deskthority

madhias wrote:I would like to have at DT a nice looking dark night theme (grey), because when reading on my tablet in the bed it's just too bright (even on the darkest brightness mode). But's that's another story, and not related to this topic.

A dark theme? Funny you should say that…


http://deskthority.net/deskthority-rela ... et#p145775

I totally agree about trying to read against a white background at night. Or even other times of day, with my hypersensitive eyes. I work around this on the web in general with a bookmarklet (details in the link) or by running my screen on inverted colour mode (a neat accessibility feature every platform must have).

The bookmarklet preserves pictures, but requires manually running (I hit Command + 2). Negative colours mode gives images that Terminator look, but ensures no flashes of white as it's always there ahead of you.

Anyway, a dark theme might be nice. Especially one where we can define our own background and foreground colours, plus default font size. Crucial! These customisations apply only to our own screens! So my elephantine text doesn't look that way to anyone else, and I don't have to wince at 9 point.

So what's the story of Ripster? I'm late to the keyboard community so I just hear people mentioned him but have no ideas what it meant :/

He was before my time, but from what I gather: he was super active, posted quite a lot of useful, if overly opinionated stuff, and somehow got into a fight that got him thrown off DT: an exclusive club indeed! Something to do with constant, in your face, sexism or some such. He seemed to get off on it. And when the ban hammer fell, he went off to the shoe place. What's it called again? Reebok, Reef, Rockport… Reddit!

I think he's the Ken Rockwell of keyboard hobbyists. And that's no compliment at all.

I'm also too young in this business to see what happened, but thanks to the internet you'll find a lot of old stuff - even here at DT. As someone said he's/was 'basically an huge troll'.

When Ripster was banned on GH, the moderators had the very bad idea to delete all his content, which was a lot, both in the forum and especially in the GH Wiki (yes, there is a GH wiki!). He was one of the most active posters over there, answering a lot of qustions.

So if you're looking for keyboard information on Google, you often find links to old GH threads that are missing the most important posts, and you don't really notice it until you read the whole thing and sense that something must be missing.

Deleting stuff only hurts the threads, and wiki pages, themselves. And so therefore all readers who arrive upon them in the future. What a poor decision.

The only time I've seen something like that here was with this guy, but as the filler text always says:

[Account and posts deleted on request]

Strange request. But a consequence of the fact that we own our posts, not DT, I suppose.

madhias wrote:I think he's the Ken Rockwell of keyboard hobbyists. And that's no compliment at all.

Rockwell's controversial? That's the thing with reading stuff on the internet, you never know where the writer's coming from. I've read a couple of Rockwell's reviews when looking into camera gear, and got the sense he was full of attitude, but that's all an encounter like that can tell. No indication of broader drama. Just like most of Ripster's stuff then!

I miss his Lego-pictures!

Didn't they just delete his (Ripster) comments and then rootw00rm took care of the wiki (and everything else)?

He was banned on geekhack because he rage-deleted somebody's wiki contributions in some stupid wiki war. I don't think there are many good reasons to ban someone, but that (deliberately destroying somebody's content) would be one of them, because it forces even the most liberal admin to protect the board from such a liability.

Muirium wrote:Rockwell's controversial? That's the thing with reading stuff on the internet, you never know where the writer's coming from. I've read a couple of Rockwell's reviews when looking into camera gear, and got the sense he was full of attitude, but that's all an encounter like that can tell. No indication of broader drama. Just like most of Ripster's stuff then!

Well, Rockwell is maybe the most controversial photographer-gear-review guy on earth. He also reviews watches, like Ripster; and similar other things. A lot of people hate the Rockwell review style (and also his photo work 'how to saturate most'), with lot's of pseudo science stuff - but often more accurate and 'natural' than real science reviews. There are a lot of Rockwell jokes like 'Ken Rockwell don't wait for the best light, the light changes according to Rockwells needs'.

Ripster started off posting very useful information. In fact, his wiki posts were one of the main reasons I joined geekhack back in early 2010. Then he gradually went insane, posting more and more outrageous crap. He would derail potentially interesting threads with nonsense posts. After a while, he just became irritating, with his arrogant "#1 keyboard expert on the planet" boasts and annoying Lego posts interrupting useful conversations.

I miss the original Ripster, before the insanity set in. I really think he has some kind of psychological disorder. He started to believe he was "the god of keyboards" and it all went downhill from there. It's sad, really.

Pity. It's not like we're tight asses about staying on topic here (duh) but there is a world between friendly conversation and waging war with a flamethrower. The internet can do curious things. Or rather people do…

Just to derail this further:

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=58563.0

What the fuck am I doing on that list!

(Votes for Beardsmore.)

Stupid poll. Everybody knows the Keyboard Oracle is the ultimate realisation of truth.

Not sure if LOL, asplode or headdesk … Hopefully those options are not mutually exclusive.

Please post a video of all those things at once.

madhias wrote:[...] rude attacks of mods or other old members

There are mods here? Attack them rudely!

At somepoint I just swapped over, probably when it all when to hell with all the issues there.

Now I heard that moderation has been quite overactive... I like it here, I spam junk and no one notices ;D