tuxlifan

Anecdotal, about 15 years ago I had good success with using USA site ASINs on a European site but about 5 years ago I only got "not found" results so I stopped trying and do the "try typing in the name and hope for the best"-dance if I don't skip amazon directly and search on meta-portals instead (in particular for IT devices geizhals.eu has a very extensive filter system so it's easier to also search for alternatives in one go). I don't remember which categories the items belonged to though or if there might have been some "market region" restrictions/scarcities placed by the sellers.

And weirdly, if there were no trees around [it], it wouldn't even be [called] a forest.

I would love to hear from a botanist/banana-related person what a bunch of banana plants are called. Are there similar differing names as for groups of various animals?

I always assumed the check digit was included as safeguard for barcode scanning.

Upon a quick reading of the Wikipedia article on EAN-13 it appears that there is some parity to determine the direction of the scan (i.e. upside-down or upright) but the numbers are encoded as-is without any further error correction contrary to e.g. QR codes.

Alas, for a definitive answer on the reasoning one might have to buy the relevant ISO standard, if it is even described there.

Given that human adults are said to be able to keep 5-9 items in working memory, I would think it prudent to include a check digit for the ISBN when one might be required to manually enter them into search masks, forms, etc. and if only hearing it (e.g. over the phone) might not benefit from the grouping they visually gain from the interspersed dashes.

On the topic of correctly copying (manually):

whenever I have to be certain to correctly transcribe a long important number or string I would at the end cover up both the source and the transcription, then reveal one character from the end, then the second to last on e.g. the source, verify that the last and the second to last on the transcription matches (in that order!), then uncover the next 2 on the transcription, verify against the source, continue with the source and so on. This helps immensely to discover transposed digits (especially since my mother tongue is German where we swap the tens and ones while speaking (or thinking with the inner voice) a 2-digit number) and not glance over well known digit groups such as zip code or special dates, etc.

This is amazing, fun and educational in one package! Thank you! Sorry this post got very long ;-)

Having difficulty settings like

* tourist

  main streets / squares, maybe some (renowned - although that might take some additional Wikipedia/Wikidata data sources :-))
  landmarks if those can easily enough be extracted from OSM data

  easter egg mode for s/Paris/your favourite City with underground transportation/: find a specific metro station :-) (any entrance would count)

  "tourist" + smaller streets + any street really close to the circle center (15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by car
  -- oh, you'll just have to add flooding algorithm :-) ^^) 

  "resident" + smaller streets everywhere but with greater probability closer to the circle center + footpaths
  (although with them probably lacking proper names most of the time that could be hard - but you could include
  e.g. streets from pedestrian zones)

  everything ^^

And then there could be (best optional) penalty modes, too:

* "resident"+:

  if you pin a street that is more or less orthogonal to the target street
  (say their mean directions intersect at more than 45 degrees ; and the pin is sufficiently
  far away (30m / 10% of map height / half a block?) from their intersection (if any exists)
  to rule out precision errors) you get only 1/2 the points

  if you pin a street the wrong direction off a main street (and the target street
  does not cross the main street) you get only 2/3 the points
  (i.e. main streets intersecting the plane and you picked the wrong "half")

  "tourist":

  the same but for cities with rivers where you picked the wrong bank

I also got very lucky with the streets, so got 330/500 on my first try. One was certainly also due to a square that is also used (at some specific times) for car traffic.

As an interesting effect, I got the first street wrong by some meters (and orientation :-\) and the 5th street was the same street again. At first I was a bit puzzled, and then got full marks for that one :-) I saw that you got the report of repeating streets already in some other comment already but that experience led me to another idea:

It would be a great learning aid to (optionally) go through the (widely?) missed streets again after the 5 rounds.

And if we could even re-claim some (small) amount of points for getting them right the second time that would certainly help our brains etch in the correct position even more :-)

A small aside: I found it pleasantly devious that the circle restricts the scrolling at higher zoom levels! Just in the cases where the target street is very close to the border it might be nice to relax it a bit though...

And while trying it out on Desktop I discovered a possible bug:

While choosing the location, when pressing the "Zoom In" button 2-4 times suddenly street names were displayed again! Is this intentional so people can easier find their starting point? Firefox 98.0 on Linux

My last point:

Would it be possible to export a map view to print it out in good quality for offline reconnaissance / tinkering?

