Hello Darkness, My Old Friend . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
What follows is a shorter blog than usual, this time about my personal aesthetics . . .
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
– Simon and Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence, 1966
I have been using the Internet since 1997, when I finally bought a dial-up land line and got surfing. But as time progressed, one thing really started to annoy me: constant white space on web pages, as if no-one has enough imagination to conceive an interface which is gentler on the eye and does not stab it at three thirty a.m. when you have suddenly woken up and decide that you want to check e-mail, etc.
So for a while now I have been looking at optimising my desktops (XP and Mageia Linux) with this in mind. This has been less successful on XP but at least xpize has ameliorated that somewhat:
The XP desktop can be further tweaked using the "Display" window shown above. However, it is possible to both have a dark theme for KDE (on Linux) and at the same time to optimise things like web pages through the use of custom CSS on a browser like Opera.
Another aspect has been the slow realisation on my part that apparent eyesight problems (which relate to focusing) are rendered almost to zero by using some means to reduce the intensity of ambient light and increase contrast. I normally wear shades nowadays when I am out because the reduction of light intensity means I almost do not need my normal (horrendously expensive, French-framed, Carl Zeiss ground-in-Germany) glasses, although one is prone, like today, to almost be run down by a post-teenage step-thru' rider as a result. But hey, at least he was wearing a skid lid (makes a change!) . . .
So:
Until a few days ago, this was my default desktop (until I suddenly went all cheesy and decided to have a shot of Barbarella in Duran Duran's Pleasure Machine LOL!):
One of the advantages of the transition from Mandriva 2012 to Mageia 2.0 was that system colours were now truly system-wide and no longer patchy in application, a sign of sure dedication on the part of the Mageia devs. This includes non-KDE apps such as Leafpad, which is actually part of the Haiku Project but was ported to Linux and allows direct non-European language input as text using SCIM.
This process is ongoing and, as mentioned previously, largely involves downloading and applying custom style sheets submitted by other Opera browser users.
Opera blog on Opera:
Dark Facebook on Opera:
Youtube on Opera:
(This has the added advantage of killing unwanted YouTube ads).
And finally my Yahoo personal page:
The laptop XP installation could certainly be tweaked into a less eye-stabbing experience, but as I tend to spend most (if not all) of my computing time on the main Linux box, this has not been prioritised since the last *cough*reinstallation of XP*cough* . . . but it all goes to show that the default and unimaginative attempt to render an online viewing experience which illogically tries to emulate the printed page does not necessarily have to be endured, provided you know where to look and what to tweak.
Edit: Added Dark Theme to personal GMail:
Uploaded July 30th, 2012
Edited July 31st, 2012
Edited August 21st, 2012
Tags: Barbarella, contrast, customise, dark, desktop, eye, eyes, facebook, Internet, kde, laptop, Linux, Mageia Linux, mandriva, my opera, opera blog, stab, tweak, white space, XP, xpize, yahoo, youtube
