what an absolute faff. Shopping with a voice assistant is an absolutely alien concept to me, because it completely eliminates the ability to look at what's available, the prices and suchlike. So why would you bother?

Answer is, we don't. We have a couple of smart speakers, but all they get used for is finding our phones if we've forgotten where we put them down, and occasionally streaming some music, which we do via the "cast" button in our music apps rather than attempting to talk to them. I think our Alexa thing also controls our smart light switches, but again, no voice controls are involved there, and it could probably be done via another means.

When I did a very brief stint working for a courier company, it was vaguely useful to say "okay Google, take me to [postcode]" and it be able to navigate me there, but I'm not sure it was actually any quicker or better to do that than just typing said postcode into Google Maps. And if I'd typed it in, at least I knew it was right.

As tech critic Ed Zitron frequently notes, tech used to be fun and exciting, but these days it just seems to be finding new and exciting ways to make things less convenient and more annoying. And, of course, this isn't even getting into the "AI" garbage.

I hope that one day very soon the tech industry manages to wake up and realise that it's doing both itself and its customers a great disservice. Unfortunately, I am very concerned that process isn't going to be a pretty one, with the obscene amounts of money being thrown around for what, to the layman, very much appears to be products that don't actually exist.

What are we even doing any more?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 339: Eras

I remember when I was growing up, and I'd hear about life when my parents were young, and thinking "gosh, that was all jolly primitive, how on Earth did people get by without televisions and computers and the Internet?" Sitting here in 2025, thinking back to my own childhood, I feel like we've gone through shifts almost as big once again.

I grew up surrounded by computers. My Dad worked for IBM, and I'm pretty sure we had at least one Atari computer in the house from the moment I was born. I learned how to use computers from an early age — not just playing games, but also using them for productivity, programming and creativity. And my enjoyment of computing helped me make some friends, too.

But by modern standards, those computers were limited. They could run one program at a time, and you had to do everything using removable physical media. Want to play a game? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up. Want to do something creative? Put in a disk, tape or cartridge and load it up, then make sure you have another separate disk or tape handy to save your work onto. Hard disks existed, but they were something like £700 in '80s money for 20MB, and thus very few people had them — more to the point, not much software supported them, either, at least until the 16-bit era, when they became a little more commonplace.

"Going online" was something you could do from quite early on if you had the necessary hardware, and it was a very different experience to what using the Internet (really the Web) is today. To even get logged on you'd have to enter a cryptic string of commands to the modem, and sometimes it felt like a bit of a roll of the dice as to whether or not it would actually work at all. When you did get online, it was pages and pages of text, no pictures, and an understanding that you had a limited amount of time to do what you had to do before either 1) your family kicked you off for tying up the phone line for too long or 2) the SysOp kicked you off remotely for spending too long, preventing others from using the service.

When "online" spaces other than bulletin board systems came along — accompanied by computers that could do more than one thing at once — it was a revelation. I have immensely fond memories of exploring CompuServe on my Dad's account, spending time on the GAMERS forum, reading and replying to messages, and, on one memorable occasion, making $200 from some custom Wolfenstein 3-D levels. But it was still very different to today; CompuServe was a walled garden of curated stuff to explore, and access to the broader Web didn't come about until later. I remember us having great difficulty setting up the Mosaic browser to view simple websites, and how exciting it was when we finally got to look at, say, pictures from NASA for the first time.

I don't think anything tech-wise has changed things as much as the rise and growth of the mobile phone, though. Getting a mobile phone when I was in my late teens made me feel like I had a whole new degree of independence, free to communicate with my friends on my own terms when and how I felt like it (Pay as you Go credit permitting). I recall long, drunken text conversations with people important to me at university; there was even a time when I'd voluntarily phone people up for a chat. I used to have long phone conversations with my perpetually absent university housemate, for example; she was a good friend, but I didn't see her all that much for a variety of reasons.

Then, when smartphones arrived, everything changed. It didn't seem like it at first, because the earliest implementation of the iPhone was very limited. There were no installable apps; you had to do everything via the Web. But sites were starting to get savvy to the rise of this exciting new technology, and were starting to serve up "responsive" pages that looked nice on the small screen of an iPhone.

