I struggled with the Moonlander although it is a wonderful keyboard.
I mapped it to a Colemak layout varient when I first got it. I was constantly discovering key combos that didn't quite work for whatever reason and made tweaks to the layout or the shortcuts in various editors. Forever tying my brain in knots learning and relearning mappings and combos. Then I'd frequently jump on other peoples computers/laptops to help out with small things and have to switch back to the old mode of thinking.
It ended up being a productivity sink rather than a boon. I don't know whether I would have crossed some inflection point if I had persevered, but there was always this fixed cost of tweaking shortcuts when using new software that was more burdensome than with a plain qwerty keyboard.
Maybe I was too ambitious and should have avoided the Colemak-esque layout, but I haven't managed to summon the stamina to give it a fair go again. I still use one half of it for gaming though. It's really sweet for that.
I found I couldn't get colemak to work for me. Like you said, too many key combos that just felt awkward. I wound up using a layout[1] called "middlemak" that feels much more comfortable to me, and preserves a lot of qwerty hand if not actual key positions, which helped in the initial switch. Took me a few months to get up to a relatively normal typing speed and a year in (of maybe 2-4 days of use a week depending on whether I'm working from the road or not) and I still have to look at my keys about 50% of the time, but it's improving and since I only customized this one keyboard, it doesn't seem to have broken my muscle memory for a standard qwerty keyboard.
I'd say it's definitely the colemak change. They keyboard by itself takes some getting used to, a new layout on top would be overwhelming.
I kept mine pretty close to a standard qwerty - the only customizations are where I put the "\|", backspace, dash and a few other keys, along with what to do with all the thumb keys. Even with these relatively minor changes, it still took me about a week to recover my WPM, and I had to use their touch typing software to practice for an hour or two. Making only a few changes also makes it seamless to switch to laptop keyboards, etc.
This matches my experience exactly. I use a standard QWERTY setup on the moonlander, with only changes being the thumb clusters and changing caps lock to backspace. After a few days of practicing, it feels natural and seamless to switch back and forth.
I have the makedo and the screws are legit amazing. I never imagined that they could possibly work so well. It's one of those things I always recommend to other parents.
The very real downside is that your kids become attached to their creations. So you end up with a house perpetually full of cardboard and fighting a constant battle to part with some of it.
In one of my art history classes we learned of a Bauhaus (or Dada?) artist that would stack their old belongings into the corners of their apartment and then plaster over it in order to reduce the clutter in their home. Might be worth trying out.
FWIW, my kids never took to the screws, but are still ridiculously attached to their creations.
I strive to be open and honest in my parenting, but these battles just don’t seem worth everyone’s investment. A box spaceship that hasn’t been touched in a week is quietly “disappeared” to the basement, and if it’s not inquired after by the end of a month it goes to recycling.
This just creates trauma that leads to more hoarding behavior as they try to keep things from disappearing in the future.
Instead, you need to complete the lifecycle of a creation. They should know things they make won’t last forever, and you need to encourage the destruction when the time comes, and after that, they can create a new thing to fill the void, and the cycle continues.
Agreed. I know a hoarder (self-described, accurately) who traces it all back to her mom secretly throwing away her toys. She became highly defensive of her "things", to a ridiculous (three houses filled) extent.
My mother, OTOH, while not the greatest in the world, would ask me to choose which toys were being donated to "other children who don't have any" (Goodwill, probably). I keep things longer than I should, but can throw away the unused from time to time, keeping my house sort of tidy-esque, kinda.
If you're going to do it, you really have to pay attention to your kid(s).
When I was in my early teens, I walked in on my mom going through my brother's toys with a bag in hand to get rid of them. Once I figured out what she was doing, I asked the obvious question, if she'd ever done it to me, and she just nonchalantly asked me if I had ever missed any toys.
I never had. She actually knew which ones mattered and which ones didn't. These days I miss the magic fairy that comes in and gets rid of the things I don't use anymore when I'm not looking!
Yup, too many parents just buy mindlessly for their kids without thinking of the exit plan for all this stuff, preferring to just throw it away when their kid doesn’t notice. This gets rid of the garbage but then your kid is left with the impression they can just consume endlessly and there’s always room for something else, they never go through the process of getting rid of things.
As a parent, I try to be very judicious about what I buy them for their entertainment. But we have a large family and everyone wants to bring a little something. When the kids were younger I get away with asking family and friends to just gift clothes if they must gift something or just bring a card or better yet a book they loved and signed instead of a card. But as kids got bigger they started expressing desires themselves so family and friends now buy toys along with more practical stuff. They try to be educational but the number of unopened rock painting kits you can fit into your storage is only so many.
