smashd

Like others here, I did a lot of learning via a game and via a typing class in high school. But one thing that helped me a lot was doing some imaginary practice away from a keyboard as well. For example, if I was a passenger in a car I would read road signs and imagine typing out the letters. Sometimes I would physically move my fingers, and sometimes I would just tense the finger involved while I imagined reaching to the appropriate key. I practiced this way anywhere I was hearing or reading words and had the spare mental cycles to do it.

I used this technique again when I switched from qwerty to colemak. You'll still need some dedicated "coursework" like a game or program, but this approach lets you fit in some extra practice over the course of a day.

I did the potato hack for a while, which is a mono diet that uses potatoes. I definitely lost weight, but lost muscle too. I might try it again as a 1-2 day "plateau buster" for some excess fat I'm trying to lose.

I also did IF (16:8) as a way to curb snacking. I think both approaches are a really good way to reacquaint yourself with eating to sate hunger rather than eating for stimulation/pleasure.

Ultimately the "experiment" that has played out the best for me has been this old saw: 3 meals a day, 0-2 snacks. No ultra-processed foods and very few processed foods (based on the NOVA classification system). 5+ servings of veggies a day. 1-3 servings of fruit. Keep added/refined sugar intake under 15 grams a day and no sweets, period. I'm very slowly but steadily losing fat, while maintaining plenty of energy for my exercise regimen.

Personally, I was lucky because I was already on a "no-gym" mentality before COVID-19. I use a full-body bodyweight routine twice a week, and once a week I train with a sandbag. I run 6 days a week. I also train with a personal trainer once a week. I'm 38, live in the USA and work from home as a software developer.

Bodyweight training: I use the routine and progressions from startbodyweight.com.

Sandbag training: I started out shouldering a 60 lb sandbag. I now shoulder a 150 lb sandbag and use an 80 lb bag for supplemental exercises (zercher squats, clean and press). Some days just a few sets of shouldering is enough. Making one or two bags is pretty cheap. Ross Enamait has a very good video/ebook you can buy that covers construction, exercise ideas and technique.

Running: I also suffered from shin pain/fatigue from running, but stopped before they progressed to full-blown shin splints. I missed running however, so I took the COVID period as a time to learn how to run barefoot. If you go this route you MUST read a book on proper technique (I read the Ken Bob book) and practice your form a lot before doing anything more than 5-minute runs. That being said, I don't think going barefoot is a requirement for learning how to run pain-free, I think the important bit is spending a bunch of time focused on learning a pain-free running technique and then building up slowly.

I'm still in the volume-building phase so I measure my running by time, not distance. I don't track my speed. I run at an intentionally "easy" pace--I only breathe through my nose and stay focused on keeping my feet happy. Three days are very short "recovery" runs. I add 10 minutes to my total weekly time if/when I felt good after the previous week. I also incorporate a warm-up and post-run routine from https://coachjayjohnson.com/samvidoes/.

Personal trainer: has been very valuable for double-checking technique, fixing minor pains and adding some creative movements that I occasionally incorporate. Shop around for a trainer that can work with your goals.

Don't forget about diet and sleep! My recovery and enthusiasm for these activities are very directly impacted by how well I'm sleeping and eating.

I work for a company that's in a partnership with Ahold Delhaize. While we were doing some in-store tests of our software product with them over a year ago, the topic of the robots came up. As they say in the article, the main purpose really is just to scan for spills and obstructions. That being said, I believe the primary driver is insurance-related. The stores are required (or perhaps given a discount as incentive) by liability insurance providers to regularly check the aisles for fall hazards, and the required sweep frequency is pretty high. In a big enough store you'd probably need to dedicate someone to it full-time--I guess in this case they opted for a googly-eyed robot.

I made the jump from Vim to Emacs about 6 months ago and org-mode was a major reason. It is very much worth it IMO. Evil supports all the Vim commands I was used to, and org-mode has been a revelation. It gave me that one place to put all my tasks, meeting notes, brainstorms, etc, and with useful workflows for keeping it cohesive. It took me an afternoon to get Emacs set up as my daily driver. It took longer (weeks/months) to dial in my org-mode workflow and knowledge to a point where I was satisfied with it, but org-mode was still a net improvement from day one. I continue to discover cool features in Emacs and org-mode on a regular basis. Don't wait, try it!

In the short-term I found that eating a piece of fruit whenever I craved sweets was a good replacement. Over time the fruit started to taste sweeter and sweeter (in a good way), and junk foods started to taste overly sweet. You can taper down the fruit later if you think you're eating too much of it. I think you also need to minimize non-caloric sweeteners for this to work.

Long-term, I took a food I was already interested in eating daily and made the minimal tweaks necessary for me to think of it as dessert. In my case it was oatmeal: adding 0.5T/11g of blackstrap molasses and 0.5T/6g of brown sugar to 0.5c/40g oatmeal (dry weight) makes a complex, subtly-sweet treat. It's ~200 calories total (~50 from molasses & sugar).

If you aren't opposed to eating fish (or don't already eat a lot of fish), you could consider incorporating mackerel or sardines into your diet. It will vary by brand, but mackerel is 230 kcal, 19g fat, 15g protein per tin and sardines (bone-in skin-on) are 150 kcal, 9g fat and 18g protein per tin. Both have a good proportion of omega-3 fats. I find mackerel delicious right out of the tin, sardines need some condiments but still taste pretty good without much work.

