have not read a real book cover to cover in two years.

Ebooks? I’d count those. They’re functionally identical to printed books.

This is why I’m QWERTY on mobile but Colemak on desktop.

One of the things that really amazes me is that mobile — which is a widely-used platform — hasn’t seen a major, widespread, substantial adoption of some new text-entry method optimized for that platform. I mean, I am pretty confident that there are better things you can do with phone hardware for text input than an onscreen QWERTY keyboard. People have tried a lot of variants, but nothing has really become mainstream. I think that something would need to be bundled into iOS and Android as a standard input mechanism for it to reach the necessary threshold.

And yeah, sure, there’s inertia behind the status quo, but for (a) a device where most people will only ever use their own device to a significant degree and (b) where anything that’s software can be swapped out with just software changes, I’m surprised that more fundamental changes haven’t happened.

Like, I’m sure that many people would like the ability to input text without looking at the screen. Or an input mechanism that’s less error-prone — onscreen keyboards on phone screens have pretty small keys.

And while I get “just use QWERTY” made sense when phones were starting out, because a lot of people knew how to touch-type but didn’t know how to input text on a phone, today, a lot of people are using phones before they know how to touch-type. Like, that same level of inertia shouldn’t exist for new users.

One problem with using a nonstandard layout is that it makes you depend on using a keyboard that you control.

I don’t use Dvorak or another non-QWERTY layout, but I do swap Caps Lock and Left Control. I’d say that that’s a preferable layout in general, since I think that virtually all users use Control more than Caps Lock, but if you’re a serious emacs user, you really need the traditional Unix-style layout, because you use Control heavily.

But it also means that if I’m on another system that I haven’t configured, I’m prone to making mistakes, and I’m slower.

I spent a lot longer than I should have doing hunt-and-peck. I mean, I live on computers, and it made sense to learn, but it was a temporary speed hit, and it was always seductively faster to go back to hunt-and-peck. Did various typing programs in school, but it didn’t stick. Years of computer use, and still did it using hunt-and-peck.

IIRC it wasn’t until I was about thirteen and taking a computer science course (which was worse to touch-type in, because it heavily used symbols) that I finally said, “Okay, that does it. I’m investing the time to learn to do this right, because I’m definitely going to come out ahead in the long run touch typing” and hit the point of forcing myself not to hunt-and-peck.

It really is a damned useful skill, and I’m kinda bummed out by the fact that I think that a lot of kids these days are only using Android or iOS devices and often don’t have a physical keyboard. I’d bet that touch typing skills are a lot less prevalent today than they were.

I’d be okay with touch typing going away if we had some successor technology for inputting data into computers that was generally-superior. But even if we had flawless speech recognition, the noise pollution in generates (not to mention the lack of security) means that it probably isn’t going to be what one uses for general text input.

Maybe with some sort of fancy subvocalization pickup gear or something.

I think that at some point, we will ultimately get some kind of brain-computer link. But as of yet, we don’t have anything like that in general use—it’s still a research area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ZI04lF2L0

Hmm. I see what you mean. That’s an awfully blue blue.

My mental image was always tan or green or something.

The heck kind of paint job is that? Blue and gold?

searches

Huh. Apparently that was a legit British North African camouflage scheme. Totally unaware of that.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Matilda-II-actually-painted-blue-during-WWII-If-so-why

Was the Matilda II actually painted blue during WWII? If so, why

sort of….

In the early part of the North African campaign British armour was painted a mix of sand, slate grey and what I’d call sky blue (I think the official spec was silver grey but as a modeller I do find that the same shade of paint from two different modelling companies can be quite different…. online forums are full of modellers arguing about RAL numbers and how modern samples compare to original paint revealed during restoration of real vehicles! )

Its both a disruptive pattern which breaks up the distinctive tank shape and well chosen for blending in with the horizon (parts of the western desert are perfectly flat). The slate grey would fade to a paler blue making the tank appear more blue than sand over time. The same scheme was applied to many other vehicles.

considers

I guess, now that I think about it…most of the movies I’ve seen about the North Africa Campaign were in black and white, so…no way to know. Huh. TIL.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/01/ibm-introduces-new-rainbow-logo-support-lgbtq-community/

IBM introduces new rainbow logo in support of the LGBTQ community

January 9, 2017, 5:00 pm EST

All of the letter openers I’ve used have been relatively blunt.

