First off, the <center> tag is deprecated in HTML5. You should replace it here with <main>, or just a plain old <div>.
Looking at your page now, I see you've attempted a solution with absolute positioning. This isn't very good if you're going for perfect centering - it's not even centered on my display! Centering things in HTML is very confusing - in fact, you can't really do it with pure HTML - but there are a few ways to do it with CSS. The simplest is to just limit the width of your body and put margin: auto; on it like so:
Code
body {
/* This can be any unit (e.g. 420px, 70%, 69vw, etc.) 43rem is just what I use. Try out different values! */
max-width: 43rem;
margin: auto;
}
In fact, this is what I use to center my website! It can only center horizontally, though.
My go-to method for vertical centering (which you can also see in action on my website) is using CSS Flexbox:
Code
/* This part forces the page to be the entire height of the window, so you can center things vertically.
This is pretty much always necessary for Flexbox-based vertical centering. */
html, body {
height: 100%;
}
/* Here's the flexbox. align-items here centers things vertically and justify-content centers them horizontally. */
body {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;
}
Now you can just stick everything else inside a div under the body (like you've already got) and you're done! Keep in mind this will center everything in the body, not just your div, so anything you want to position differently will need position: absolute; or similar. If this is what you want, you can also make it align the elements vertically instead of horizontally by adding:
Code
body {
flex-direction: column;
}
You can actually do this with absolute positioning as well, but it's not quite how you've done it - I would replace the CSS on your main div with this:
Code
/* This applies to your main div, which I see in your page has the id "divElement". */
#divElement {
position: absolute;
left: 50%;
top: 50%;
/* Keep in mind the transform property doesn't have good support in really old browsers, if you care about that */
transform: translate(-50%,-50%);
}
(Admittedly, I got this solution off Stack Overflow, but I've tested it and it works!)
This solution will apply to just your main div, but from my testing it's only good if you know that div is going to be shorter than the window.
You could also combine Flexbox with position: absolute; or margin: auto; (this is actually what I do), like so:
Code
/* This uses position: absolute; and transform to center the main div horizontally, and then Flexbox to center its contents vertically. */
#divElement {
position: absolute;
left: 50%;
transform: translate(-50%, 0);
height: 100%;
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
justify-content: center;
}
or
Code
/* Same as before, except with margin: auto; and a set maximum width instead of position: absolute;. */
#divElement {
max-width: 43rem;
margin: auto;
height: 100%;
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
justify-content: center;
}
With accompanying HTML changes:
Code
<body>
<div id="divElement">
<div>
Your content here
</div>
</div>
</body>
That's about all I got. Hopefully one of these works for you. IMO, centering things is probably the most disproportionately hard thing in web development for how basic and common it is, but it's pretty simple once you get the hang of it! In theory, all these methods will center your page on not just Most Displays (TM), but every display.
And just for fun, here's a secret forbidden centering method that you should never ever use:
Code
/* Everything about this is cursed as hell. Never do this. I am not liable if your computer explodes from using this. */
:root {
--bw: 50rem;
background-image: url("https://example.org/your-background-here");
}
html, body{
height: 100%;
}
body {
width: calc((var(--bw) / 2) + 50vw);
}
#divElement {
float: right;
width: var(--bw);
height: 100%;
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
justify-content: center;
}
I've only discovered good headphones relatively recently - for most of my life it's mostly been whatever cheap junk I could get my hands on. This changed when I got a pair of Audiotechnica ATH-M40x headphones a bit over a year ago. The sound quality on them was great - I'm no audiophile but I can definitely tell when I go from built-in device speakers to nice headphones and the bass frequencies suddenly appear - but one of the swivel joints snapped after only a year and since then build quality has been a huge deciding factor in which headphones I buy, but not at the expense of sound! Currently I'm rocking (pun intended):
Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) which I use for music production and general listening at my computer. They're built like a tank and the sound quality is even better than the M40x's, but they don't come with a detachable cable but I know how to fix that! I bought my pair through a modding company, and now they have a mini-XLR port on them! Supposedly Audiotechnica's headphones are bassier, but I haven't really done a comprehensive test.
KZ ZSN Pro earbuds - they cost me about $20 USD, but they sound good, look beautiful, and are built shockingly well! They even come with a removable cable! I use these for everything when I'm away from my computer. It's because of headphones like this that I still refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack - although you can get a wireless adapter for these on Amazon...
I've also had a pair of Skullcandy Crushers, the original 2014 ones that didn't support bluetooth. They have haptic motors in them to emphasize the BASS, though the motors only worked with the original cable. These were wired headphones that took a AA battery! They were hilarious. Shame the port for the removable cable wore out and became unreliable after a few years... maybe if I learned to solder I could replace it
I've considered getting more headphones for more specialized purposes, but I've found that at least for now these two are all I need. Headphones are expensive... I've also considered getting a DAC/amp for my DT 770s, does a nice DAC and amp make a difference in y'all's experience compared to just running out of your computer's audio jack directly?
I run my own small instance! It uses an alternative software called Akkoma that has some extra features compared to Mastodon, like the ability to react to posts with emojis, discord-style, and a UI I consider to be generally nicer. I'm @will@social.isopod.cool
I'm of the opinion that the client should have to do as little as possible when rendering a webpage, so I try to keep client-side Javascript to an absolute minimum and serve static HTML whenever possible, but my backend is full of PHP code. I love adding dynamic features and automating simple backend tasks to minimize the amount of repetitive markup I have to write - for example, my art page is really just a PHP script that scans a directory for images and populates the page in chronological order based on file metadata, so all I have to do to update it is upload an image and the rest is taken care of for me!
I tend to stick to wired as well. I could honestly give or take wireless peripherals for the most part (except that my BIOS doesn't have bluetooth drivers!) but for audio? I understand why it exists, but I could never use it myself. It might just be that I've only used cheap, crappy bluetooth headphones but I just don't want to hassle with software and inconsistent connections just for worse quality. Plus, it saves a lot of money to be able to offload all that audio processing hardware to the source. Cheap wired headphones can get really good!
All that said, I really like Logitech's wireless peripherals. It's proprietary, but it uses a USB dongle that's as plug-and-play as any wired peripheral, and it's been amazing in my experience.
If I need to use wireless stuff, I love it when it just takes AA or AAA batteries. It's nice to be able to just replace the battery with a commonly available one when it dies. All my wireless gear takes them!
I've never had a particularly fancy phone, for a long time it was because they were too expensive but at this point I've realized I don't need or even really want the fancy stuff, especially if it means giving up the few features I actually care about (read: the headphone jack). My first phone was a secondhand iPhone 4S from a family member, but I decided pretty quick I didn't want to get locked inside of that particular walled garden and it's been cheap mid-tier Android phones ever since, mainly from LG. My current phone is an LG K61. It has way more cameras than I know what to do with, but otherwise I can't complain about it. It's withstood an impressive amount of drops, albeit with a screen protector and a basic case. It does what I need it to do, which, admittedly, isn't a lot; I don't use it for anything much more intensive than watching Youtube. I'm planning to keep using this thing until it gives up the ghost, and then see about trying to get a Fairphone 3.
If you're curious, it looks like this: It's got something approaching a pearlescent sheen in person. It's a cool effect.
From what I can tell, LG seems to be quietly killing off their phone division. It's a shame, I really liked their phones.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing more cross-platform and cross-generation games. I can't think of a single Xbox game that isn't playable on both Xbox One and Series X/S. Maybe a few third-party games, but certainly nothing that's piqued my interest. It's great for players, which I'm all for, but has definitely reduced the need to invest in a new system so I wonder if it's hurting Microsoft or if the software sales make up for any decrease in hardware.
I can't remember where, but I've heard that modern consoles are generally sold at a loss and made up for by sales surrounding them, like online subscriptions and exorbitantly priced games and controllers. This being the case, it's possible Microsoft actually benefits from selling fewer Xboxes and maintaining backwards compatibility with the old ones.
I think people are starting to accept that you don't need great graphics to have a great game. People today will play a NES style game just as happily as a brand new AAA game; that seems like a shift from past decades where everything had to be the biggest and the best.
Most games right now are still playable on last-gen consoles, and besides RTX the graphical leap doesn't seem worth the upgrade this time around.
I can definitely relate here. I'm not much of a console gamer, but after I bought my new computer with its shiny new latest-gen graphics card, I realized most if not all of the games in my Steam library ran fine or even just as good on the old one, and neither are especially "high-end". I think we've reached a point where even if you want to go for photorealism, graphical upgrades beyond what exists currently just don't make sense anymore. Even some games I would consider to have "good graphics" have shockingly low system requirements by current standards.
As for modern consoles, I could never really be bothered. I had an Xbox 360 once, but I mostly ended up playing Minecraft and Terraria on it in between having access to computers to play them on. Those two games in particular were really bad about cross-platform feature parity when I played them on the Xbox, and I think that shaped my perception of console gaming for a while afterwards as being just an objectively worse version of the PC experience. Even so, neither platform has had anything on it since that interested me enough to actually want a new console. I've got a Switch that I use exclusively to play Kirby and that's about it.
I couldn't say for certain, but some of the first videogames I can remember playing were Lego games on my parents' old Windows XP box. I didn't have Lego Island, the one Lego game everyone else seems to care about, instead I had Legoland, Lego Racers 1 and 2, and Lego Creator. My favorite by far was Lego Racers 2. It was this semi-open-world-ish racing game where you got to design your own car and all the characters spoke in some primitive dialect of Simlish. I remember in races your car could take damage and pieces would fall off, until your car was destroyed entirely and you were left running on foot! I would try to build vehicles as large and with as many parts as possible within the tight limits the game set in order to avoid complete destruction, but I don't think it actually did anything. Unfortunately the disc must have gotten damaged or something because I remember that computer becoming very temperamental about loading it. I was forced to play... other games! The horror! None have quite compared since.
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but I know how to fix that! I bought my pair through a modding company, and now they have a mini-XLR port on them! Supposedly Audiotechnica's headphones are bassier, but I haven't really done a comprehensive test.