It's not limited to AbbVie either, I get Xolair injections for chronic hives and Genentech uses a similar program. I assumed they were making a profit from the insurance-covered portion of the cost and used the program to maximize the number of people taking the drug. That idea in itself is pretty "clever" but if they also get to call the program-covered portion a "charitable contribution" then that is really something special.

Then it is better for the producer, but at the cost of denying the consumer this benefit.

If the screen cast includes audio narration, no. From the the article: "the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory."

The person doing the learning needs to be speaking out loud. Screen casts with narration would be worse in this regard because the viewer wouldn't be able to speak and also listen.

Sorry to hear about your kitten.

One of our cats does the same thing with her paws, mostly on our (glass) storm door or on mirrors. She'll also do it on opaque doors when they're closed and she wants to go in the room they're blocking. Like you mentioned, maybe that behavior indicates a desire to go to the place they're pawing at.

I have experimented with adding other veggies, but it just ends up adding complexity and allows worse choices to sneak in over time. It's easier for me to deal in absolutes in this matter.

Potatoes have a great balance of nutrients and provide satiety in a way that no other food does. I can (and do) eat 2 pounds of potatoes a day, which is about 800 calories. That leaves me with 1,200 calories of "space" (assuming a 2,000-calorie diet) where I can introduce the variety you speak of at dinnertime--2 or more vegetables, a protein (typically legumes or meat) and fruit or another starch. The restriction to potatoes during the day simply blocks out a lot of "bad variety" in the form of convenient junk foods: in my experience, a potato is a better food choice than most of the foods pushed at me while I'm working, running errands, etc.

The 24-hour version of the diet is usually only done for 3 days at a time. It provides sufficient macros during that time period and also provides a better micronutrient balance than most U.S. citizens get from their current diets.

Yes, there are cautions for people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic. I suspect that you can't do the strict "hack" but there could be useful ideas in there, e.g., related discussions on resistant starch.

I personally eased off sugar in iterations, by making short "pushes" where I cut out ALL added sugars and answered any cravings with fruit like bananas, apples or grapes. Each iteration wouldn't last forever, but every time I "cheated" it was with a little less sugar than before. And every time I tried again I lasted a little longer before cheating.

Something that really helped me was getting angry at the companies producing all these foods with added sugar. Seriously, look at the labels, it is EVERYWHERE (at least in the USA). I resolved to not buy these products--why give your money to these companies that can't make a product taste good without resorting to cheap tricks? Why am I paying them to hurt me? I do still buy dark chocolate for dessert a few times a week--I am not opposed to dessert, but that's the only place I think sugar should be.

Ultimately I think everyone has a unique approach (mentally and physically) that works for them, and it's probably an ensemble of smaller strategies accumulated over time that create success in the end. Be willing to experiment (safely), accept temporary failures, learn what works and then repeat all over again.

Potato hacking. I normally follow the "potatoes by day" variant. The process is simple: steam/boil at least a couple pounds of potatoes, then let them cool in the fridge overnight. The next day, you can only eat potatoes (no condiments whatsoever!) until dinnertime, at which point you can eat a normal dinner. Coffee, tea and water are fine during the day as long as they don't have added sugar/cream/etc. Don't forget to cook more potatoes if you're running low! They keep for at least a few days in the fridge.

In my experience the hack is a great way to liberate yourself from false hunger signals and feeling like you "must" eat certain foods. If you're hungry, the potatoes taste good. If you're not, they don't. Resetting all these habits helped me shift the remainder of my diet towards better food choices, to the point where I actively seek out fresh veggies & fruit and dislike packaged or meat-heavy meals.

The hack is not for people that have issues with nightshades or starches of course. potatohack.com has the most comprehensive info on the subject, but it is discussed on other blogs as well.

There's one winner - Waze/Google. They're collecting all sorts of juicy data from this app.

One could argue that Waze is virtually "adding lanes to the road" by finding all these alternate routes. Yet you'll see a lot of articles that claim that adding lanes just encourages more people to drive, which is nice for those people but does not improve congestion issues overall. Will this relationship also hold true with Waze over the long term?

If it does, Waze isn't really adding any long-term benefit to a city's traffic problem. It's playing a (arguably) zero-sum game with convenience, adding it to some people's lives and removing it from others. Waze users gain the convenience of driving in scenarios where they normally wouldn't, but the extra drivers are an inconvenience to residents of affected streets and city planners.

Measuring this effect sounds difficult because of extra distribution of the traffic, although I suppose you could come up with a "Waze factor" to estimate total traffic based solely on numbers from major roads. I'm going to guess that this work will fall on city planners and traffic engineers, not Waze.

I got a p151hm from Malibal with the better matte screen, 16gb of RAM and an i7 processor. I went with SSD in the main slot and had the optical drive swapped for a spinning hard drive.

This thing is a great workstation replacement: I run Linux as the host OS, with Windows 7 in a vmplayer VM for work. The VM gets two cores, 8 GB of ram and both sides stay really snappy. It also runs cool.

It's certainly no macbook though: in comparison the battery life is poor, it's heavier and the fans are a little noisier. None of these things have been an issue at all for my usage patterns: I walk to work with it and haven't noticed the weight, I use it plugged in at home and work, and ambient noise generally outweighs any fan considerations.

I couldn't recommend it more at this point. Malibal's customer service has been great, and I got more hardware for my buck than I could find from anyone else.