Author Archives: f2x

Visibly Ambiguous

So here lately, a YouTube channel has been promoting a new sponsor called, “Visible”. They are offering something that I thought seemed very compelling. Unlimited text, talk, and 5Mbps data including hotspot for $40 a month. Unlimited!

OK, so this sounds like a damn good solution to my problem. 5Mbps is actually good enough to stream YouTube or Netflix without any trouble. Sure, if you’re downloading the entire internet while trying to stream video, you’re going to have a bad time, but just by itself, 5Mbps will stream good quality video without buffering, and $40 a month is right in my comfort zone.

So it looks like I found my perfect wireless ISP. Problem solved. I guess I won’t have to bitch and complain about this anymo- oh no, no, no… They’re not quite the promised land I was looking for, and I wouldn’t be ranting about it, would that it were so simple.

First of all, it’s through Verizon’s network (not that that’s a bad thing), and none of my devices are compatible with their service. OK, so let’s get their cheapest device for $99 and oh… the hotspot is only available through their app and limits the connection to one device at a time. A proprietary hotspot? I got a bad feeling about this.

Also, they’re still in their early access phase… So they aren’t ready for primetime anyway. It’s a startup, funded by Verizon, manned by former Verizon employees, trying to pass themselves off as the hip new MVNO that’s actually just a front for Verizon.

Of course I guess it depends on how much streaming you do over your phone. I use Mint Mobile’s $20/month plan with 8GB of (much faster) LTE data and unlimited talk and text, and I’m just fine with that because I’m not constantly watching videos on my phone. On the other hand, if I were regularly streaming audio/video on my phone, I could see this unlimited 5Mbps service being a very attractive offer.

So while I’ll keep an eye on this one, it looks like they tainted their service enough to make using it as an ISP problematic at best. On the other hand, if they ever package their 5Mbps as a wireless home ISP for $40 a month, I’m in.

Pax,

-f2x

The Dot over the ‘i’

It’s the little things, and in this case the very little things. I just wasted five #$%^ing hours trying to fix the dot over the ‘i’. Let me explain. You might have noticed the font used in the comic is unique to this comic. That’s because I spent way too much of my free time building my own custom font using a program called “Fontforge”.

So when I redid the panel templates for 2019, I used different sizes of fonts and noticed the larger the font size, the more the dots over the i’s looked a little off. I did some manual tweaking and resizing in the bitmap editor, but I didn’t want to mess with the hassle of editing the font itself.

Fast forward a few months, and it was still bugging me… Just look at the “i” in the “Twice” in the page header. Why is that dot so small? Basically, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. This needed to be fixed.

There were a few other problems with the font as well. The dash was too long, the copyright symbol was not proportional, and other minor things I felt needed a tweak. Since there had been an OS reinstall since the last time I work on my font, I had to install the latest version of Fontforge before I could start editing.

Oh the joy. This latest version of Fontforge insisted my font had errors. It proceeded to #$%^ up a few of the letters like ‘b’, ‘e’, and ‘q’. It took me three hours to fix everything. It bitched and complained about anything else it could whenever I tried to generate the font. Finally, after I got rid of all the errors and glitches, I generated the font, and then for some reason, the font would not work.

The #$%^ing font would not work.

First of all, Fontforge is a travesty of a font editor. Looks like something designed for Windows 1.0. It’s about as intuitive as reading a technical manual written in Jenglish. While I would never have been able to create my font without the program, I still want to hunt down the program designer and beat them with a pool noodle.

I spent another two hours pouring over everything on that font. Finally I realized I was generating the font into the wrong format that my bitmap editor couldn’t even read. Ugh! I’m such a bonehead! I changed it to “Truetype”, and magically the problem was solved.

I just spent five #$%^ing hours trying to fix the dot over the “i”, and nobody in the entire #$%^ing world will give a shit.

What am I doing with my life?

Kudos

These jokes don’t write themselves, and they probably weren’t written by George or darkmare either. Nevertheless, they sent in the jokes that you’ll be reading this week, so thanks goes out to them for the help they’ve given me. If you want to help out, please go to our submission page, or add flush2x@gmail.com to your list of recipients when you share jokes with friends and coworkers. Every bit helps!

Pax,

-f2x