grimoire

The UX Hell of Just Logging In

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Welcome to a rant!

What’s turned into my unofficial “thesis” of my blog if you will is that technology, despite the current awful state of it, is good. Or at least, it has the potential to be, if it’s built and maintained by people who not only care but who are instiutionally empowered to turn that care into excellent products.

However, despite that core optimism, I would contend (and I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion) that tech is in an utterly horrendous place right now. And that impression is crystalized daily by a number of little incidents. As Ed Zitron put it so well:

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

From “Never Forgive Them”

Here are two examples from merely the last 24 hours centered on “signing in”, an utterly benign task that, depending what you’re signing into, can quickly devolve into a farcical Kafka-esque nightmare.

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Fixing up some Creature Speakers

Saturday, July 5, 2025

So recently I wanted a set of these creature speakers for my secondary (work?) desk, because… I mean they’re just so fucking cute, look at them. These are JBL Creature Speakers from the 2000’s, and they can be had pretty cheaply with one caveat: They’re now over 20 years old, and boy did JBL not build these for the long haul. But you know, nobody does, and yet we fix things anyway because pushing back against the tide of inevitable flow of time just makes some of us feel alive.

So, I grabbed a set of these off Mercari. The seller helpfully (and quite honestly) let me know they had aged even further since he had listed them for sale, letting me know that the speaker units within the satelites had now fully deteriorated and they were effectively mute. That said, I had specifically known this was likely, and reassured him that I knew this and my plan was to fix them.

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Synergy Would Like Me To Buy a Worse Version Please

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

So I’m taking the advice of one of my favorite creators at the moment, Ed Zitron, to take a bit here to write about software that, while useful, has gotten measurably worse over time, though also for a side of hilarity, has demanded I pay to access a newer version that I definitely, 100%, cannot overemphasize enough that I don’t want. Which is funny in the cosmic sort of way to me.

Along the way I’ll be explaining why what it does is so great, why the new version fails on it’s face to accomplish the same thing, and at the end I’ll go find out if you can actually buy the old (working) version or not. I hope for your sake you can.

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How to Clean the Face Buttons on a Steam Deck

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Today my friend’s Steam Deck hits the Black Workmat of Doom™, which to be clear is legally distinct from the Workbench of Doom™. They’re both full of doom, but this one is smaller, and more suitable for smaller items.

And small this is, though large-ish by mobile gaming standards? This is the first generation Steam Deck from Valve. This thing kicked off a well documented surge of tiny computers stuffed into large gamepads that can actually run games pretty well, though IMO the Deck is still the best, mostly hands down to Steam OS and of course the amazing work Valve has done on the Proton tech under the hood that lets Steam OS, which if you didn’t know, is actually linux, to run games so well.

But anyway, this isn’t a history lesson. My buddy got some sticky mess on his face buttons, and that’s no good. Let’s go dig it out.

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Can my Air Fryer Stop Screaming At Me?

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

So a ways back we got one of these Chefman 6.3 qt air fryers from my aunt. We love the thing, it’s great to use and does a great job cooking food, apart from one massive, massive flaw: this thing’s buzzer is LOUD. Like genuinely the loudest buzzer I have ever heard in a kitchen countertop appliance, to such a degree where it would actually hurt our ears to use the thing.

Now I’ve resolved a problem like this before, with our electric fireplace, which had a remote to turn things on and off, and also the same exact kind of buzzer (though honestly even that one wasn’t this fucking loud) but the point is: I knew what to look for. And finally it irritated me enough that the thing ended up on the Workbench of Doom™.

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