I was working at an Apple Store when the iPhone launched. It was an exciting time, for sure, and it only got more exciting when the App Store launched. Suddenly, there was this brave new frontier for software, and we'd all download and experiment with all manner of different apps; not just games, but productivity tools, creativity tools and silly joke apps — who can forget the "drinking a beer" one?

When in-app purchases were announced, my heart sank. We were already starting to see some nickel-and-diming in the console gaming space, and it was about to get much worse in mobile. Free-to-play became the default, and aggressive monetisation came along with it. And there were people who would make excuses for this. People who are still making excuses for it to this day, to such a degree that we're never going to get rid of free-to-play and microtransactions at this point.

But I think the biggest change was how addicted people became to those black plastic slabs. And I'm not excluding myself from that description, either; I could feel myself being compelled to fiddle with it constantly, and I didn't like it. I still don't like it. I'm better at controlling it today, but I still feel the "urges" near-constantly.

Things only got worse with the rise of content designed to be deliberately addictive, such as short-form videos. For quite some time now, I've found a lot of tech to be scary and unpleasant; definitely a far cry from the excitement I'd feel every day when I booted up the Atari 130XE to do some BASIC programming.

It's not all bad, of course. It's great having satellite navigation in your pocket when you're trying to find things. It's great being able to stay in touch with people via a whole host of different means. And it's great being able to quickly snap a photo or video of anything without kicking yourself for not bringing your camera with you.

But there have been some big changes. Whether or not they're as big as the differences between my parents' childhood and my childhood, I don't know. But I suspect the realisation that you've lived through some huge changes in the world and society is an important part of progressing through life; you often don't notice these changes while they're in the middle of happening, but when you look back on them you realise that they were pretty massive. And not always for the better.

Would I like to go back to earlier, less technologically advanced, less convenient days? Some days, I honestly do think that yes, I would. There are a lot of great things about our modern, connected society — and a lot of terrible things, too — but sometimes I just miss the simplicity of life as it was back then.

I find myself wondering exactly what I mean by "back then"; if it was possible to go back, exactly what point would be the optimal one? I think, for me, it would probably be the early 2000s. Mobile phones would exist but wouldn't be the life-consuming soul suckers they are today; computer and video game technology would be at a good point; and we might all see a bit more of one another in the real world.

I might not have this blog, though. Or maybe I would. Perhaps it wouldn't be in quite this form. Perhaps I'd be a trailblazer in the blogging space.

Who knows? You can't go back, more's the pity. So we're stuck with what we have, regrettably, constructed for ourselves. At least for the moment.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone?

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 290: Foxit? More like Fuckit

Good one, I know.

As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a bit of time collecting together scans of old computer and video games (and Computer & Video Games) magazines with a mind to sticking them on an old Kindle Fire tablet to use as a portable "magazine reader". As part of that process, today I found myself looking for PDF readers, both for Windows and for Android.

I wanted one for Windows so that I could potentially use it to make some videos about the magazines I don't have hard copies of, and neither Chrome nor Firefox's built-in PDF handling quite does what I wanted. (Chrome, notably, still lacks the ability to display two-page spreads but assume there is a "cover page", meaning it fucks up magazine and book layouts and there's nothing you can do about it.) So I did what any normal person does, and I Googled it, even knowing that Google itself has been gradually going down the toilet.

After skipping past the fucking useless AI summary and sponsored links, I clicked on an article that was absolutely bullshit SEO bait ("The best free PDF readers for Windows!") but was at least from a vaguely reputable outlet, TechRadar. This article informed me that Foxit was the best PDF reader for Windows.

Great, I thought. I've used Foxit before in the past. I doubt it's changed that much.

EH. WRONG.

Foxit has enshittified itself beyond all recognition. Not only has it made the inexplicable decision to model its UI on Microsoft's odious "Ribbon" interface, it also boots up with a floating "AI" button that you can't get rid of without some tinkering deep in the options and then quitting and restarting the program.

Let's take each of these in turn. First, the Ribbon.

I hate the Ribbon. I've despised the Ribbon ever since Microsoft introduced it in Microsoft Office 2007, and every time I use a program that uses this obnoxious piece of crap instead of normal toolbars and drop-down menus, I make a specific effort to find something else to use instead.

