Firefox Tweaking Tips - Easier Access to "Page Info / Media"

I recently learned that there are two ways to make it easier to access the "Page Info" window in Firefox:

In short:

1) The "Ctrl-i" shortcut opens it directly

 

2)  Enable the following option:  "browser.menu.showViewImageInfo".   Then, right-clicking on any images will now include a menu entry to directly jump to the "Page Info window's "Media" tab", with the relevant image selected

Apparently the following Bugzilla issue was tracked this through to completion (whereas the linked issue to put back easier access to this in a few extra places is still a pending todo even today, YEARS after the easy access functionality was removed!)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1692553

Linux Setup - Partitioning Editor Feature Requests

Based on my experiences today, I'd like to offer the following feature requests to Linux install tool partition editor UI devs:

1) If you have to use MiB, just give us an alternative units drop down for MB (defaulting to MB), and do the necessary calculations / conversions under the hood

2) It's high time to add the option to do a "Standard multi-partition install" equivalent of the "Erase Disk (and create single partition install)". This would essentially ensure you have separate root and home directories (*), with swap + anything else needed all getting auto included too. All of these would be set to default sizes relative to the available disk space, that can then be tweaked as desired (ie mainly OS vs Home dir split).

(*)  In this day and age, that would seem a sensible default choice, given how many OS's need reinstalling every few years anyway, whereas your personal files are often a lot more persistent (i.e. you really don't want to have to keep restoring those from backups all the time)

3) Lower priority, but could we also get the option to reorder partitions we're newly creating / don't exist yet. Makes it easier to figure out how much space we can play with?

EDIT:  Turns out most distros use the "calamares" installer. Hence, I guess these feature requests should be directed towards that project!

Lessons from Aviation - Saturday Morning Thought on AI / Automation Use

Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places, but it seems that there is not much discussion out there on how we should be looking towards the aviation industry for insights into how our relationship with automation should proceed.

After all, pilots have been dealing with "autopilot" systems for decades now!

Salient lessons I think:

* There is a general skepticism of "what the machine says" that is drilled into them from early on - Yes, many do depend on navigation systems much of the time, as they are generally reliable. But, where possible, they are reminded to look out the window / use multiple sources and confirm whether that matches what the machines say. 

On that note, a very important part of their job is to constantly monitor and track the system information, cross-checking that against their expectations. Trust but verify.

* Between that and the need for redundancy in case of failure (e.g. backup radios, backup map + light sources, backup instruments), you'll also soon find that many pilots are actually wary about night flying, where the risks are greatly heightened, as darkness makes it harder to spot deadly situations. In other words, you should be careful about putting yourself in risky situations to begin with! Manage the risky situations by avoiding in the first place

* The need for regular "stick and rudder time" - i.e. there is widespread understanding that they do need to manually exercise / practice their skills *without using the automation*, so that they remain capable of stepping in when the automation goes berserk / breaks, which *will* happen, often at the worst possible times.

* It is also heartening that while this automation has existed for decades, there has been sufficient strong advocacy for maintaining two-pilot operations to maintain human-in-the-loop operations.

Mastodon UI Wishlist

As I've mentioned a bunch of times on here, ever since the hostile takeover and demise of Twitter a few years ago, I've switched over to Mastodon (+ posting / reposting stuff on here again).

Here's a list of things that I wish that there was a Mastodon UI that did. Unfortunately, the way things are going, it also seems that I'm likely gonna have to implement all this myself in my own client / frontend to get any traction on it...

Reaction to "Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUD's" - i.e. Thought Provoking Ideas on Reframing the UI / UX of AI

I just read a very thought provoking blog post from Geoffrey Litt, based on some ideas pitched some 30-ish years ago by Mark Weiser

Blog Title: "Enough AI Copilots, We Need AI HUD's"

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-we-need-ai-huds


My (Non-AI Powered) Summary, with additional spin on top: 
1) The industry at large is going about this all wrong!

2) The "me too" industry frenzy currently of just piling in on top of the "tasteless" (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) zombie train of building digital versions of Tom Riddle's horcrux-diary is stupid.  

    I'm with Mark on this - as those who've followed me for long enough know, I'm very much against all this "chat" and "agent" style crap that all the AI-TechBros are currently all still hyping up.

3) HCI + Interaction Design specialists/experts such as myself should really be stepping in and stepping up to meet this challenge head on - to get back in there to steer the ship as it were, instead of being backseat passengers to an almost certain trainwreck - by doing what we do best:

    a) Taking a step back, and asking the essential basic questions about what exactly we're trying to really achieve, and **WHY**...

    b) Crucially, not letting the existing framing cloud our judgement, and obscuring our own personal ethical + philosophical principles on the direction that we wish to steer technology in

4) What is it that we have to offer then?

   A) Show Don't Tell - If your tech is really that fancy, it doesn't need to be in our faces all the time. We shouldn't *need* to be constantly "conversing" with it, like micro-managing a third-rate annoying minion

   B) An Assistive Superpower - (Now where have we heard *that* before?  ;)    Yep, the emphasis here should be on the tech taking care of the mundane stuff, while using its strengths to highlight stuff we can't figure out as humans...

*NOW* we're talking.
  i) Harnessing tech to help people do what they couldn't otherwise do
  ii) Augmenting + Building Up, NOT Replacing + Subjugating!

