laurieg

Really nice! I currently use ActivityWatch for tracking tasks on PC.

Some things I would like to be able to do with software like this:

- Identify the 'spark' of a distraction. For example, opening my email inbox to read a specific email also shows me many unrelated emails. These can easily be the cause of a 5-15 minute distraction. This information is often actionable. I installed browser plugins to hide my youtube suggested videos and my distractions went down. I made sure to close all unused windows to avoid catching a glimpse of unrelated work.

- Identify repeated tasks, and the cadence of those tasks. Do I manually make an invoice once a week for a particular edge case? Is the process basically identical every time. Could this be automated?

- How was I feeling before, during and after a task. (This is a very broad and intentionally not well-defined question, but I think it has the most promise for improving procrastination and task initiation).

It is instantly awkward. If you are there with one other person and you start talking, they assume you are talking to them.

I'm a huge smart speaker user. I have one in every room. But as soon as guests come over I stop using them. I would never use Siri etc in public.

Going from voice input to silent voice input is a huge step forward for UX.

There's something comforting about conversations with strangers. It gives me a feeling that we are all in this together.

One subtle effect of living as a visible minority is people assume you can't speak the local language. Even in minute everyday moments like stepping into a crowded elevator people avoid saying a few words. No one means any harm but it can feel surprisingly isolating. Almost like everyone else is in some grand linguistic conspiracy against you.

Like with all home automation, you should use it to solve problems you have, not problems you want to have.

Here are some ways I use security cameras:

Check if my colleagues are in the office or not (and if they are in the middle of a live recording). Check on my plants while I'm away. Check if there is a free parking space. Check if I left something at home or in the office.

I'm not really thinking about crime, even though they are called 'security cameras'.

The National Museum of Computing (next to but completely separate from Bletchly Park) is fantastic.

Definitely book a tour if you go. Speaking to the volunteers about how they used the machines on display is a fantastic way to experience part of the living history of computing.

> I ran a survey people said would love to pay 5$ a month but no one converted when I added premium modal.

"Hey mom, what do you think of my app?" "That's a lovely app dear. I'd definitely pay $5 for it"

You have learnt a valuable lesson. People will say one thing and do something else. Users actually paying you money is great, not only because you get money but because you get strong information that what you have made is valuable to them. (The above example is drawing on the book The Mom Test. I definitely recommend you read it)

Most engineers build software backwards. They start with a solution and go looking for a problem. They make the fastest, shiniest, neatest solution to a problem no one actually has. (How do I know? It's exactly what I did with my first startup!)

Imagine a dating app. It takes 30 seconds to open. The pictures only show up in black and white. The app crashes half the time you try to send a message. But it always gets you a date on a Friday night. It would be the most popular dating app in the world.

Try to find a problem that is so important and valuable to people that they will pay for your app even if it is slow, buggy, ugly and broken.

It's similar to the blind spot in your visual field. Your brain fills in the blind spot with what it expects to be there.

With the clock's second hand it's filling in temporally rather than spatially. Your brain goes back in time to fill in where it expects the hand to be

For the technical side of things, use ink script. There's an editor, plugins and it's a mature project.

For the creative side I would recommend trying out all kinds of things. Should your player be able to get stuck/into a dead end? Will players play once or many times. Can you "win" your game or is it more of a narrative? How do you want the player to feel!

For some more specific ideas, think about how your game branches. Branching and decisions in games are far trickier than they might appear. Too subtle and the player misses the choice entirely. Too in your face and they become boring ("kill the baby" vs "save the baby", gee I wonder which one takes me down the evil path)

Also, merely asking a question or giving a choice can influence the player. If you ask "who is the killer?" and give a list of suspects, one of them must have done it, even if the player never considered it. The question also assumes the player knows there was a murder and gives that away if they hadn't worked it out yet.

Short, pronounceable words are scarce. If you want a 4-6 character project name Japanese words often fit the bill. Japanese culture is also very well exported.

> If I were to play you a C major triad on the piano (C E G) then you'd easily be able to pick out those individual notes

Unfortunately, that is exactly the thing I cannot do. I play the piano but I can't pick out multiple notes. From a simultaneous sound. To me it's like witchcraft. Same with singing. I find it very hard to tell if a recording is one person singing or two people singing in harmony.

What's the gold standard for learning relative pitch?

Related, how can you learn to hear multiple notes at the same time? It blows my mind that people can hear a piano chord and pick out individual notes.

I highly recommend the book "The Mom Test" for tips on how to speak to customers and what kind of information you can get.

Just a few of the things I learnt from that book:

Don't ask if people would use your product. It's too hypothetical and people are too nice. "Sure, I'd probably use it. Looks useful. Keep working on it!". Then you never hear from them again. If you really think they'd be interested, ask for money.

Don't ask about people's problems in an abstract way. "Tell me about your business problems" is just too vague and wishy-washy. Ask about more specific things. Example: "You're having issues with double booking? Tell me about the last time it happened." Asking about the most recent time something happened is a great way to get concrete details.

Ask people how they have solved the problems or tried to solve the problem they talk about. "It was a major issue so we hired an extra member of staff to confirm all the stock lists". (Great, they're willing to spend real money on fixing this). "I searched around and tried out ABCSoft and XYZSoft but they were designed for a different kind of business and didn't really solve it for us" (pretty good, they're putting effort into finding solutions). "Oh, well, it's always been a big issue but we haven't tried to solve it yet" (Uh-oh, it's probably not really a big problem for them. It's not painful enough for them to try to solve).

Unfortunately, a simple normalization of kanji --> hiragana throws away pronunciation information.

I love catching these little translation flubs. Japanese movie and TV subtitles seem to have quite a few, probably because of the aforementioned time pressure. For example, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and "crown" had been mistranslated as "clown".

Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.

Great resource, thanks for sharing.

I thought the written text was very high quality and didn't show many of the usual tells of a non-native writer. Could you share some details of how you used AI tools to help write it?

I remember being given a large K'nex construction set as a toy at Christmas. I can still feel the visceral excitement of opening it up and looking at all the pieces, imagine what kind of things I'd build. I think the ferris wheel was my favorite.

A few years ago I was a bit down abd feeling like I'd never experience that kind of excitement and joy again. I've come to realize that now I'm older it's my job to create that same joy in others.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day and can find a way to create just a little moment of joy for someone else. Merry Christmas!

I still remember phone numbers from radio ads I heard as a kid. I don't have any phone number memorized apart from my own

The framing of something can totally affect how you feel about it.

If I set a goal to run 5km everyday and one day I run 4km I feel like I've failed. Somehow not meeting the goal invalidates any positive feelings of running the 4km.

I think a lot of side projects have an implicit, unstated goal of "finishing" or "releasing". This is setting yourself up for the same trap as the runner.

It is not referred to as a change in pitch, usually people call it intonation or accent, but the actual change in sounds is a change in pitch.

The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.

The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.

My favourite board game rulebook is Pictomania. It starts by giving a very high level view of what the whole game looks like. It's a single page in the rulebook and doesn't get bogged down in details.

Then, it explains the small details of the scoring system. Since you know how the whole game basically works you can mentally hang the smaller rules onto the overall game system.

It reminds me of Jeremy Howards Fast AI course. He teaches "the whole game" with some of the details skipped. Then, he adds details one by one so you never get lost. The analogy often used is teaching sports to children. You start with a simplified version of the sport (For soccer: kick the ball into the other goal) and then you add extra rules (out of bounds, off-side, penalties etc) when they come up.

Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.

As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.

One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.

Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.

I would temper your expectations. Singing lessons will improve your singing faster than practicing alone but it still may take years and years to develop.

I had always enjoyed singing and I started singing and piano lessons at the same time. With consistent practice you can improve at the piano, learn more complex pieces and see your progress. With singing the process is a lot more mysterious. You probably don't understand the things that are going on inside your body very well and the teacher can't just say "Try putting your first finger on this key and your middle finger on this key".

After three years I could play reasonably complicated pop songs on the piano and read chords. I'm still a few steps the average "someone who likes to sing level".

I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.

English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.

Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.

I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.

15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".

You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.

There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.

It's worth giving Aisle a try. It's from Sam Barlow (creator of Her Story).

You only have one command, and then the story "ends". It's an interesting way to tell a narrative. You can feel the DNA of Her Story in there.

Is you are on a tourist visa then you cannot work. Actively working as a nomad ok a tourist visa waiver is breaking the law.

Of course, nomads often did come and with in this status. They would exist in a grey area, arguing their with was more incidental in nature and bit the reason to be in Japan (just like replying to a few with emails while in holiday).

The nomad visa is essentially formalizing this grey area. As other commentors have mentioned, it's not a particularly useful status as you don't get a residence card and you can enroll in national health insurance too. You'll also find it harder to find apartments to rent too

He's how my microwave oven works

Rotate knob to select power oven or microwave

Press in knob to select.

Rotate knob to select preheat or not.

press in knob to select

Rotate knob to select temperature.

Press in knob.

Rotate knob to select one tray or two

Press in knob to start.

BONUS: the knob's encoder isn't great so if you spin it too fast is goes backwards.

A few more buttons would've made this thing so much easier to use and the oven itself is actually quite good.

I spent 3 years taking voice lessons with a few different teachers and I was really surprised just how little progress I made, even with regular practice. I'm very curious about your experience learning to sing. How long did it take you? What was your starting point?

I found the whole thing to be a real head scratcher, to the point that I find it hard to imagine learning to sing is even possible (obviously it is, but what is actually going on in the process?).

The characters are 守破離, they basically mean "follow" the rules, "break" the rules and "leave" the rules behind.