"Artists Beware"

Griping about tech again

Okay, so the 'Tech Review' industry is.. Massive. It's been around arguably long before youtube, but youtube has really expanded the reach and scope of the Tech Review industry. From retro to modern day hardware, from computers to peripherals and gadgets; there is a large assortment of tech to review and people that do it. They put hardware through the ringer with extensive testing comparing features and price points in relation to those features. A great resource for all of us that don't have the money to take the gamble on new tools ourselves! But the thing that ALWAYS gets left behind, are the creator tools:
Drawing Tablets (screenless and screen), Tablets and Laptops with pen inputs, Scanners, Screen Calibrations, Printers, and Monitors from the perspective of color accuracy.

If you want any insight into real use cases for these bits of hardware you either have to go through word of mouth or gather up scores of scant blogs of creators talking about their use of just one object and then compare notes and hope you interpreted them in the right way to make sense to you.

Large format scanners are by-far the most difficult thing to shop and research for, because their price ranges from 400$ on the low end, to 5K-12K otherwise. This jump in price is STARK, and not something the average creator can afford to risk. But many can't afford a 400$ risk, either. So it would be nice if someone with money could purchase the range of these large format scanners and test them with a control of different strong colors at different DPIs and the scanning software to give the rest of us some frame of reference for what would suit us best for our budgets and what we need without taking expensive risks. But no. There is not a single video out there like this but you sure can find 20 videos comparing 20 year old GPUs published this year. I can't even find a blog with a comprehensive break down of the different large format scanners and their actual in-use quality. I sure can find a bunch of keyword dumped lists and videos, though.

And not just videos, what about hardware spec listing and documentation? When I try to look for monitors that may hope to capture the same color space my CRT once did, I would look for how good the black levels were. You know the spec that is least likely to be documented? Black levels!!! Oh sure they'll tell you that they have a 98% accurate Adobe RGB color space, but without the right light balance, that means nothing! There are massive monitor spec documentation websites and they list so much in the way of input and refresh but not the black level.

There used to be a single community with a single master thread that would test and catalog tablets and convertible laptops and what type of digitizer they had, along with their specs and price ranges so that you could make an informed choice on the hardware they got and what to expect and the kind of drivers they would need. tabletpcreview.com now no longer exists thus the forum is now gone and all that remains is this copy I made of their spreadsheet and this archive of their thread. The community still exists in some way on reddit, but it all seems to have mostly died as of two years ago and there doesn't seem to be the wealth of documentation it once had. You can find laptops and tablets with all their specs listed out except for the digitizer.

And you can tell not just the 'tech review' community but the larger tech community in general that are not illustrators themselves seems to just forget these tools are important or are a factor to be supported. The Unix ecosystem rarely accounts for scanners, like sure there's SANE, but you could be one hardware revision away from being supported at all, or supported but completely non-functional for the use cases needed for illustrators and designers. And even if you do have something that works, compatibility for scanning on an Open Source OS tend to be judged by how it scans documentation, where color quality and DPI don't matter as much, and leaves any information about that sparsely documented if documented at all. Tablet drives that aren't Wacom are a pain to come by, drivers for anything with a built-in screen can be even more of a struggle. This is compensated by Krita having its own driver which works with most tablets out the box, which is great! But if you want to use your tablet for literally anything else? LOL I guess. And calibration tools? I haven't even dived into those but I know they only offer Windows and Mac versions of their software of the ones I have checked.

It just gets so frustrating to see Tech Enthusiast communities completely ignore vital parts of the creative process in the same field. And it feels even more pronounced in open source spaces. And so much those communities, Tech in general and Open Source specifically, really seem to gather around Gaming, and little else. With regard to open source OS, I get why, I really do. When trying to appeal to the wider public for adoption of the platform, something that is important for long term growth of the services, gaming is going to be the biggest net and has often been the largest deciding factor for what OS to use. Low adoption to the platform for decades IS the primary reason why Unix Native software so rarely is developed. And also I know a MASSIVE driving force behind the current push to get more games supported on Linux is largely due to Steam and its deep pockets and all that wasn't brought on by some sort of altruism, it was to advance the viability of their own hardware. So like I get why things are the way they are.

But it sucks that such incredibly vital tools for creative works (creative work that often goes into those games..) are just an afterthought in the greater tech industry.

