Aging Clumsily?
Or is it crappy software?
I had slightly better than 20/20 vision until my late forties, then over a period of about sixty days in 2015 things just went to heck. These days I’ve got 2.25x readers.
And I find things like this absolutely infuriating …
On the left you can see a bash shell on MacOS. That’s a comfortable sized font for a 27” 4k display. This postage stamp on the right is KeePassXC and in the red circle you can see I’ve selected the so called “large” font.
As an accommodation to aging eyes I’m already scaling this monitor to 70% of available pixels.
The application in the driver’s seat on screen resolution is Maltego. This particular graph, with 8,500+ entities, is an absolute beast to use. I occasionally need to reference stuff a fraction of this size on the 2560x1600 13” display of my Mac Air and it’s just miserable.
I write new versions of this article less often than I did when I had a Linux desktop. MacOS has a coherent set of accessibility controls. Linux has layers of interface stuff and it’s not unusual to find yourself in an absolute standoff - make one app work, or the other, you shall not have both. The solution there, as clunky as can be, is to install a virtual machine just to house the application you’ll use less.
The treatment for Lyme disease that I received from 2008 to 2010 was in many ways just as bad as the disease itself. I lost a lot of the last eighteen years, but I never lost the drive to put post-Lyme sequelae behind me.
Getting sick at forty sucked, starting to recover in my early fifties was … gratifying, but unexpected. Finding Omberacetam by accident in 2022 has been a revelation. This neuropeptide restores a significant portion of the neural plasticity one has as a young adult. When I need to do something new, and finding Matthew Berman’s AI coverage has triggered that for me, I’ll start taking it again.
Now if I could only find something that does the same for aging eyes …