Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2023-07)

@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk asked People who use "dark mode" colour schemes on the web; is it preferable to choose it yourself via a setting specifically for the site, or have the site automatically switch based on your system preferences? Is there best practice here? #a11y

To which I responded: I prefer sites that follow my system settings (and my own main site is set up that way), not second-guessing when I might like dark mode (looking at you New Scientist).

For the record, EOU is set up very early in the HTML as:

<meta name=color-scheme content="light dark">

then in the in-line CSS:

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){body{background-color:#000;color:#eee}img{filter:brightness(.9)}}

I have never observed any light-mode "flash" with this set-up.

Multiple reports claim that Musk is imminently replacing the Twitter bird logo with something that looks like the X-Windows logo.

Time to remove all those footer bird icon links from EOU then, along with LinkedIn and FaceBook, thus lightening page loads for new visitors somewhat...

Most pages will no longer have any JavaScript.

A build wrapper script update will force (most) pages to update when there is enough sunshine tomorrow (forecast rain and thunder notwithstanding).

Oh and apparently @EarthOrgUK hasn't Tweeted (since June 2009)!

I am plodding on with my PhD research.

I continue to work on the statsHouse repo. Two days ago I built my first JAR and started using it to autogenerate the .mid outputs from the energy data series. On the RPi it does all 264 of them in about 7s (cf a little over 1s on my MacBook Air M1):

INFO: sonifying: 1/264: [data/consolidated/energy/std/con/Y/meter/con-Y-meter.csv, data/consolidated/energy/std/con/Y/meter/con-Y-meter.mid]
INFO: sonifying: 2/264: [data/consolidated/energy/std/con/Y/meter/con-Y-meter.csv, data/consolidated/energy/std/con/Y/meter/con-Y-meter.mild.mid, -style, gentle]
...
INFO: sonifying: 262/264: [data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.csv, data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.mid]
INFO: sonifying: 263/264: [data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.csv, data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.mild.mid, -style, gentle]
INFO: sonifying: 264/264: [data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.csv, data/consolidated/energy/std/geno/M/geno-M.house.mid, -style, house]
INFO: runtime 6.668s

It is good to have been able to do IDE- and CI- integrated Java unit testing, with the (free) CI running automatically on GitHub for statsHouse and my PhD TRV model.

From a few days ago, a sample from V5.x with some manual fiddling in GarageBand: