nobody_nothing

This is exactly the type of uncommon solution I was seeking. Thank you so much!

Got it. I think the trouble is our building is only 5 units, 2 of which are occupied by elderly people who likely don’t care. So feels unlikely that Spectrum / AT&T would undergo construction for just 3 new subscribers. (We’re surrounded by much larger apartment buildings, which is probably why they’re wired and we aren’t). Perhaps worth checking on though.

Re: fixed wireless, would that typically offer higher speeds than my current 5G home internet? Verizon advertises my plan as 25-75Mbps upload, but I never see that. I worry it’d be the same with any over the air service, but I haven’t really explored fixed wireless.

Direct link to the interview: https://youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8

(I was locked out of the embedded player on suspicion of being a bot)

Full disclosure I'm not a production designer, but have worked in the art department on some smaller film productions.

These individual parts are likely used to build larger props that a production can't otherwise acquire. For example, assembling a cyberpunk plane interior, or the control panel in a time machine.

They can also be scattered around a set where those individual parts would belong (like a mechanic's studio) to make the space feel real and lived-in.

Lastly, they can be used for close-up shots (with just a little bit of production design built up around them). This is a lot cheaper than renting an entire interior.

For those on Mac who want to configure these (or any web page) as your actual screensaver, you can use WebViewScreenSaver[0].

[0]: https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

I recently threw together a simple website for this purpose – love those YouTube playlists, but having YT open during my work sessions was hurting my overall productivity.

https://radio.writing.fm

This is one of the best – maybe the best – videos I've seen on effective writing. I rewatch it every couple months.

Quick idea: what might be nice instead of (or in addition to) an After Effects animation would be some interactive HTML sliders and buttons. When a website visitor slides them, they can see what effects the settings would have on their monitor -- potentially even applied to the website itself. Just a thought!

This is great!

I wrote Margin[1] for similar reasons. But because I wanted to be able to incorporate notes as well as to-dos, absolutely anything can go between two square brackets in Margin:

[ ] denotes a to-do item

[x] denotes item marked as done

[anything] denotes an annotation of type "anything"

At first blush, it would appear Margin and [x]it! are compatible, with some very minor differences. Feel free to draw inspo from the Margin spec, and hit me up if you want to combine / collab.

[1] https://margin.love

Honestly, I can see validity in both your comment and the parent comment that you're arguing against. But I'll press you a little, if only to understand your point better:

> Microsoft's share of the desktop market at the time was very close to unity.

> Apple's share of the smartphone market is around... 55% within the US.

At what percentage of the market should Apple be required to loosen their grip over their platform / open up their marketplace? Is there a specific number they could reach where you'd feel comfortable placing more restrictions on these practices?

> People will tell me to click that “unsubscribe” button. I will and swear I have before.

Regarding this point, I've had this suspicion of so many subscriptions – to the point where I was questioning my own memory/sanity on the regular. I finally set up a label in my Gmail inbox called "Already Unsubscribed!". Every time I unsubscribe to a newsletter, I add a Gmail filter that marks anything from that sender with the "Already Unsubscribed" label. This way I know if I'm just misremembering unsubscribing, or if I'm actually being spammed.

Incidentally, I just checked that label after about a year of doing this. As it turns out, there's only one company that's ever continued to email me after my unsubscribe request. So I guess my memory (or sanity) has been failing me all this time.

(And no, the company is not Wikimedia) :P

Just want to flag that, in addition to all this fun and exciting new tech for disabilities, we really do just need better basics.

As the partner of a wheelchair user, these exoskeletons are a great toy to have on the horizon – but the promise of this has been around for a long time, and while the hope of a better future is exciting, we need change on a much quicker time scale than this. (Not saying people shouldn't be working on this – it's rad that they are).

On a day-to-day level, my partner would much more benefit from:

- A better wheelchair (this will mean something different for every body – for them, someone who uses a wheelchair for chronic pain, an exoskeleton wouldn't even help – much more useful would be a wheelchair where every bump of pavement doesn't rattle your whole body).

- More accessible shops and public spaces. We don't really get to go out much – most often blockades include cracked sidewalks, friend's houses that require a step (or stairs), and inaccessible shops.

- Better safety nets for those with disabilities (it's VERY expensive to be disabled in America – consider how much more these exoskeletons will cost than already expensive wheelchairs).

tl;dr These technologies are exciting and deserve attention and energy – just keep in mind that the notion that these emerging technologies will someday wipe out all of wheelchair users' problems in one fell swoop is both false and does nothing for the many millions prevented from participating in society right now. We need better access today.

> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art.

I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings).

For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves.

The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.

This single best book on storytelling that I've ever read is 'Invisible Ink' by Brian McDonald [1].

Of all the concepts in my comment above, the one it covers most in-depth is "theme" (the book calls it "armature," but same idea).

The main argument of the book is that storytelling is an evolved survival mechanism, and that every great story conveys a single piece of survival information (think the morals of Aesop's fables).

Every other technique discussed in the book is built atop that fundamental truth, and exists to help the storyteller prove that piece of survival information.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Ink-Practical-Building-Reso...

I've been studying storytelling for about five years, as a way to improve my writing. Here's what I've learned so far.

The simplest unit of storytelling consists of...

  (a) A character who attempts to achieve a specific thing.
  (b) A conflict standing in the way of that attempt.
  (c) A conclusion to that conflict.

