mashoo
website guide

help on the following topics is available below; click a topic or scroll down

website name
monitor calibration
audio/video playback
colour scheme
text style

website name

mashoo is a corruption of matthew; it's the way the girl next-door used to say it when i was a little boy

monitor calibration

to calibrate your monitor, use the image below; if you are viewing this page maximised with a black background, calibration might be possible without leaving this page; otherwise, save the image and load it against a black background; many image viewers are able to do this (load the image full screen without resizing it);

there are 4 circles, each brighter than the last, from left to right; adjust your monitor's brightness until the leftmost circle is invisible and the next one visible;



before i was informed of this calibration in 2008-10, my monitor brightness used to be set too low, because the bright white backgrounds of the internet used to wear me out; everything added to this site (or updated) since then has been produced on a calibrated monitor; it should therefore be viewed by a monitor similarly calibrated

audio/video playback

the codecs in use at this site are the vorbis audio codec and the theora video codec; these codecs are free and open; information and downloads are available at xiph.org

colour scheme

initially this website was just my blog, and my blog contained nothing but photographs; i chose a black background to make the photographs more visible; when my words arrived, the obvious choice of colour was white

text style

much of the text on this website does not conform to common orthographical conventions; my lower-case/semi-colon style comes from unix shell scripting, and occurred to me as a viable alternative when i took offence at the upper-case letters in the comments in a shell script i was typing; the script itself seemed much more elegant; and so i changed the style of the comments to fit the style of the script; later, i began to use the same style to send text messages from mobile phones, which saved me the effort of creating upper-case letters; it was also a good way of balancing out the excessive use of upper-case letters by other people