1,050 karma · joined April 3, 2020
As a disclaimer, I'm not an expert and am unaware what flaws my analysis may have.
* Get a good chair. I bought a secondhand Herman Miller Mirra chair from an office furniture liquidator.
* Buy a sit/stand desk. I have one and while I rarely use it in the standing configuration, the easy control over the hight of my desk is very useful.
* Go tenkeyless. Full-size keyboards require you to move your arm to reach the mouse and put force you to work in awkward positions. For me, getting a Kinesis Advantage2 LF keyboard was the most important improvement I made. I can never go back to any other kind of keyboard now. I also bought an external tenkey pad that keep on the left side of my keyboard to minimize arm movement.
* Use a trackpad instead of a mouse. This might not apply to everyone, but I tend to grip a mouse too firmly and it causes pain in my fingers and wrist. I tried a Logitec trackman, which is an improvement, but I get pain in my thumb. What works best for me is an Apple Magic trackpad.
* Do you work on on monitor and have it sitting directly in front of you. Make sure it is adjustable. Extra monitors mean you have to turn your head to use them. I use my laptop display as an extra monitor and only put things that I check infrequently and need to interact with little on that display while working.
* This one might be unpopular, but learn the VIM keybindings and use them in your IDE. This will reduce how often you need to use the mouse once you get the hang of it.
Last but not least, work from home. Every employer I have had, big and small, had sorry excuses for ergonomic office equipment. Getting something better always seems to involve some kind of political drama. I'm much happier with my personal equipment that suits my needs.
For me, the most exciting thing to happen to Godot is the Steam Deck. The question of how to run Godot on the Nintendo Switch came up frequently on r/godot. There was no practical avenue for small time devs. I'm excited to see what doors the Steam Deck will open as an alternative handheld gaming device.
* Fallout New Vegas - Explore the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Mojave. Many ways to play the game. Worth playing and re-playing.
* Keberal Space Program - Build your own rockets and try to get them into space. There is so much you can do with this game via mods. Mechjeb is a must as it makes it much easier to get your ship where you want to go.
* Sim City 4 - There's really no substitute for the classic. Cities Skylines is ok and I might try it again on the Deck. It seems to be broken on the switch (gameplay falls apart at 30k pop).
Designed in late 2014, it slightly pre-dates the official Elm Architecture, although thankfully we picked up foldp ideas from early Elm games
The cons are:
- A fair amount of work to make changes to the state side-effect free, but the documentation has a good tutorial on how to approach this.
- It's for ClojureScript, so it's a non-starter for organizations that will not consider anything outside of the mainstream.
I have also used Elm. If I recall correctly, Elm's state management paradigm was inspired by re-frame. I found writing JSON decoders in Elm to be demoralizing and tedious. Since the creator of the language was vehemently opposed to providing any real JSON support I decided to move to ClojureScript.
For work, I like the infrastructure as code space. Bringing order to chaos.
Also, with a good laser printer there is no need to stop printing. It took 10 years to use the toner cartridge in by Brother printer. I'm hoping for 10 more out of the new cartridge I just bought.
As with LTA, he’s pushing the humanitarian applications of airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention delivering food to famine-struck regions.
I would love to see airships return, and there are many possibilities today that didn't exist in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, like supersonic flight for the masses, it doesn't seem likely to ever return to the aviation mainstream.
It is very ergonomic. I no longer get wrist and shoulder pain while typing. I wasn't sure I'd like the keyswitches, but those have grown on me as well. I used to get joint pain in my knuckles due to firmer Gateron Blue switches in another keyboard.
If I could change one thing I would have the shell and keycaps made of PBT instead of ABS, other than that it is by far my favorite keyboard. I can't go back. It's on the expensive side but well worth the money.
The http server used in Chidi is actually fairly new and I was not aware of it. It is part of the spork package. About two months ago I chatted with the creator of Janet about whether or not an http server will be added. He said it would not be added to core, but it looks like he added to spork about a month ago. It looks like it is a pure Janet implementation so there should be no licensing conflicts. I'll have to try it out.
Some rough spots:
- No canonical http client. There are a few attempts at wrapping libcurl but nothing complete and well documented yet. However, the creator of Joy framework for Janet does have an http client library.
- The main http server circlet is MIT licensed, but it is built on top of Mongoose, which is GPL/paid commercial. Something to be aware of if you want to distribute binaries made with this library.
- I have never been successful getting any of the UI or drawing libraries to work.
- Naming of packages is a bit confusing even if you have watched the Good Place and are aware of all of the inside jokes.
I am aware that there are already libraries that cover these to an extent like circlet and halo for http. Joy also features an http client. Maybe it's outside the scope of the project, but I think an http server and client as part of the core would really add to the utility of Janet. It would also answer some of the licensing questions for distribution if these were included directly in Janet core. For example, circlet is MIT, but it is based on mongoose is GPLv2.