Together, these three things form a Simple Dramatic Unit. For example:

  (a) Sally tries to swim back to shore.
  (b) But two shark fins emerge from the water.
  (c) She gets pulled under.

Do you notice how, even though there's nothing particularly inventive or original about the above scene, you're leaning in a little? Wondering what happens next? That's the power of the Simple Dramatic Unit.

Technically the above is a complete story, but it doesn't feel totally resolved because it doesn't have much of a punchline. We want to know what happens to Sally, and we even hope for a happy ending -- how might she get out of this situation?

As a storyteller, you continue to string together these Simple Dramatic Units til you reach the punchline of your story (also known as the "resolution").

Once you master the Simple Dramatic Unit, and tying multiple Dramatic Units together, there are numerous additional variables you can weave into your stories to improve your storytelling:

  - Stakes (Sally is a mother of two children, both on the beach that day.)
  - Strong Characters (Sally is a risk-taker who feels a strong command over nature. Not once in her life has she ever feared the elements.)
  - Theme ("Those who don't fear nature are all the more at its mercy.")
  - Tone (Her children watch the shark attack from the shore with keen interest, but without alarm.)
  - Style ("The beach was placid that day, the smell of salt rendered sweet in the humid air....")
  - Originality (The shark fins aren't grey, but a fluorescent pink.)
  - Etc, etc.

But all those things are secondary to the Simple Dramatic Unit. Master that first. It will serve as a very solid foundation for any type of story you want to tell.

Wow, thank you for this detailed feedback! Some of this was on my list, but most of it wasn't even on my radar.

I've been planning to make it auto-select just the time for easy copying, but auto-copy may be better. I'm always somewhat hesitant to hijack the user's clipboard (what if they had some text copied that they needed?), but maybe it's expected enough these days that users wouldn't mind.

Thanks! Never heard of timefhuman, but now I'll look into it.

To parse human-written dates, time.lol currently uses a combination of the JavaScript libraries Day.js [1] and Sugar [2].

If Day.js can't determine a valid date from the given input, then Sugar is invoked to try even harder :) Seems to work well so far, but indeed it falls short with complex input (e.g. "The Tuesday after July 4th").

[1] https://day.js.org [2] https://sugarjs.com

As someone who maintains an eCommerce WordPress site, I find writing code that deals with datetimes to be extremely onerous.

I’m always bopping between various conversion sites to debug my outputs. I wanted a simple, uncluttered page where I could do all my conversions in one place. I’m hoping https://time.lol becomes that spot.

I'd appreciate any feedback you have to offer!

Planned improvements:

- Make copying outputted dates easier

- Add a timezone picker for the input

- Add an output row that allows you to see the date in any timezone you wish

- Make the design more legible / aesthetically pleasing

> Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it?

Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online?

It seems like one solution to this problem would be a document that stores an editable copy locally and a revision hash in its metadata, then decides whether to serve up the local or cloud copy depending on whether the user is connected to the internet.

Sure, this could cause conflicts between online / cloud files if someone else edits the file at the same time as you, but that's true of any cloud sync service like iOS Notes.

I guess in retrospect I'm just describing Dropbox which, while it's more a container for standard files than a file format in itself, has largely the same effect.

This is madness! I love it. I'd thoroughly enjoy an addition to the demo where you play back audio the mouse has captured – I think many would be interested to hear what kind of fidelity gets captured.

Agreed. Often times it's easier for me when the music doesn't have lyrics (although if I've listened to it enough times, even that stops mattering).

Lately my flow music is Xerrox, Vol. 4 by alva noto[1].

[1] https://album.link/s/5czmSKJDla5GcXs6IMOLAc

Added[1]! Thank you.

[1] https://github.com/gamburg/margin/commit/d9abf003f665627d392...

Exactly! The idea here is to formalize the already intuitive way many of us use plain text. Once the syntax is formalized, it can be utilized by applications. This way your data remains in a portable, non-proprietary format that can be reliably parsed - whether you choose to use notepad.exe or a Margin-specific application, you already have everything you need.

Good question. I do think this would be achievable through annotations if an application were determined to do it. Annotations are sort of the catch-all for added functionality.

The philosophical question is an interesting one. I think for the most part, if items are meaningfully related, the Margin philosophy would probably be to store them within the same document parent (or file).

Beautiful site. And I agree, very similar philosophy to Margin. Just requested access, excited to give it a try.

Important question. Still thinking through this: https://github.com/gamburg/margin/issues/2

Love this idea! Thanks for adding it to the GitHub.

Very elegant way to encourage adoption of the language! This is now on the list[1], thanks.

[1] https://github.com/gamburg/margin/issues/4

Thanks! This is useful.

Org mode looks great, thanks for calling my attention to it. For anyone looking for a brief introduction, they have a compact guide[1] on their site that took me a minute to find.

It looks great for coders who are ready to learn new syntax. Though what I'd really like to avoid with Margin is anything that makes the language more complex than it needs to be.

For example, org mode defines headlines as:

    The headlines in Org start with one or more stars, on the left margin. For example:
    * Top level headline
    ** Second level
    *** Third level

With Margin, there's no concept of a "headline." For the thinker, the headline could be represented by any level of the plain text hierarchical tree. And the thinker would then be free to choose (or conform to) any Margin-based app that corresponds with their model. In other words, it works best however you want to use it.

[1] https://orgmode.org/guide/