August 2012
41 posts
new laptop! (after much kerfuffle)
After waffling a bit, I ordered a Lenovo IdeaPad u300s laptop from the Lenovo website, since stores weren’t stocking that model anymore. A week later, I found out that they’d never even placed my order. After calling Lenovo’s sales folks several times, putting up with general rudeness and lack of knowledge from a few different representatives, being bounced between departments and even continents, being told I could no longer get the machine I paid for at the price I paid, getting an outstanding amount of conflicting information, misinformation, and plain crap, and finally getting hung up on in the middle of my sentence by an American sales guy, I gave it all up in disgust.
So I went to a Fry’s store today, picked up my second choice (an HP Folio 13), and was back home setting up a new laptop within the hour.
I name all my electronics, so does anyone have any idea what to call this beautiful creature? My old laptop was Winston and my phone is Benedict, so I guess I favor potentially stodgy, slightly British male names, haha. Anyways, please be patient with me—I think I’ll be able to answer your asks and emails in much better time now that I have something to answer them on. I am happy as a clam! c:
EDIT: oh my heart I just pressed a button by accident and I didn’t even know this laptop had a backlit keyboard but it does
Where could I find that infamous font used for the bottom-corner word origin and URL? It's lovely (and not very distracting or weird, I should add).
See, that’s what I think! I actually do really like it—it’s very useful, and I think it’s quite pretty just for its simplicity. Just so you know, it starts looking badly fuzzy at anything much bigger than the size I have it. I turn off aliasing and hinting to minimize fuzziness. It’s called Silkscreen, and you can download it free from its creator at http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/.
so I've read all your excellent suggestions regarding...
…changing/removing the word origin in the bottom right of my images, above the URL. Thank you, and I appreciate them (really!), but I’ve decided to keep it as it is. Here’s my reasoning/rebuttals:
“Take it out of the image and put it in the caption instead”
In the process of reblogging, captions are almost always eventually lost. I need the origin to be in the image so people won’t see it later and be unable to find the origin. You might say “They should just go to the source and find it!”, but it turns out that people tend not to do that. Plus, there’s already a lot that has to go in the captions and I don’t like to add more.
“Change the font it’s in because it’s weird/small/ugly”
I actually have a special place in my heart for that font because it’s readable even as small as five pixels high. A normal font would be a blurry mess; a normal font at a bigger size would be just as weird. Utility wins over beauty on this one. I will experiment with another font, just for you guys, but don’t bank on the weird small font changing.
“Make it grey instead of black”
Black text on white background: that’s what I’ve always done with this blog, and I think that’s what I’ll always do. I’m not sure, but I think a bit of random grey text in the corner would be even stranger. Anything different draws the eye, so it’d likely add distraction, not minimize it.
Of course, it’d be prettiest if I could just not do the origin at all, but I can’t do that, so this is kind of what we’ve got. I’m sorry, everyone. :c Just focus on the biggest words and try to ignore the corner stuff if it bothers you?