Also, seeing Janet on HN a year or so ago was what got me to watch The Good Place, so thanks for that as well.
Then, I bought a 2019 MacBook Air. One with the new keyboard design. It failed in six months and required three separate trips to the Apple store to get fixed. One day I couldn't get anything to load for about an hour. It turns out Apple's binary signing servers were down and that caused my self installed binaries to fail to load. I felt I had graduated from that sort of nannying by then.
Right around the time Big Sur became available my MBA refused to use my external display. It had worked perfectly for a year prior. Some searching revealed many users resolved their display issues after updating their OS. That seemed more like a coincidence but I had unplugged and plugged everything in at least twenty times by this point. I was ready to try anything. I upgraded to Big Sur and my monitor connected again. I always found it odd my system destabilized when that update became available. Probably a coincidence though.
iOS 14 killed the battery life on my iPhone 6s. It's an old phone, but I bought it new in 2019. I can get pretty reasonable battery life if I turn low power mode on, but it turns off automatically when the phone is "sufficiently charged", and I don't receive it to be much better than the battery life I got before iOS 14.
Recently, I have noticed my Magic Trackpad is much more "glitchy". The cursor jumps around the screen, for example. That was really the thing that always held me back from jumping ship. I really like the trackpad. A lot. At lead I did.
That's a long way to say already felt Apple was going backwards, not forwards. Still, Apple is pretty good. I'm afraid to pick something that I might find worse.
You have to give up a lot if you want to leave the major closed ecosystems (Apple, Window, and Android). In a way you are making yourself a digital second class citizen. You can even see the way the major close source ecosystems try to make you a second class citizen on their platform for choosing another platform. MS Office alternatives for a long time, and maybe still are, never quite fully comparable with the genuine article. If you are an Android user and all of your friends use Apple your friends get a crappy experience compared to the experience they have with others using iMessage. You're practically a burden to communicate with.
If you want to have privacy, I believe you must accept becoming a true second class citizen, or go to extreme lengths to maintain you privacy (and maybe still be a second class citizen anyway). I understand everyone is questioning what Apple is doing, but we should be questioning all of the privacy invasion we are forced to accept to be first class citizens in our society.
You must give up some privacy or accept a degree of second class personhood for the following (in the USA).
- Driver's License: Picture, address, physical description (including weight), and signature. It is very impractical to go with out a driver's license in most of the United States.
- Credit Score: This example is actually unreasonable because you can't actually opt out of having a credit score. You are also punished for not participating with a lower credit score.
- Bank Account: You need to provide personal info to open a bank account. It isn't easy to function without one, and you will pay more money to have access to the money you are paid via payroll check.
- Job: You need to provide a lot of information to have a job (legally) in the United States.
And today:
- Internet and all it includes: You must give up your privacy in almost every way. Where you travel, what food you eat, what you like to read, what you like to listen to, who you are friends with. Most of this was happily volunteered in the past, but to enjoy the benefits of things like Google Maps, Netflix, and Spotify, you need to give up your privacy. It is pretty impractical to replace these and things like them with something that is not more of the same.
To even get started:
- Linux PC/Laptop
- Linux smartphone
To be really be privacy conscious:
- CDs, DVDs/BlueRay, ideally purchased with cash, instead of Spotify, Netflix, or their many variants.
- Standalone GPS unit with pre-purchased maps instead of Apple/Google maps.
- No credit cards. Bank cards are also suboptimal from a privacy perspective.
To be really, really privacy conscious:
- No driver's license
- No car
- No phone
- No bank account
- No (legal) job
- No land
- Don't register to vote
- Only buy with cash
With Apple, and with everything else, we all have to decide how much of our privacy we are willing to give up in exchange for first class citizenship in our society. We all have to decide how much friction we are willing to accept in exchange for privacy. The deck is stacked against those who prefer privacy in many ways.
Personally, all things considered I am ready to move on form Apple and accept more friction. I might even go as far as giving up Spotify and Google Maps for the alternatives I've mentioned. I don't actually have a credit card so I'm already a second class citizen of the consumer finance world, but that might have to change in the future. I think that's about as far as I feel I can go.
If you are interested in the history of airship travel, and its rise and fall, I highly recommend The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee. It's a short book about an unlikely union of ex Navy airshipmen and evangelical Christians chasing the impossible dream of brining airship travel back in an era where the world had moved on from airship travel.
I think there were a lot of clues along the way that people would embrace the current world of smartphone cameras, but I don't think it was obvious at the time. The "selfie" has been around for ever. My first cell phone had a mirror on the front so you could properly compose your own selfie. MySpace (and others) really popularized sharing these images. Instagram found a niche popularizing the hyperreality of the digitally edited selfie.