The Ribbon is an eyesore. The Ribbon takes up far too much space on the screen. The Ribbon's myriad tabs and huge buttons make it a massive chore to find simple functionality, since each tab is organised with no real care or attention. It doesn't conform to any standard functionality, so you'll find the same functions in different places in different applications, and it feels the need to take over the entire fucking window when you want to do something as simple as open, save or close a file, or look at the program's settings page.

In Foxit's specific case, I am honestly struggling to think of why a supposedly "lightweight" PDF reader has enough functions in it to warrant having a multi-tab Ribbon. I need a PDF reader to do one thing: read PDFs. Occasionally I might need to copy and paste images and text from a PDF, and the ability to take a snapshot of a section of a PDF and save it as an image is always nice. But I do not need multiple tabs worth of disorganised functionality, making it a chore to do something as simple as display two pages side by side and let me flip through the entire document like… well, like a magazine or book.

This is what people are talking about when they say "the computer" is constantly being enshittified. Things that worked perfectly well are being "updated" for no other reason than to say that they have been updated. Simple, straightforward, intuitive interfaces that remained standard conventions for decades are being uprooted in favour of borderline abusive design that forces you to click through page after page of crap in order to find the one thing you're looking for. And for what? To say that the company is "growing"? To say that the company is "innovating"? Fuck that. Just make me a fucking PDF reader that lets me read PDFs.

Which brings me to the "AI" button. I do not need a fucking AI button in my PDF reader. If I have opened something in a PDF reader, I intend to read it or print it. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "summarise" the thing that I'm trying to read either for information or pleasure. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "analyse" the document or figure out "trends". I am a human being. I have a brain. I can do these things myself. I do not need "AI" to "do it more quickly". Believe it or not, I enjoy reading. I enjoy researching. I'm not so fucking lazy that I need a fucking chatbot (&c. &c.) to take the human part out of the equation. Because that's just depressing.

Things weren't much better on the Android front. I tried Foxit on Android as well, just out of curiosity, and sure enough, while it lacked the Ribbon (the one benefit of a phone screen is that it's too small for such a shitty interface) it still had the odious little AI bubble. So I uninstalled it immediately.

If you've been in a similar situation at any point, may I recommend Sumatra PDF for your desktop PDF reading needs, and PDF viewer lite for Android. Both of those seem to fit my needs perfectly well right now: no ads, no subscriptions, no Ribbon, no AI, no bullshit. Just a thing to read PDFs with. Which should not be a hard thing to find in 2025. But apparently this is the world we've built for ourselves.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 288: Some interesting links I found this week

I'm trying to do a bit less scrolling through what little social media I still use, and a bit more reading of interesting blogs, articles and what have you. To that end, I've set up Feedbin as an RSS reader (it's pretty good — subscription-based, unfortunately, though that does mean it's nice, clean and ad-free) and am taking a bit of time each day to just read some interesting things. Moreover, if someone happens to share an interesting-looking site, I'm adding it to my Feedbin so I can keep up to date with other posts on those sites, rather than simply forgetting they exist like I have done in the past.

To that end, I'd like to share a few posts I happened to run across this week. Not all of them are recent posts, but I happened to read them this week in my travels around the Internet. You might enjoy them too, so here they are.

The Case Against Gameplay Loops

https://blog.joeyschutz.com/the-case-against-gameplay-loops

This is a nice post that echoes some of my own thoughts on the weird increase there has been in people talking about "gameplay loops" recently. Many games are based on a gameplay loop, for sure, but it's often quite reductive to talk about them that way, and it's certainly not good for talking about games as a creative medium or work of art.

Writer Joey Schutz echoed my own concerns about being conscious of gameplay loops to the detriment of your own enjoyment, which I wrote about here. He cited the example of the game Tactical Breach Wizards, a game which I've heard good things about from people whose opinions I trust.

"[This game] felt fresh and interesting, with good mechanical hooks and nuanced abilities," he wrote. "But at some point along the way, it began to feel stale to me. After beating a boss, the game declared in big, bold letters 'Act 2 out of 5 COMPLETE'. My God… 3 more acts and I'm already tired! So I put it aside and went on with my life."