In Australia a company called REDcycle supposedly recycled soft plastics from all the major supermarkets. After a decade or so operating the business collapsed and it was discovered that they had about 11,000 tonnes of the stuff stockpiled in 40+ warehouses across the country because they hadn't figured out how to recycle it.
Instead of being in a landfill and leaching microplastics it's all bundled up and contained. I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together. From my point of view any effort at sorting trash is beneficial to the ecosystem because even if we don't have a method to deal with the problem now, we can wait a generation or two for technology to improve.
Some cynics think the plastic industry supports sham “recycling” efforts that don’t actually work, in order to alleviate customer guilt and forestall a ban or mandatory reformulation.
The bad thing, in this line of thought, is that we’re being lied to and taken for fools. Tricked into buying things we’re promised are recyclable when they’re not.
The costs of storing more and more plastics will only increase, storage is cheap at first, and that's why they did that, and when it starts getting expensive, they abandon ship. It is either classic fraud or incompetence.
These plastics will have to be dealt with eventually, recycling, burning or burying them. Waiting is just a waste of money. If we wait "a generation of two", we will be drowning in warehouses full of plastics like over-ground, inadequate and expensive landfills.
These are plastics, not nuclear waste. The "wait and see" strategy works for nuclear waste works because such waste is compact, hazardous and potentially very valuable. It also decays naturally, so the simple act of waiting makes it less hazardous. Plastic waste is the opposite of that: bulky, relatively harmless, mostly worthless, and it becomes worse as it degrades.
They tried to keep it secret that they were storing the garbage instead of recycling it. The trash still needs to be disposed. Your response is to question whether this was fraud and a bad thing. That’s a weird response.
> I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together.
No it shouldn't be dropped. But it certainly should be fixed. It's a bit disrespectful to the consumer to make them drag their plastic back to the store only for them to end up in the same place as their trash bin. That's the kind of thing that creates environmental apathy. Which makes it harder to drive change. People don't like being lied to.
However since then many small cycle plastic to oil (Pyrolysis) plants have popped up, which are set to scale up. This reclaimed oil will be used to create new plastic.
Australia is targeting 50% recycled content in its packaging by this year.
I've used NextDNS.io in the past and setup schedules to block the reddit domain during work hours.
The problem that I found is that sometimes it's not just a place of procrastination but the place you want to search for a useful answer to your question.
Pause and resume across devices even. Pure psychological torture.
Close your laptop and then pick up your phone later and it resumes right where you last saw it. You immediately put your phone down to cut it off because you want to relax. Go make a cup of tea then sit down on the couch and turn on the TV for a minute...
Incredibly sad. It’s a real testament to tteck that he took the time to transition the project, and make his wishes known how he wanted us to proceed. Tteck is a legend.
One thing I've done is create a "color clock" using a smart bulb that changes color based on a daily schedule. So at 8:00pm the bulb has a dim orange glow, this changes to dim red glow at 9pm and then turns off at 10pm (sleep time). Its a really nice relaxing way of ensuring a regular sleep pattern (no longer clock watching etc).
That's a great idea! I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it because I did the opposite for my toddler to let him know when it was okay to get up in the morning (otherwise he'd be up before 5am). I had a dim red as a whole room nightlight that transitioned to dim yellow-green to signal that is was now okay to get up.
I have a Philips Hue bridge plus Hue smart bulb.
The Hue system has an "Automations" function you can configure via their phone app.
So I just created a set of custom automations to change the bulb color on a set daily schedule.
There are lots of other ways of doing this depending on your setup. I think you could probably use IFTTT or Zapier to do the same thing with other brands of smart bulb.
Something similar happened in Australia on a large scale. A soft plastic (single use shopping bag) recycling company called REDcycle which partnered with all the major supermarkets was discovered to be just stockpiling it in warehouses. They'd been doing that for about a decade before they were discovered.
Sooner or later someone is bound to crack the code on plastic recycling — enzymes or gm bacteria or whatever, or even just throwing it all back down empty oil wells. I think separating all this crap in the meantime is perfectly cromulent.
The problem is that we are told to reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.
Instead people are told there is a solution for recycling. They feel like the problem of plastic waste is solved. So they don’t make any efforts to reduce or reuse their waste.
I mean the problem of plastic waste is kinda solved, we just decided that we didn't like the solution, landfills. The best thing you can do for your waste is live somewhere that has well-managed landfills and ensure your trash goes there.
There's not really anything in the way of grass-roots waste reduction that scales. I'm not really offered a choice between product and product-without-plastic. My trash is filled every week with all manner of plastic I didn't ask for. I would be over the moon if I could go to the grocery store and all the plastic was aluminum, paper, and glass— (bonus if I could return the containers) but that decision is made by the bean counters.
I'd throw whatever little weight I had behind legislation to make it so but at least at the state level it would never pass. The single-use plastic bag ban was met with a reaction at the same level as if the people for it killed everyone's dog.
Sorry, what do you think a landfill is? In the UK it's a big area where rubbish is dumped, it's exposed to the elements, microplastics wash and blow away from such sites.
Eventually, when decommissioned the area gets covered with dirt.
How is that kinda solved, do you mean like "I don't live near a landfill so I assume that air full of microplastics isn't the air I'm breathing and that water isn't the water I consume"? That sort of solved? Because beyond that I ain't seeing it.
I think in industry terms you're describing a dump. Landfills have liner systems on the sides and bottom, sumps to collect and dispose of trash juice, gas collectors, they're compacted, netted, covered daily to prevent trash from blowing away, then capped and sealed with clay when full, and (in the US) required to be monitored for 30 years for environmental problems and to ensure the decomposition is going as expected.
The microplastics in your air and water probably aren't coming from landfills, in fact the solution to that is very likely to be more landfills. Those plastics come from coastal countries lacking good waste management who dump plastic into rivers and oceans, and the solution is painfully boring— municipal waste management.
US paramedic: Same here. If you have to run to a CPR to "save" that person, they're already dead. I had this argument with toxic bosses when I was an SRE - "If PagerDuty goes off I expect you to run to your computer, and have configured the escalations accordingly". No, boss, if I'm not running to a CPR, I'm not running to a "errors exceed 2% for XYZ API call".
There's also the adage of "if you get injured, now we're more resource-constrained, because we have an extra patient."
The only area where I could see "moving with a purpose" would be uncontrolled bleeding, and getting to a patient for a tourniquet, starting fluid resuscitation and getting you to a surgeon.
You're a paramedic, so you have more training than I do. I was always taught CPR is a form of life support, and you have around three minutes from the time of arrest to begin CPR to prevent brain damage from hypoxia. So, why would seconds not matter for initiating CPR?
Perhaps this is because, as a paramedic on an ambulance, you're simply never on scene within three minutes? (As compared to a bystander)
So a couple of things, in order: every minute from arrest that no CPR is being done, chances of survival decrease by about 10%. If bystander compression-only CPR has been started, there's about 8 minutes supply of sufficiently oxygenated blood (and while compressions aren't ventilations, they do still encourage some small oxygen exchange). Even when we arrive, gaining advanced airway access or ventilation comes secondary to compressions (our county gives a limited window of 10-15 seconds to pause compressions to intubate, but with Glidescopes it's often possible to intubate through compressions).
I'm curious if people actually use the IR in place of their TV remote as in the promo. For me personally, I think the friction of having to fire up an app first would preclude me from ever using it in earnest.
I used that feature once. Long day on a construction site. Last job was to hook up a PC to a Smart-TV. No remote to be seen. Costumer no longer on site. Jelly 2 to the rescue :-) Felt Swiss Army knifey.
I have the jelly star and I do use this feature. It's useful if the remote is missing and you need to adjust the volume or something.
I aslo used it when I was working away from home and was trying to plug my laptop into a TV HDMI port. I had no remote and couldn't switch the input manually but was able to do it with the phone.
I mapped it to a Colemak layout varient when I first got it. I was constantly discovering key combos that didn't quite work for whatever reason and made tweaks to the layout or the shortcuts in various editors. Forever tying my brain in knots learning and relearning mappings and combos. Then I'd frequently jump on other peoples computers/laptops to help out with small things and have to switch back to the old mode of thinking.
It ended up being a productivity sink rather than a boon. I don't know whether I would have crossed some inflection point if I had persevered, but there was always this fixed cost of tweaking shortcuts when using new software that was more burdensome than with a plain qwerty keyboard.
Maybe I was too ambitious and should have avoided the Colemak-esque layout, but I haven't managed to summon the stamina to give it a fair go again. I still use one half of it for gaming though. It's really sweet for that.