TIL: nocp is so much shorter than nocompatible :-)

I just really really wish my minimal comfortable setup would not need to include

set mouse=

on all "newer" machines/vim versions :-\

On my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard I have a mapping of (left)space+q to produce Esc which for this combo I hit comfortably with my left hand thumb + ring finger.

On other keyboards I find fishing for the Esc key with the left ring or sometimes even middle finger good enough since it's so prominently singled out on the top left corner on all the keyboards I had yet to use, but it breaks the flow a bit more.

It probably helps that I'm not typing in proper form for the 10-finger system but only some hodgepodge approximation of it...

I'm guessing you want

:%s/^pick/s/

to replace "pick" at the start of line with "s" on all lines? If you execute it once in vim you can recall it later with just typing

:%↑

and confirm with Enter.

As for the top of the file:

gg

I use the mnemonic "go go line" (as in Inspector Gadget's "go go gadget") and since you can prefix it with a line number (e.g. 4gg to go to line number 4), leaving it out gets me as close to line number nothing^Wzero as possible, i.e. line 1.

HTH :)

PS: the % says "on all lines" your trailing "/g" would make it match&replace "pick" multiple times on the (current, since % is missing) line

PPS: As an aside, I use "vim somefile +N" all the time to open somefile at line number N;

especially when there's an error message in the form "error at somefile:N" by typing vim, then double-click-middle-click copy&pasting "somefile:N", Ctrl-E to jump to the end and replacing ":" with " +". I really should write a shell function for that...

EDIT: formatting

I have no idea about the odds and didn't bother to look up the timeline but I can give you some anecdata and tell you exactly why I might have theoretically been the 4th lurker-become-excited-commenter for this post, were I to read this first on the computer instead of on my phone (and nearer real time than on a following weekend) and less hesitant to post comments in general:

I find json to be a PITA to parse as a human when looking at getting a bigger picture or keys/values that are strewn away from each other and not just e.g. two values next to each other. Anytime I have to do something with it, I have to search through my history to dig out some jq invocation and then try to tweak it correctly to do what the (most of the time similar but also different enough) task at hand needs. My mind sadly just seems to be unable to sufficiently grok jq.

So when I read here about jless I was stoked and the excitement was strong enough to want to dig out my login credentials and make a comment along the lines of "This is AWESOME! Thank you so much for making life easier!". In the end, when I logged in on the computer and had reflected more, I opted to upvote a comment instead and then saw this thread; so thank you, I guess, for providing me an opportunity or excuse to express my enthusiasm in addition to that.

I consider my discovery of jless (which sadly I was apparently not able to make on my own while searching the internet for json tools previously - so yay for lurking on HN :-) - but it might also partly be the relative (to my predicament) youth of the tool) of similar importance to me as macros in vim or back in the days using bluefish for editing HTML as they all save my time being spent on doing tooling to do things and instead allow it to being spent on doing things directly. (BTW thanks to all these devs!)

Just my 2 cents :-) (and I'm not particularly interested in starting or partaking in any further discussion)

- Infinite scroll allows you to find information faster, even from not so notable sources

That is the opposite of my experience. I used to be able to skip, say, 5 or 8 pages of results to ignore the automated botsites and mainstream nonsense on some searches and get less popular but in some contexts more helpful results. Now I'm stuck with torturing my mouse wheel or use some specialist search engine like https://millionshort.com/. Especially since "-" and "+" don't seem to work reliably anymore.

- Bangs allow for a streamlined, faster search experience if you use certain services massively.

Yes! I love !wa for time zone conversions that understand most appointments copied from somewhere

For opening hours I now often use http://openpoimap.org/

It can be a challenge sometimes to find the right category to activate to get the markers but when using the search box it usually tells you in brackets which category to switch on for more information and it even centers the map for you.

YM(and expectation)MV, obviously.

I thought that would be a big problem for me, too, being used to inverted-L shaped enter keys basically my whole computer life.

After a few days I stopped worrying because the UHK enter key is actually easier to reach for my right pinky finger than the one on my previous MS Natural keyboard was. OTOH the "\|" key above the enter key I'm still mistyping occasionally.

the wire in between the two pieces limits one of my use cases

curious about your use case. Would 3 meters of cable help?

https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/faq

[...] text-based config! (Especially since one could then put it under version control.)

At least for the VCS part: The config is saved in ~/.config/uhk-agent in a json file (don't know if the file name there changes though) and there are Export and Import options in the UHK Agent available.

