Tools dull, and people neglect to sharpen them. Filters clog, and people neglect to clean them. Oil needs to be changed, guitar strings lose their brightness, lightbulbs flicker and die, rooftops gather moss. We live in a world where our possessions require maintenance, and the only solution to that is to have fewer possessions. Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)

The iPhone that the author mentions gives many tools to silence notifications from apps. The real problem is the social expectation that we are always paying attention, always ready to respond. I had a phone free week last year and now frequently will leave my phone in another room on silent for hours at a time unintentionally. It irritates my friends and my wife when I don't respond to their texts immediately. And it's frustrating that these features are being foisted on us more and more. But ultimately all things require maintenance, including relationships, and ultimately we set the standard of how much we have to give and are willing to put up with.

As far as the watch goes, personally I wear a Casio Tough Solar w/ Waveceptor because in theory they should go decades without needing a battery change or needing me to set the time, unless I travel. The WVA-M640 is reasonably stylish, and G-Shocks are virtually indestructible. As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.

Science is empirical knowledge and processes which can be transferred, art is gut feeling and subconscious knowledge applied automatically, which can’t be transferred.

Roughly I think this corresponds to how our minds perform cognitive offloading of repeated tasks. New tasks that require instruction following occupy our attention, but the more we do them, the more our minds wire the behavior into our “muscle memory”. Practitioners of the arts (or even the art of science, one might say) have a built a neural network that offloads tasks so that higher cognitive functions can focus on applying those tasks in expert ways.

It’s sort of like when we start out our brains have to bitbang all tasks (muscle movement, speech, etc.) but over time our brains develop their own TCP offloading, or UART peripherals. And you can’t just download a TCP offloading engine, it has to be built into the silicon. Hence why “expert knowledge” isn’t transmissible.

Which is why spaced repetition is an effective learning method. You’re hacking your brain to wire facts into the hardware.

If you're on Android, Firefox supports many full desktop extensions, including uBlock Origin.

My home router was an old Thinkpad for a while, but then I switched over to a slightly newer Dell Optiplex that my work was throwing out. The plus side of that is that the i7 is total overkill for routing so I can also have my "router" run some VMs for network services and cut down on the number of boxen in my homelab rack.

Alpine is a great distro for this.

"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

The way fossil fuels have been exploited has been categorically evil, and from that perspective I think the "industry" is going to be seen as a net negative. The negative externalities are in line with the waste generated by the development of nuclear weapons (think Hanford) on an even grander scale. But it would have been impossible for us to reach a point where it was possible to produce solar cells, hydro, and wind energy without the incredible energy density of petroleum fuels. The fuel for the industrial revolution that gave us our modern livelihoods. Petroleum-derived fertilizers are what enable the global population that we have today, so in a very real sense you and I would not exist without the development of fossil fuels on a grand scale. Whether or not that is a benefit or a deficit to mankind will probably be left to the historians.

Lest anyone think I condone the irreparable damage done to the planet by the industrialization enabled by reckless exploitation of petroleum, I think the whole thing is shameful, and I feel a bit of shame every time I have to drive my gasoline-powered car to the store. But I think there was a responsible way to harvest and benefit from that natural resource and like most natural resources, human greed found a way to make the worst of it.

https://github.com/Fwirt/textadept-minimap

Textadept's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Scintilla allows for a lot of features that are nigh-impossible in the likes of Vim and Emacs due to their reliance on terminal behavior. However, Scintilla is not terribly well optimized and does not support GPU rendering, meaning that while there is very little bloat, Textadept can still chug in some edge cases. The most notable instance right now is large files with no line breaks (e.g. minified js libraries). Other Scintilla-based editors also suffer from this to varying degrees, although Notepad++ has some performance optimizations that seem to mostly mitigate it. Notepad++ is also Windows only and not as easily extensible.

The documentation for Scintillua also gets pulled into Textadept's API documentation as a dependency, so the syntax is also explained there. It's basically a bridge between Scintilla's native lexing and LPeg.

The great thing about Textadept’s extensibility (and use of Lua specifically) is that it’s easy to pull in other Lua modules to add functionality. I don’t think it would be much work to modify the scratch file extension to prompt you for an encryption key on startup and then run the scratch files through libsodium (via luasodium) if you want to have your cake (scratch files) and eat it (some cursory level of security).

Mitchell is to be commended for maintaining the editor solo for so many years and keeping the LOC count really low (2000 lines of C, 4000 lines of Lua). If you’re willing to read the source it’s really easy to wrap your head around the whole thing, which can’t be said for Emacs or Vim. When I find the time I’ll finish my vi mode…

RockAuto is fantastic and usually has the best prices by a huge margin, but if you're not careful you'll kill any savings with shipping costs.

"This measure is based on NHK’s mission as an international public service media to provide essential information to Japanese nationals residing in or traveling in the region."

Broadcasting in English or Arabic isn't going to be of much use to Japanese nationals.

My guess is that it’s a function of products either being shoplifted or just “wandering off” when a customer takes an item and then returns it to the wrong location. Recently I thought Walmart was out of an item I wanted, but I scoured the shelves and found one unit left sitting 3 shelves down and 4 feet away. I doubt a picker would have gone to the same lentils to locate it. In the case of many perishables the store is actually obligated to discard these items because you can’t tell how long that package of ham has been sitting in the sporting goods aisle.

One particularly egregious case recently was when an auto parts store said they had an item in stock that they keep behind the counter. To their credit, they called me and told me they could get the part from a neighboring store by the next day. Still faster than I would have received it from Amazon.