In which I tinker with hardware, think about cookies, pour scorn on marketing, and generally squander my precious time on this planet.
SSD drive
I've recently installed a shiny new SSD drive to replace my old HDD one. I say replace, turns out there was room for both of them in my laptop. Installing the SSD was relatively painless, involving a Microsoft tool to install Windows via USB stick, and then obviously a fair bit of installing all my preferred applications.
I have two observations about this process. Actually, I've got another one first, which is the SSD was so small! I couldn't believe how thin it was - 3mm at most. Incredible.
Anway. The SSD has made things considerably faster. A friend upgraded years ago and gave me this advice, which I pass on to you - if you can only do one upgrade to your computer, get an SSD. I might be quite late to this as it's probably hard to buy a computer these days without one, but it's worth mentioning.
The other thing to note is that installing Windows (and doing a couple of minor updates since) was much quicker than expected. I've ranted about Windows 10 in the past and how it took eight hours to upgrade a brand new install of 8 to 10, and how slow all my updates have been since. The install this time was far less than an hour.
Maybe having a fresh install of Windows 10 works much better than an upgraded 8? Seems obvious, but surely it shouldn't be seven hours better? Well, at least it's quicker now, I guess.
Important things accomplished during lockdown
This week, I have decided what I would call my boat, if I ever owned a boat.
If my boat was a yacht or other sailing craft, I would name it 'Unexpected Gust'.
If my boat was a motor boat, I would name it 'Boom Magnet'.
That is all.
Cookie consent on the web is broken
Wait, let me explain. Yes, cookie consent on the internet is often wrong because many cookie banners do little more for the user than informing them that cookies are going to be set, rather than giving them any degree of control over it. But I'm not talking about that.
I've been doing some work on cookie consent recently and it suddenly occurred to me that most cookie consent models are based on the device and not the user. If someone uses my phone and consents to cookies on a site that I later visit myself, that site will continue to set cookies based on what was previously agreed. I haven't consented to that - the person who used my phone did.
This is a complex problem, because what's the alternative? Ask the user every time they visit a new page? Or maybe the system we have is okay? Maybe this is something that should be set at a browser level rather than in the page itself? I really don't know.
Voted the best
I dusted off my old copy of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within recently and on the back of the box, beneath all the other reasons why you should have bought it, it says "Voted IGN's Best PlayStation 2 Action Game at E3 2004".
Things like this make me laugh. It sounds very impressive on first read, but what does it actually mean? It didn't win this award, otherwise it would say so. It means someone voted for it to win the award. But how many people voted? Who were they? Where did it place in the final scores?
It means at least one person voted for this. That person could have been anyone, including someone involved with the game. It was ranked at least last in the final scores. That's all we can say for definite.
The reality is that it's a pretty good game and it probably got a good number of votes, and ranked fairly highly in the final tally, but not high enough to win and probably not high enough to specify. "Ranked fifteenth in IGN's Best Action Game" doesn't look great on a box cover.
It's a bit like saying I was voted world's sexiest man 2020. It sounds impressive until you think about it.