It is so difficult to get others to understand my struggle with recollection with a sequence of letters and numbers, especially people in the tech field when I try to describe my issues with the command line. I keep being talked at that repetition and familiarity are what I need and it works for everyone and I just want hold their face and look at them like 'no. no it doesn't'.

And I'll have people point out 'well you write dialog well' and 'but you code HTML/CSS in text' and it's like... I desperately need you to know it's not the same.

You know why I am so good at dialog? Because the characters are having audible conversations with one another in my head. And when I'm reading, it's converted into 'sound' in my head, it doesn't remain text. It's easier for me to remember the concept and context of a thing, the idea of a thing, than the literal words used to express that thing.

When writing, it's easier for me to write dialog than descriptions because dialog sits in my mind back as audio, even if it's made up, and there's a direct translation of audio to words. But descriptions sit in my mind as pictures and feelings which does not have a direct literally translation. Sure I can list out the objects as they exist, but that isn't exactly very narratively compelling.

And when I'm writing HTML/CSS, I heavily rely on cutting and pasting, autofill, not to mention visual differentiation and indenting to make sure I don't loose my place. But almost none of it I can do from memory. There's a reason why I use Phoenix Code, and not like, notepad, I don't think I'd be near as good at it if I did.

You want to know how I remembered Phone Numbers as a kid? I remembered the dial tone sequences. I could be in a situation where I would not be able to repeat the phone number back or write it down, but get me in front of the phone and i touch the keys and hear the tone and then I remember the sequence without even looking at the numbers. I feel like my brain works in Raster and coding and command lines expect me to work in Vector. Like I know the approximation or idea of the thing, but I don't have the actual file, like the difference between a text file and an image of a text file.

And this makes the command line a nightmare.

For Example, this is the steps one has to take to add a new website to Apache.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo a2ensite domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

I absolutely cannot remember this sequence if I were to write it all from scratch without a reference. And its not because I don't understand what is happening, I know exactly what it does!

1. Make a new directory
2. Change the owner of said directory to the user account
3. Copy and paste the default conf file to make a new one for a new domain
4. Edit the new conf file using Nano
5. Initialize the new site config
6. Restart Apache

The problem is, if I were to write all these out from memory it starts to become something like this:

sudo makedir -p /var/www/domain.com/public.html
sudo chown $USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html (this step can often be forgotten entirely)
sudo c p /apache2/sites/default.conf /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo nano /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo a2??site domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

And that's on a good day!!!! It feels like how it feels when I'm being asked to spell something without writing it down. Which may I point out, I've been historically very bad at spelling. It is extremely common for me to remember the vague approximate of the letters that exist in the pile of the word but completely loose track of where they are in the sequence they exist. The very act of writing feels like sentence that float above my head that I have to keep leaping up to pull it back down a letter at a time before it disappears from me entirely. It took me till my 30's before I could spell Necessary correctly without spell check, and even then I can't spell it without a visual in front of me.

So once you start getting into commands where it's like ` -u dphp -p` Man like.. I can't.. I can't remember that

d's can be easily mis-remembered as b's, h's, p's can be easily mis-remembered as q's a's o's depending on the text and some letters can be just completely forgotten in the sequence entirely.

In an environment like the command line where there is no room for error, that it must be exact and perfect every time, file paths must mirror 100% what exists it is an active source of stress for me to use the command line. I have to switch my brain into the OCR gear that barely functions. And there is nothing there to remind you or autofill or suggestion when you're typing, something that would remind me the things I'm forgetting, something I rely on heavily when I'm coding in HTML/CSS.

You know how I write anything? How I write this post? How I code? How I write scripts. I jump around! I started in the middle, worked at the beginning, I add to the end, I move things around. I do the same with HTML, too. I edit non-linearly

The command line, is live. There's no previews, no double checking, once it's in, it's in. And if you screw up, sure you MIGHT be able to fix it, but in MANY cases, you can't or might not know there's anything TOO fix until you're so deep into it you don't know where you made the mistake. Deleting files/directories is the most NERVE RACKING thing you can do on a command line, I wish I could do that visually x_x

I know a possible solution to some of this is to get a different shell to do the command line interfacing from, but I don't even know what to use and if any of them has like.. a guide to tell me what it will do before I commit the line to active? like 'these commands will result in this happening' sort of feedback, I'd feel a lot less lost with something like that. x_x