I use only 40% and 30% keyboards, thats ones without dedicated number or f key rows, and have done so for about six years now. Majority I use are standard stagger but a few are ortho or splits. Almost all of them that I like using are split space with left half as enter and the right as space.

I can touch type, although I am not the fastest, only a bit above 80wpm. This is mostly due to me being dyslexic so spelling is challenging for me and I can get bogged down looking up words or retyping it. If I do not give a shit about spelling I can easily get well over 100wpm.

I think the main show off skill I can do is look at a person I am talking to while typing a different conversation on the computer. Obviously I cannot do either if its complicated conversations but simple stuff is fine.

Mechanical keyboards are like guitars, you can play the same notes on a cheap one as you can on something custom made for you for thousands. Do they sound very different? Almost always, although the guitar needs someone who can actually play well, unlike the mechanical keyboard.

However, if you really really care and you really really know what you want out of either you can tweak absolutely everything about both. You want ultra soft silent keyboard? Sure. You want the most clickty keyboard with tons of pressure? Sure. You want something thocky but still has lots of flex? Sure.

I can’t understand that gibberish, speak RFC 791 like a true patriot

If its made before 2009 its likely not BPA free and you should consider upgrading to a modern one. I think the plastic was changed again around 2014. Mine is from that time period and doesnt have an after taste either.

As well as the glass one you can get one made of tritan, which would be my pick over the glass as its mostly the same look, a lot cheaper, and pretty much unbreakable.

UK as an adult you often have to pay for this per request and there is a limit on the number you can request at once. As it can take weeks or even months to complete while you wait for your turn in the queue so it makes it very hard to stack requests.

As a kid I used to love this service as it was free without real request linits and a lot faster. I could just pre order books that hadn’t come out.

I stopped using my local library because of it as their planned fiction book selection is basically large print romance or war stories or westerns.

I love my pocketbook colour three. The extra screensize is very much appreciated for comics

Yeah Japan is awful for that and the tourists have only gotten worse with their behaviour over time. I did the main spots of Kyoto once, biggest mistake of my trip.

If you avoid the popular spots entirely then its usually pretty easy to find places that are more authentic. But its been a few years since I last went, its a very tough holiday for me as I am coeliac and the Japanese just do not take gluten allergies seriously (they had something like three people in five years diagnosed in total) so I have to self cater the entire trip.

Toss up between saying BVI a year after Irma, it was so quiet and empty. We spent the day on the beach at Bitter End (its absolutely amazing now its reopened) and if you know that beach its never empty except we had it to ourselves. Went to a bar in Little Bay and just spent the day hanging out with the owner, only ones there, told to help ourselves to beer from the fridge and had dinner with them. BVI is never that quiet during main season, its usually busy to packed.

Other one is Antigua during COVID, quiet beyond belief. Restaurants only allowed to do take out, so they would bring you the meals to your boat. Had a BBQ of the best steak and lobster on the main beach at Barbuda cooked just for us. Last night they opened up restaurants for dine in, only customers at this fancy Mexican fusion restaurant on the beach. They were so happy to have people back, ended up sharing the head chefs bottle of (very expensive) wine as we chatted at the end of the meal.

Most of my favorite holiday stories are when we have gone somewhere and its empty of tourists and just pretty quiet overall.

If you really insensitive to lactose then yeah its going to be very painful, milk is in just about everything baked or with most sauces that isn’t stamped vegan. At least most reputable places will take it seriously and have a proper allergen book.

I am Coeliac, and its like me going to Japan, just about everything has wheat added to it. Soy sauce? Gluten. Miso? Gluten. Whats annoying is that traditional Japanese recipes for Miso and Soy do not use wheat, it was added later after the American occupation. You can buy both soy and miso gluten free outside of Japan very easily, but in Japan, even though they made by Japanese companies? Ha good luck.

The worst part is that nobody in Japan takes it seriously as there been like two people in the last five years who were diagnosed with a gluten intolerance let alone Coeliac, so even if you take a Japanese speaker along and they explain it politely to the chef, you still get gluten.

It reads like she didn’t check ahead of booking, if you have some sort of allergy, she she appears to, its essential to check ahead.

It also reads like excluding tax, they paid about £600 for flights, transfers, hotel and all inclusive, each. I am not surprised that the food and drink would be closer to the budget end for that price.

My mother did the slitty eyed gesture and said that there were too many chi*ks here, in the car part for a large asian grocery store in the local chinatown that she had chosen to go to, to buy asian food. Yes other people heard and saw what she did, including asians. This was more than twenty years ago so not linked to the current rise of more overt racism.

This gets a lot easier if you have somewhere reliable and preferably free to stay when you need to start working again. Even if you have paid off your own place or been given a place for free you have bills to pay on it. I guess you can rent it out while you are away, but that seems less than ideal to me as how do you keep it maintained if you aren’t in the country? It just ends up being another cost.

I would have loved to have done this but the housing situation has always put me off.

Watching UK 70s TV now is wild. Prime time sitcoms using camp gay sterotypes as a punchline in themselves, black characters being called Chalkie or similar. These had regular repeats throughout the 80s on the main TV channels. Hell, known ephebophilie and bigot, Jim Davidson, had a prime time game show till 2002 and would regularly do his Chalkie character on it.

Late 90s/early 2000s UK TV was still pretty homophobic and racist, see Little Britain for yellow and brown face combined with racial stereotypes, big name comedians of the time like Frank Skinner making homophobic jokes.

Early 2000s in the UK was aggressively misogynistic, mostly in the printed press, absolutely rabid.

Obviously these issues haven’t been solved, but at least its unacceptable for mainstream TV in the UK to pedal this shit.

Have you tried adding blueberries to it, they are an anti oxident

Buying less and buying for life as a priority when choosing purchases. It’s had a knock on effect thst I try to buy bespoke from small artisans as they tend to be higher quality and it supports small businesses rather than megacorps.

It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn’t push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.

Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.

I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.

So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.

Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.

Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.

Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Lost went on far too long and they backed themselves into a corner by saying that the big secret was what nobody had guessed, but this was right around the Internet getting popular to talk about tv shows, so everything good had already been suggested. If it had been me, I would have just picked the best one and gone with that…