How To Add Google's New Themes to Chrome

Google has just introduced several new themes for Chrome that offer both dark and coloured options. The themes will change the colour of the Chrome UI elements but don't affect the web pages that Chrome is displaying. For that you'll need an extension like Dark Reader.

LifeHacker has a handy guide to enabling the new themes, including screen shots. Some of theme are pretty lurid. I am now using the Slate theme, which uses a combination of dark blue and black. Along with the Dark Reader extension that I've been using for a while, it makes web browsing much easier on the eyes.

Incidentally, if you use Windows 10, you can use dark mode in some of the apps. This is especially handy in File Explorer.

Getting Dark Mode in Acrobat Reader

Here's a tip for fans of dark mode: how to get white text on a black background in Acrobat Reader. 

These instructions are for the latest (and highly enshittified) release of Acrobat Reader. 

1. Click the hamburger menu icon in the upper left.

2. From the menu,, click Preferences.

3. In the Categories list, click Accessibility.

4. Select Replace Document Colors.

5. Then select Use High-Contrast colors and choose White text on black from the High-contrast color combination list.

6. Click OK. 

In step 5, you could select Custom Color and then pick your text and background colours. 

I'm posting this because I cannot easily read PDFs with black text on a white background. The current release of Acrobat Reader changed whatever settings I had in the past to give me dark mode in PDFs, and it's been driving me crazy for a while now. 

Some PDFs may not work well with these settings;. for example, tables with shading will be a problem. I will have to experiment more to see if other settings in the Accessibility dialog will help.

If you know of a (preferably free) PDF reader that works well in dark mode, please leave me a comment.

 

Enabling Dark Mode in Windows 10

I have a 28" monitor and staring at a screen with a white background is a guaranteed way to end up with a headache from eye strain. So as much as possible, I use dark mode in my web browsers (the Dark Reader extension in Chrome and the Dark theme and the Owl extension in Firefox).

But until recently, Windows didn't have a dark mode setting for its own applications. That's been fixed (somewhat) in the October 2018 update which showed up on my PC a couple of weeks ago. You can enable dark mode in Settings > Personalization > Colors. It works for Microsoft's own apps, including File Explorer, Settings, and the Windows app store.

It should also work in Office applications, if you have a more recent version of Office than Office 2013. Unfortunately, I am still using Office 2013, so I'm stuck with the blinding white screen in Word. That might be enough of a reason to consider upgrading Office (or to convert my files to Google Docs).

For email, I mostly use Mozilla Thunderbird. The default Mozilla Dark theme changes only the menu bar, which isn't much use, so I use a third-party theme called TT Deep Dark. It changes everything except the message content, so it's not perfect but it's better than the default.

Featured Links – February 12, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Ducks in the bay

• Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that would attend plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
• 5 dark mode upgrades for your Windows 10 or 11 PC. "Microsoft is slowly making dark mode better on Windows, but these tips will give your dark mode a big upgrade today." I would have a hard time using my computer without dark mode. I second the recommendation in the article for using the Dark Reader extension. 
• Next-Generation Spaceplanes Are the Cutting-Edge Evolution of the Space Shuttle Dream. "Spaceplanes seemed out of favor when the Shuttle was retired in 2011. They now seem to be making a comeback."
• Moderately Advanced Aliens Could Easily Take Over A Milky Way-Like Galaxy, Simulations Show. "A new simulation has looked at how quickly a moderately advanced alien civilization would take to spread itself across a galaxy and the answer is not long at all, at least in relative cosmic terms. Even equipped with spaceships not much faster than our most advanced interplanetary probes, the whole ordeal could happen in just 1 billion years."
• Micromobility: An Urban Transportation Revolution. "E-bikes, E-motorcycles, E-scooters displacing oil use and improving urban living."
• Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything. "Physicists’ search for a theory that explains all reality in one framework appeared to have stalled. But now they are reinvigorating the hunt by exploring a wild landscape of abstract geometry."
• The Super Bowl will be watched by 100 million people. But not all of them will see the same game. "Two million Canadians and 13 million Americans live with colour blindness, and North American sports are behind on making their products accessible." Fortunately, I have normal colour vision, but I can understand how being colour blind would be a real problem for sports fans. 

Featured Links - August 14, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A classic Jaguar

AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine. "Robots, computers, and algorithms are hunting for potential new therapies in ways humans can’t—by processing huge volumes of data and building previously unimagined molecules." AI does have some good uses and this is one them.