Huh. I had no idea that one would use an impact driver on Torx screws.

I kind of mentally associate Torx with (delicate) personal electronics and associate impact drivers with big, heavy pieces of hardware with rusty bolts.

neighbors’ dad insists on mowing their lawn at least twice a week, especially when I’m trying to enjoy my hammock.

Noise-cancelling headphones.

I wouldn’t be the best resource for more-elaborate stuff, like if you think that the thing is at serious risk of falling apart, sorry. I don’t do that much plumbing stuff myself; I’ve had to unclog drains.

You can get various types of flexible devices that you push down a drain. There are relatively-simple ones that are just basically a barbed plastic strip or flexible metal thing.

There’s a plumber’s snake, which can have a manual crank (or more-elaborate motorized ones).

In general, I’ve found that those are more-effective than liquid drain cleaners. A hardware store will carry them.

Be careful, if you’ve already poured drain cleaner down the thing, not to burn yourself with the substance.

EDIT: Oh, right. The WP article on the plumber’s snake makes a point that I’d forgotten about — one thing that you can do is use a toilet plunger on a sink, though I think most of us don’t normally think of doing so. I’ve successfully done that in the past too.

“Valerie Jackson”

https://www.lacrossetechnology.com/pages/sensor-finder

EDIT: IIRC, those things use button cells or something, so you might try replacing the battery first.

If I remember, those squared-off things aren’t actually cobblestones. I don’t remember what they’re called, though.

searches

Apparently “setts”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobblestone

Cobblestone is a natural building material based on cobble-sized stones, and is used for pavement roads, streets, and buildings. Setts, also called Belgian blocks, are often referred to as “cobbles”,[1] although a sett is distinct from a cobblestone by being quarried and shaped into a regular form, while cobblestones are naturally occurring rounded forms less uniform in size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)

In late 2025, the Mint halted the production of pennies for circulation, largely due to cost.[8][9]

They’re antiques now! Can’t expend them on such mundane uses!

Apparently the original Easy-Bake Oven was 200W, then dropped to 100W, then moved to some sort of dedicated heating element.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy-Bake_Oven

The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, one above the food tray and one below.

The idea was that the cake would bake more quickly and evenly if heated from both sides. Later models used only one bulb, leveraging convection from better interior heating dynamics to achieve the same results.

In 2011, the last version to use a 100-watt incandescent light bulb was replaced by a new version with a dedicated heating element, named the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven. The replacement was due to the availability of alternatives to the incandescent light bulbs that heated previous versions of the Easy-Bake Oven.[23] It was feared that newer lamp requirements would render all models that used light bulbs as their heating elements obsolete because lamps would no longer be available. (The company never provided initial or replacement bulbs.)[24][25]

investigates

Looks like the heating-element-based variant is still 100W:

https://consumercare.hasbro.com/api/download/E6120_en-us

ELECTRICAL REQUIREMENTS:120 Volts AC only – 60 Hz. 100 Watts

If it was a kitchen outlet, it may have been a 20A (2400 watt) circui

Nah, this was a 15 amp circuit, though that’s a fair point.

Did it show you the combined wattage

It showed something like 2400W, IIRC, but the meter itself is only rated to something like 1900 W (well, VA), so it may not have been a perfectly-accurate reading.

goes back to try each independently, and both together

With both on, and the other load, it shows about 2300W in total load for the circuit.

There’s about 200W of other load on the circuit.

The heater alone — listed as being 800W, if I remember aright – bumps it up by 700W alone.

The kettle bumps it up by 1300W alone. So it might have been ~100W off at that point, but it was correct that it was over what the circuit could do.