Thanks to Tom's newsletter.

I seem to not be getting a move on with my dues today... so I'll write this instead.

I recently discovered QNTM, via this article. I'd planned to just bookmark the page and move on, yet I lingered there for a while. I was curious about the person behind the text, so I read the about me page.

It didn't reveal much, so I read the about the site page.

That revealed more, but just made me more curious, so I kept reading pages, and now I've wasted a substantial part of my day! Also seemingly changed my style of writing - albeit temporarily - as to somewhat mimic the fascinating and intriguing character that is or is behind QNTM.

I assumed QNTM is neither abbreviation nor acronym, but rather a short-form variant of Quantum, without vowels. Though this seems to be mentioned nowhere on the site. Maybe it's just a random combination of letters. Maybe it sounded good. Maybe the mystery's intentional.

Now that I say it's neither abbreviation nor acronym though I wonder if my understanding of neither the word abbreviation nor acronym are correct.
It seems what I consider an acronym is actually more so initialism - where the individual letters of the acronym form the initial letters of each word the acronym abbreviates.

Does an acronym abbreviate btw? Shouldn't it acronymate instead? Wouldn't an abbreviated version be the abbreviation, and wouldn't that then just be a part of a longer word, not a combination of multiple?

Does any of this really matter? Back to QNTM:

I think one of the reasons I ended up spending a fair share of time on this particular site also has to do with the content, and how it actually is CONTENT. There's substance in everything. Every page is both layered with learning and strong opinion, and it's refreshing, I think because:

1. Most content online these days is made with an intention to sell, or market, more so than to actually... be thorough.
2. Most content online these days takes care not to offend, and cater to a specific group, since it's written with ^ intention.
3. Most content creators - popular ones at least - are fueled by greed or ego, and so their content comes across petty, or overly appealing, in an effort to make readers like it, or appreciate them.
4. Most content online is either unsubstantial and short, or unnecessarily long, but rarely both. Both chockful of information, and easy to read - QNTM does not ramble.
5. As I'm writing these bullet points I realize I actually don't hold any of the points above true to any particular chunk of online content at all, and am just making an effort to somehow differentiate the QNTM content from other content, so it makes sense to me why it had me captivated so long, even though it doesn't in fact seem to be that specially written, and DOES largely consist of rambles after all. Especially the design rant.

Oh how we've progressed since that was written though.

All of it rings true, yet I'm slightly offended by the (validated, but still) bashing of Flash. I'm glad we have Ruffle to preserve it. I am also honestly glad I'm not seeing it used in menus or interfaces on mainstream sites any more, because it really WAS impractical, but also very cool...

I look back on the time more with an appreciation for the nostalgia than with a recollection of the aggravation a lot of those finnicky; frustrating interfaces did ensue.

So what about QNTM?

It's an old site. I don't know much about the creator. He made the site from scratch, he knows how to code, he knows a lot about a lot of other things too, he admits he's not the greatest designer, but still upholds various ethical standpoints in regard to how a functional design should ideally be - which I respect, has made some fun stuff like Absurdle and HATETRIS, writes in a clear and concise way, has a site that loads blazingly fast, is image-free and easy on the eyes, yet contains more content than you'd assume at a first glance.

It's actually a bit flawed on the navigation front isn't it? No proper sitemap or other comprehensive list of pages and projects. Yet that does add to the sense of mystery, and your willingness to explore further, and find that which is not instantly easily findable...

I think I might be redesigning my comment sections a bit with the QNTM ones in mind too. They're simple and practical. Nothing unnecessary. Discussion's there for those who wish to discuss; the discussions that do occur are useful ones as such.

I like this site... that is all. And this is how I discovered QNTM.

Mozilla are revolutionizing the browser piracy game again!

I think I'll be swapping my default browser back to Mozilla. Last time I moved from them they were getting unbearably slow, and Chrome was so much faster, but that was on my old computer. Should be no issue now.

More info here.

Basically: They've created sandboxes for individual sites when it comes to cookies! No more tracking between sites.

Better for security, and so much better for privacy.

Hope Google follows suit too.

Hmm.

ICQ is going down!

Though the parent company is VK?! When did Russia buy ICQ... or was it always Russian?

It wasn't apparently. It was an Israeli startup initially. Then AOL took over. Then VK. Or rather: AOL sold ICQ to Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, who now owns what would become VK, in 2010.

I might've used ICQ back in the day. I might have. Not sure. Never was a big proponent of IM type stuff. But I've always loved the acronym, and so it is a bit sad to see it go.

RIP, the longest living IM client in HISTORY.

I think? At least one of.

ICU...

Ever heard of puter.com?

It's a virtual browser-based OS! A free one, with 500MB storage and a variety of standard apps and games installed and ready to use, in a style that seems familiar both to Windows and Mac, and thus ought be easy to get accustomed to for just about everyone.

I haven't tried running my own stuff, or uploading my own files, or creating an account to keep track of them (you get a guest session created for you when you visit the site without), but first impressions are: I'm impressed.

It seems you can even use it for website-related work. You can publish things, and link to them, and being able to do both that and computing, for free, with seemingly no restrictions at all on bandwidth and use, with an interface as smooth and inviting as this, is pretty dang cool.

And the name! Genius.

I'm not sure for what yet, but I think I might be using this more in the future... the .com Puter.

I've been getting fearful of Windows updates lately, cause recently they've been failing all the time. Both at home and at work. Both with Windows 10 and 11. Both on my laptop and stationary... not all updates, but some particularly annoying and persistent ones on pretty much all devices.

The issue at work was particularly troublesome, since it was a time-consuming update, and it kept failing halfway through, and it was at work! Each time it failed it spent even more time than it'd spent on the update subsequently restoring the earlier configuration too.

For a few weeks at least every time I'd get to the office and reboot the computer the update would kick in, and it'd chug away, and fail, and revert, and when I left the office and shut down the computer it'd try installing it again, so the next time I get in...

It just kept happening!

I tried troubleshooting. I cleared out temporary files, I restarted the update service, went through settings and CMD directives that might potentially fix things, but no dice. Eventually I just disabled updates for a certain period of time, and either I've yet to turn them back on again or this issue might've actually resolved itself with a latter one...

On my laptop I had to increase the HDD partition size for boot-related files for one particular update to finally go through.

My home computer's been upgraded to Windows 11 for a while, and so far it's been pretty buggy.

I don't recall the update number, but there was a notorious one that just wouldn't go through no matter what - I found out when I Googled the issue, and saw that at least I wasn't alone with it.

Today though? Windows just installed an update for me, so I rebooted, and suddenly all is good! It went fast too...

This is almost... unreal.

It works again.