The fact that this kind of thinking is causing people to fall out of love with games well before finishing them is what concerns me. Schutz quotes some figures about estimated completion rates and, as someone who finishes pretty much every game he starts, this makes me sad.

But anyway. This post was good and you should read it.

Constraints are the Point

https://hey.paris/posts/constraints-are-the-point

This is a nice simple one: a response to all the wild flailing and gesticulating generative AI enthusiasts engage in any time they talk about how generative AI is going to "revolutionise" gaming.

"Imagine being able to walk up to an NPC and ask them anything!" they say.

"Nobody actually wants that!" anyone with any sense says.

I've pretty much spoiled this whole post with the above description, but you should read it anyway, as it's a lot more thoughtful about it than I am.

Why DigitallyDownloaded.net isn't going to review Assassin's Creed Shadows

https://www.digitallydownloaded.net/2025/03/why-were-not-going-to-review-assassins-creed-shadows.html

Matt of Digitally Downloaded is a personal friend of mine, and I 100% support him in his decision here, especially after having seen the harassment he gets after terminally online fanboys look him up via Metacritic if he gives a game an "outlier" score.

I feel for Ubisoft right now — and it's not often I'll say that, I can tell you — because no-one should have to put an anti-harassment support plan in place for releasing something they've worked hard on for a very long time. But the "discourse" around this game is absolute garbage-tier, demonstrating the absolute worst of the disgusting culture war that continues to rage around popular entertainment.

"Poorly analyzed US-centric garbage" – Why do Americans keep ignoring European gaming history?

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/03/poorly-analyzed-us-centric-garbage-why-do-americans-keep-ignoring-european-gaming-history

I've pretty much covered this in yesterday's post, but it was interesting to see a Bluesky spat covered on a commercial website. If you didn't catch some of the better responses throughout the day (or you're not on Bluesky), this is a good look at what happened.

The Dying Computer Museum

https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672

From Jason Scott of the Internet Archive and textfiles.com, this is a sobering read about what happened to what appeared to be a thriving computer museum after its main benefactor passed on. I'm sure this isn't the case for all museums, but I sincerely hope that similar efforts to preserve computing history in this country have a suitable plan for what happens after their main curators pass on, because it'd be a terrible shame to see stuff that had been put out for the public to enjoy to end up on the auctioneer's block, doomed to end up in a private collection and never seen again.

Anyway, that's that. I hope you enjoyed those. I don't know if I'm going to do a post like this every week, but I am going to make an effort to bookmark interesting things as I come across them, then share them when I can. So look forward to another post like this in the near future, I guess! I'm going back to Xenoblade Chronicles X now. Ta-ta!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

2462: I Don't Need Any More Tutorials or Updates

0462_001

I was out today, making heavy use of my phone to assist with some part-time courier work I've picked up recently. At some point during the day, the Google Maps app updated, at which point it felt the need to give me a tutorial.

Nothing, so far as I can tell, has changed in the Google Maps app since its last iteration, so quite why it felt the need to deliver an irritating and persistent tutorial is beyond me.

Google Maps isn't the only app to do this. Pretty much any "productivity" app on mobile these days feels the need to bore you with a pointless (and often non-skippable) slideshow before you can start using it — even in the most simplistic apps.

I get why these tutorials are put in there — it's to cater to stupid people and/or the technologically disinclined, who might not be familiar with the conventions of interface design. But they should be skippable. And if the app has clearly been on the device — and used heavily — prior to the latest update, it should automatically skip the tutorial by default.

And while we're on, I can do without pointless, unnecessary updates, too, even though App Store, Google Play and Steam reviewers seem to think that they're essential to an app or game remaining useful and/or fun. (These people never lived through an age where your word processor came on a floppy disk, and that was it, no more updates unless you shelled out for a new version.) These people are the reason why we get stupid, idiotic revamps to things that worked perfectly well the way they did before, like Twitter and Google Hangouts.

The latter is one I find particularly irritating, particularly in its Chrome extension incarnation. Previously, the Chrome extension was a discreet little affair that took the pop-up Google Hangouts interface from GMail and rendered it in an "always on top" version that could sit on your desktop — tucked away when you didn't need it, yet just a mouseover away when you did.