These are indeed very much things that are right in my wheelhouse, and problems that I can get behind!  (Whereas the "AI" discourse to date has very much been a very alienating, and unpalatable soup of world-destroying slop that make me and countless others sick to our very core)

Thanks for the reminder Geoffrey!

 

As for the rest of us:   It's high time we started getting cracking, and righting this ship! There's lots of work to do!

Principles and Frontiers for Creative Software Tools

Here's the long-promised "Manifesto + Roadmap" for the future of Creative Software Tools I'd been wanting to publish since May/June 2024, but was ultimately stalled from doing so by a bad first encounter with Covid ultimately sapping my strength to take on outside-work commitments for a few months.  

NOTE: To get this out, I may just publish it first then amend it later

 ~~~

Dabbling with designing up another DCC tool after a hiatus of a short break from that field has reminded me of a whole bunch of untapped / unsolved directions for the future of DCC tools to make them more useful to the humans who use them.

Wishlist for My Ultimate Photo Management + Editing Tool

Now that my project schedule is freeing up again (and most importantly, I'm finally free of my various university contracts / commitments over the past few years, with the rather onerous IP provisions those came with), my attention has again been turning towards what sorts of projects I may want to start working on in my free time going forwards.

 

The key operative principle though for any such projects I now take on is this:

From now on, any passion-projects I dedicate my free time to (and with full force) will necessarily only be ones that I fully control + own. Unfortunately, experience and hindsight have taught me that merely having something be open source (but still part of someone else's platform / hosted by some other funding org) is ultimately not the answer I once believed it to be.

Note: This is also NOT a firm commitment to actually embarking on building all of these things. But rather, just some open-air brainstorming, hoping that someone will build it all for me (and then not put it behind a hideous subscription-based paywall). Heck, maybe the mere act of brainstorming these designs then releasing them as blueprints to hopefully inspire a whole ecosystem of interfaces should be the actual project!

Enough framing boilerplate. Let's get down to the original topic for today's ramblings:

What my ideal "next-gen" photo management + editing tool solution should look like, were I to go through the effort to set one up.

Autocorrect Rant

One of my pet peeves about how auto-correct works on my phone is this:

Having to fix and refix and refix something where "it knew better" and kept correcting what I enter, despite either:

1) Repeatedly deleting the "fix" it applied + immediately retyping what I had originally typed

2) Explicitly choosing "option 1" (left-word - i.e. the thing I typed), over "option 2" (i.e. its default auto-correct solution)

This is especially annoying when it happens multiple times within a few 5-10 minutes, when I'm typing + re-correcting the same sequence of characters again and again!

Solution:

The solution is really quite simple IMO - An explicit user override for a particular sequence of characters (or an immediate delete + retype of the same thing) should be a strong hint that they do not want that sequence autocorrected again in the next 5-10 minutes. If they keep doing this over a longer period, then that sequence should *never* get auto-corrected to whatever the system decides ever again.

*That* is the sort of "smart" behaviour that people really want from their tech, not the "lie-generating plagiarism machines" that are all the rage right now as the Big Tech titans once again battle to win the latest "first to build the 'Next iPhone' Monopoly game"

Thoughts About "AI" (Winter 2024 Edition) - AKA: No, I do NOT want to have to "talk" to your "chatbot"

I briefly interrupt coverage of my Music Visualisation Project to cover a brief rant about the topical "AI" issues that are all the rage right now.

 

My current position on all this "AI" hype is:

1) TBH, I bloody HATE all this "me too" bandwagon jumping crap that's going around at the moment, and hope it all blows over sooner rather than later - just like "Crypto" and "NFT's" and "Metaverse" fads before it did. The sooner the better!

See also this "supremely on the point" blog post ;) -  https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

 

2) The UX of all these "AI" tools is fundamentally flawed:  i.e.  

     "I do NOT want to have to fucking 'talk' to your bloody 'chatbot' to do stuff!"

 

3) The majority of all this "AI" hype is all being poured into all the wrong directions: 

    "We should be focussing our efforts on helping people do what they cannot do otherwise (i.e. augmenting human abilities),  NOT trying to replace them  (i.e. destructive misery causing)"

    That there is perhaps the best way to sum up the ethical line / standard I use to decide what I spend time working on. I'm only interested in working on stuff that betters humanity's ability to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't be able to do without the technology. Other stuff (e.g. ad networks, DRM, fintech, killer robots, facial recognition, tracking + surveillance tech, making people/industries/etc. "redundant", etc.) I refuse to work on  (and really, anything I am not interested in, I do a categorically *awful* job at...)

 

4)  In that light, will I work on or play with AI stuff at some point?

     Short Answer:  If AI is the right tool for the job, I will consider it.

     Operative word: "right tool"

     So far, none of the problems I have been working on have required reaching into that toolset, so I haven't bothered to really delve too deeply into it. But if the opportunity arises where AI presents a better solution than we can achieve otherwise, I will consider it then.

     Prime Example:  With some of the image generation + editing tech out there now, we finally have the a set of powerful tools for fixing a whole bunch of previously prohibitively difficult-to-fix problems, giving us the ability to do spot fixes for defects that would've previously ruined many images / videos. In that sense, these user-guided "repair" tools are precisely the "powerful magic fix-it tools"  that we've all dreamed of having all these years, and so, by my previously stated principles, they may well be the right tool for the job in those cases. But using these tools to construct entire fabrications from scratch, trained off everyone's data (however ill-gotten)? Nope - that's pretty much something that should not be done!