The source for UHK Agent is available at https://github.com/UltimateHackingKeyboard/agent so at some point someone could make some CLI utility to load a pure text config...

That said, the UHK Agent is available as an AppImage and it works astonishingly well for me, even on a non-mainstream Distro (Void Linux).

I have the UHK with Cherry MX Brown switches and my old MS Natural (105KB?) which I had purchased second hand.

I feel that my UHK keys require less force than the Natural.

My Natural has a bit more prominent click points (which require more bundled force at a certain point) but an overall "stickier/mushy" feeling (to be fair, I hadn't cleaned it a lot :)).

My UHK keys feel more springy and one might not particularly notice the click point but I still get good tactile and auditory feedback.

It took me about 2 days to get comfortable with the new keys. Overall the UHK feels smoother and less strenuous.

I hope you can make some sense out of the above, otherwise please feel free to ask for clarification :)

Preamble:

I've so far only used my UHK for "regular text" usage, i.e. writing text, CLI, browsing and some light wasd + trackball gaming...

I've also activated an option for the left Mod key so that pressed alone it gives me a space character but together with other keys it works as Mod.'

I have the brown switches which I find satisfyingly clicky enough and at the same time easy to press.

--- * arrow keys

are very comfortable with holding my left thumb on Mod down and then using the right fingers for jkl and i (I was a bit skeptical at first but even the left thumb on Mod + left pinky on Ctrl to jump words etc. is working well for my fingers).

In some instances I've also used the right thumb on the frame switch ( Mod; which I find not as comfortable to press as the regular Mod/Space keys but works well enough) plus jkli for one-handed operation. Also, if you need to do a lot of arrow-work at once you can toggle the Mod key held by double-tapping it (same for the mouse and fn keys).

For applications / games where you use the arrow keys and other keys at the same time a lot and where input speed is critical I would look into creating a custom mapping though, if possible. It's very easy to duplicate an existing layout and modify it with the UHK Agent (and also to switch between layouts. Later on a feature to automatically switch layouts depending on foreground application is planned, IIRC).

--- * ESC

left-handed Mod+q has become almost second nature after a few "training" sessions with vim :) and if you don't want the burden to hit the q key exactly, Mod+` (key in the upper left corner) works as well in the standard mapping.

--- * F1-F12

I barely had the need to use them since I switched to the UHK.

I can imagine that it might be an issue in e.g. certain games where you would want to use F1-F12, 1-12 and Ctrl+1-12 and Ctrl+F1-F12 at the same time and quickly. For the occasional F2 or F4 in htop it is more of a mental hassle (for me) to figure out if the description is supposed to be left or right of the F* label than pressing Mod+number, especially since the F* are printed on the vertical sides of the caps.

Besides, if there was an extra row of keys above the numbers I wouldn't be able to reach them with my fingers anyway without lifting my hands from the (excellent! wooden) palm rest.

--- * thumbs vs. weak fingers

there are extra switches on the frame right "below" the split mod/space key which you can use or reconfigure the same as any other key (if you don't want to have secondary actions like I have set up with the left Mod key). One of the addons (Key Cluster Module) will also bring extra keys into the split.

---

Granted, SysRq makes you think a while before you get it right the first time :)

One of the biggest advantages yet for me has been the ability to put my trackball where the numpad used to be and thus have it in an even more comfortable position for my right arm and shoulder. I'm looking forward to the addons though to see if they will obsolete the need for any extra pointing device.

That brings me to my biggest hurdle so far: I've yet to create a numpad-layout to more quickly enter lots of numbers and that will definitely feel just weird on a staggered key layout compared to a regular numpad (after half a decade of very frequent and regular usage). If all attempts to retrain my fingers on that would fail there are still those USB-numpads availble though for the now more occasional number-after-number sessions and it's an expense and inconvenience I am willing to potentially endure for the satisfaction the UHK gives me so far in all other typing and ergonomic aspects.

HTH

PS: all and any typing and other errors are mine and not the UHK's ;)

[EDIT: formatting]

Thanks for pointing that out! I've always thought it was depending on how far from the vertical edge (i.e. current value) I click that I either get a "drag" (if clicked close enough) or a "set / drag&set" (clicked farther away). Or maybe it was just my mental model I got stuck on from some Motif (IIRC?) controls.

Actually, in Gimp 2.10.4 it now for me even changes the shape of the cursor: lower half: ↔ (left-right arrows) upper half: ↑ (up-arrow) so it seems they fixed the discoverability :)