Now, however, it's in its own separate window for no apparent reason — a window that opens up every time you start Chrome, whether or not you have new messages to read — and, presumably in an attempt to "look like Android", it has one of those annoying mobile-style "drawer" menus on the left. These are fine on mobile as they're built to be usable with a touch interface, but on the big screen they're clumsy and unnecessary. I honestly don't know why we don't still use drop-down menus any more; they may look boring, but they work. At least Mac OS still uses drop-down menus for most apps, though Office for Mac still has that horrible "Ribbon" thing at the top instead of the old-school toolbar from early versions of Office.

Updates are fine when they add something meaningful: look at something like Final Fantasy XIV, which adds meaningful new content with every major version number update. But when they're change for change's sake — like Hangouts' new format, and Twitter's insistence on reordering your timeline even when you have repeatedly asked it not to — they're just annoying. And, moreover, that inexperienced audience the developers were hoping to capture with their tutorials will likely end up being turned off by having to "re-learn" their favourite app every few weeks.

And don't even get me started on the three system restarts I did the other day, with a notification that there were new Windows updates available every time. At least I managed to excise the cancer that is the Windows 10 nag prompt, so I should be grateful for small victories, I guess.

1696: Side Effects

One of the side-effects of 1) having a job that doesn't involve staring glassy-eyed at the Internet all day and 2) being in the middle of a self-enforced social media blackout (it's going great, by the way) is that your priorities and even interests change.

Oh, don't worry, I'm not about to stop boring you with tales of obscure video games any time soon, but what I have found is that I'm in no hurry to keep up with the latest news in gaming and related spheres such as technology.

This was really driven home to me today when someone asked what I thought of Apple's new announcements.

Eh? I thought. I haven't heard anything about those.

Apparently Apple announced a new iPhone and a smartwatch, whatever the fuck one of those is. And I was surprised to find how little of a shit I gave about either of them. My current phone is a functional workhorse at best, though without Facebook and Twitter demanding my attention every few minutes it stays in my pocket or drawer a lot more than it used to, and is largely being used for a bit of lunchtime Web browsing and playing music in the car. As such, I find it hard to get excited about the latest piece of shiny, pretty and overpriced tech that Apple is coming out with. My honeymoon period with "smartphones" is well and truly over: I'm not interested in playing games on them, I'm rapidly discovering the value of not having social media in your pocket, and for organisation, frankly I'd rather use a paper notebook and calendar. Get off my lawn.

It was the watch that particularly bewildered me, though. Before I left the games press, tech writers were just starting to get excited about "wearables", and I couldn't fathom why. I still can't. It just sounds like an unnecessary step in the process of consuming digital content, and a way for the ever-present menace of notifications to be even more intrusive to your daily life than a constantly beeping phone already is. A little computer on your wrist is something straight out of sci-fi and a few years ago I'd have been all over it, but on reflection, now? That's not what I want. Not at all.

I'm not writing about this to be one of those smug "well, I don't care about those things you're excited about" people — though I'm well aware it may well come across that way. Rather, I'm more surprised at myself; I always had myself pegged as a lifelong gadget junkie, and the trail of defunct-but-useful-at-the-time technology (Hi, Palm!) my life has left in its wake would seem to back that up.

But I guess at some stage there's a saturation point. You see something, and see no way for it to possibly fit into your life; no reason to own one. I already felt this way about tablets — I barely use our iPad even today — and I certainly feel it about Apple's new watch. Smartphones still have something of a place in my life — if nothing else, it's useful and convenient to have things like maps and a means of people contacting you (or indeed contacting others) in your pocket — but their role is much diminished from what it was, and I'm in no hurry to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

It's another case of, as we discussed the other day, solutions to problems you don't have. All this technology is great, but it convinces us that our lives would be an absolute chaotic mess without it — when, in fact, it's entirely possible that the opposite could be true. After all, the human race survived pretty well before we discovered the ability to photograph your dinner and post it on the Internet, didn't we? While I'm not ready to completely let go of my smartphone — not yet? — I'm certainly nowhere near as reliant on technology as I once was, and I'm certainly not obsessively checking news feeds to find out the latest and greatest news about it.

And you know what? It's pretty nice and peaceful. I could get used to this.