It is time to deprecate the use of the academic title Master of Science. As the Mozilla Foundation already has proven long time ago, the master-slave metaphor has to be overcome. And before you ask, yes, we have a suggestion on how to call it in the future: Maximally Certified Scientist, for short MCS!

If you're willing to change the world you'll find ways to do it. And we strive not only for a world of goodness but for the best of all worlds imaginable! Nothing less, folks!

Cancel out the term master once and forever and wherever it may be still in use! If you can take an even tiny step towards the best world imaginable, perform it! I hereby shout out to the universities and campusses all over the world: no more masters nowhere!

The contents of kolloquia.de has been migrated to WordPress.com and is available again via the well-known URL kolloquia.de! I hope that the connectivity issues we've experienced since the beginning of 2022 are history now.

At least since 0930 this morning (2022-11-10) kolloquia.de cannot be reached via the German 1&1 DSL network. Again and again the same problem! As far as I know 1&1 uses the infrastructure of the German Telekom, our biggest communication services provider. kolloquia.de itself is hosted by Host Europe, a company which is part of the GoDaddy network of Internet companies. To me it is a mystery how such problems can occur over and over again without anybody fixing it once and for all!

Of course, I've contacted the support and gave the all the necessary information, but I have no hope that they will come up with any findings. My goodness...

HiDPI (4K or higher) monitors, standalone or part of a laptop, are fun to use but this fun is corrupted often either on the application level or even the system level, e.g., Java as the one instance being responsible for the execution of Java applications and thus being an important part of the system as a whole.

In addition, components such as libraries can take the complexity of the problem to an even higher level. You'll be lucky if your application of interest is a jar which can be launched using the uiScale option. This helps in some cases, but really only in some. But other applications like the notorious Eclipse IDE cannot be scaled to a reasonable appearance without severe side-effects. If you scale it by a factor of 2, the icons in the object tree are displayed incorrectly and are cut in half.
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Most interestingly, the HiDPI problem is equally bad on Windows as well as on Linux systems. Either way you have to fight yourself through legions of real or, in most cases, pseudo-solutions. And in the end, you'll often give up without having come to a solution.
Sometimes I think, 4K displays are not what the world really wanted, the nerds using them will find out how useless they are. Okay, that's a bit over the top, but the hassle you sometimes have using wrongly behaving applications is over the top also.

I have these candidates on my list:

• Eclipse: HiDPI-related bugs are known forever, still buggy after years.
• DeepShredder13: The support of the Shredder application either can't help or isn't willing to. The problem is that the application is a binary which was created by javapackager, and I could not find a solution to extract the jar file from it. If I could, I was able to use the -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2 option but since I don't have the isolated jar file, I'm stuck with an application which practically can't be used on a 4K screen.
• DaVinci Resolve: HiDPI-related problems known for years, but also no action taking place for years. The most notorious case of arrogance by the developer, this program really costs money.
• Zettelkasten ZKN3: HiDPI-related problems on Windows, but at least it can be fixed on Linux.
• Lazarus: This IDE is already problematic on a full HD screen where fonts and icons are a bit too small, but on 4K it's simply ridiculous. Also in this case the problem is widely known but nobody's working on a solution.
• Ardour 7: Unreadable, impossible to use. You have to use absurd scaling factors system-wide in order to get this UI presented in a legible manner. No chance as far as I know to work with this application on a 4K display.
• LMMS: The main menu fonts are okay, but when you open the submenus everything is so tiny that... Also these little windows on the main work area are ridiculously small. All in all the same as Ardour but a bit mixed up. Uninstalled.
  

Two of these applications cost money, especially Resolve! And Black Magic knows about the problems without taking action for years! That's a kick in the ass of the customer!
If I hadn't already two 4K laptops, instead I'd rather buy two Full-HD machines together with two Full-HD monitors for each of one. Okay, the problem is the footprint on my desks, but the footprint on my mental condition would be much less.

Technically you may come into trouble with DPI/HiDPI problems if you set your system's DPI value to something different from the system's default. I've published a blog article about Google Chrome which showed blurry maps (www.kolloquia.com/blog-english/google-chrome-has-problems-displaying-google-maps). This phenomen was caused by an altered DPI value on a screen which wasn't even Full HD.

On my laptop running Kali Linux, Google Chrome shows this ugly picture:

On the same computer Firefox shows this part of the map like this:

Any ideas how this happens and what I can do about it? Write it in the comments, thanks a lot!

PS (2022-10-25):
The Solution is to use these options in your menu call to Chrome:

--high-dpi-support=1 --force-device-scale-factor=1

​This will have side-effects for sure! But you're better off anyways using these options.

I wrote about this subject some days ago but want to clarify things a bit and tell a short concise story:

I tried to setup a new website with Host Europe. They have been bought by GoDaddy in April, 2017. One of my first steps was to install a Managed Wordpress site. This system has configuration pages of its own and I told the system to setup a new Wordpress site for me.

I received a mail that the site had been built and was ready to run but I couldn't reach it with my browser. The only network I could use was the one of O2 which is part of Telefónica. And I had experienced problems with this network earlier: The old kolloquia.de site wasn't available from within O2 for several days, and this repeatedly.

After I had built about a dozen Wordpress sites and deleted them again, since I could not reach them, I used the option to make use of a server located in North America. From this moment on everything worked fine.

So, the conclusion of all this is: Telefónica (or O2 as part of it) has a very big connectivity problem with Managed Wordpress sites outside the US. That's my understanding of the extremely annoying and frustrating problems I've had over several weeks, or even months now.

​I hope this article may help some people, good luck in this world of monopolies!

In order to publish articles with a commenting section on Weebly sites, you have to open up a new page with the blog option explicitly set!