How NASA Nearly Lost the Voyager 2 Spacecraft Forever. "The space agency lost touch with the beloved spacecraft following a faulty command signal. Here’s how it happened—and how engineers worked to bring it back."

The Sweep and Force of Section Three. A long, comprehensive, reasoned explanation of why Trump (and possibly many of his associates) is not eligible to run for office. Thanks to Timothy Snyder for pointing this out.

Smoking-gun evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration from Gaia observations of wide binary stars. "A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics." If confirmed, this could be Nobel-prize winning research. 

How Editors Blend Art and Science to Bring NASA’s Space Photos to Life. "Webb’s stunning images are not beamed to Earth from the $10 billion space telescope in full color. In fact, Webb’s detectors capture monochromatic photos that are exceedingly dark. Thanks to expert image processors Joe DePasquale and Alyssa Pagan at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, the dark gray raw images come to life in unbelievable ways."

Good Omens (BBC Radio). "Adaptation of the 1990 fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. An angel and a demon try to save the world from an apocalypse. Starring Peter Serafinowicz and Mark Heap."

Who Needs Meta or Google for News? Use ‘Really Simple Syndication’. "RSS is a universal, open, algorithm-free news feed you can have for free. Silicon Valley giants treat it like a secret." I can't imagine using the internet without a feed reader. 

7 Easy Food Swaps That Help the Planet. "Consider ditching resource-hungry foods for these delicious alternatives that leave a lighter footprint."

Review - The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantary, Volumes 12 and 13

Update: I've added Widdam by Vandana Singh into the liked stories in Volume 13. I read her story "Requiem" in a Neil Clarke anthology and liked it enough to see if had missed any stories by her. 

Over the last couple of years, I've been neglecting short fiction, which is odd considering that I was a frequent reader of science fiction magazines as a teen. (I used to dream about Analog and for a while I had an almost complete set of The Magzine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a 30-year run of Astounding.Analog). So after finishing Ray Nayler's excellent The Mountain in the Sea, I decided to dive back into anthologies for a while. I;m going to start publishing short reviews as I finish them. 

For many years, the best annual anthologies were those edited by Gardner Dozois. Sadly. he passed away in 2018. so his last anthology was the 35th edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction, covering 2017. Since then, Jonathan Strahan and Neal Clarke, among others have edited series of year's best anthologies. 

In this post, I'm going to briefly discuss Jonathan Strahan's anthologies, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volumes 12 and 13 covering the years 2017 and 2018.  These are hefty books: Volume 12 has 539 pages and 29 stories, Volume 13 has 30 stories and 494 pages. Both volumes include an introduction by Strahan and short biographies of each author.

For each book, I'm just going to list the stories that I bookmarked as being especially good with occasional annotations. I should note that I much prefer science fiction to fantasy, so I didn't read many of the fantasy stories (though I did start reading all of them). I bookmark the stories that I like and create a numerical score: stories I liked/number of stories in the book, expressed as a percentage.

Volume 12 (Likes: 29%)

• "Eminence", Karl Schroeder
• "The Chameleon's Gloves", Yoo Ha Lee
• "Crispin's Model", Max Gladstone: This one turned out to be horror, not my usual taste but quite good. 
• "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, Greg Egan": A dark look at an AI-dominated near future. 
• "An Evening with Sereryn", Rich Larson
• "Babylon", Dave Hutchinson
• "Bring Your Own Spoon," Saad Z. Hossain: A science fiction story with djinn.  
• "Belladona Nights", Alastair Reynolds: This was easily the best story in the book. A vision of humanity's far future that was elegaic, powerful, and terribly sad. 

Volume 13 (Likes: 26%)

• "Yard Dog", Tade Thompson. Jazz and fantasy, a nice mix. 
• "The Blue Fairy Manifesto", Annalee Newitz
• "Okay, Glory", Elizabeth Bear
• "Meat and Salt and Sparks", Rich Larson. I must track down his story collections; I like everything I've read by him.
• "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth", Daryl Gregory. I think this was my favourite story in the book.
• "Golgatha", Dave Hutchinson
• "Widdam". Vandana Singh. I've now read two stories by her and must find more. I had passed this one by, thinking it was a fantasy. It's near future SF and very. very good.
• "Quality Time", Ken Liu. If you know any software developers or tech engineers, get them to read this.