MaKey MaKey: Control your mouse+keyboard with ANYTHING4

Ok, so this Kickstarter ends in five hours and most people will have to wait an unknown amount of time to get their hands on a unit after today. But the video should still be available in the future, to blow the minds of future generations.

Here is what you’ll witness in their pitch video: a Pac-man controller built out of pencil lead on a piece of paper, DDR played using buckets of water, piano playing with bananas, typing with alphaghetti…

This Kickstarter is sort of a sweet spot makes it worth posting for me, because the price is really reasonable and the results are unarguably impressive. It brings to mind the Kickstarter for Twine, except that the minimum price isn't one hundred dollars. Granted, Twine seems awesome, except that it costs more to get anything useful done with it, and what it can do won’t blow anyone’s mind. This is Arduino with all the parts included - plug-and-play electronics hacking. That makes me really excited, because I’ve got lots of stuff I’d like to make, but I don’t yet have the skills.

For example: Sacha Chua, who first came on my radar as someone who blogs about Emacs, blogged late last year about a homemade USB foot pedal. Combined with AutoHotKey, that provides for a lot of possibilities - you could do pretty much anything with a tap of your foot. Thing is, I don’t know how I would get started building such a thing.

MaKey MaKey would let me build a foot pedal out of anything I have lying around the house. With more potential buttons, because my understanding is that you can use a configuration file to change what keys it will send. That’s awesome, and you will never convince me otherwise.

L'ignorance, deuxieme prise4

lacealchemy:

You seem to use the word “ignorant” as a shield, Matt. “Someone better explain it to me, because otherwise, geez louise, I’ll never learn and forever be ignorant. NotmyfaultI’mjustignorant.”

So, to answer: How can an ignorant person do the right thing? Educate yourself. Become LESS ignorant. While the Internet is full of rants and it can be hard to take someone’s opinion seriously when it’s followed by “*^@^&!^%@”, there are resources besides the Internet that are easily available.

Go to the Ottawa Public Library website and type in “transsexual” in the search bar (http://ottawa.bibliocommons.com).  There are 63 items that appear and all of them are about either stories of trans* individuals or factual books about trans* people in our world. 

Hell, I’ll lend you a book. It’s called “Luna” and it’s by Julie Anne Peters. It’s about a girl and her biologically male sister. 

There are people out there explaining it in a “relatively reasonable” manner. You just have to go listen to them. You can’t just sit back and complain about people not taking the time to explain things when you are not taking the time and effort to understand. And you should take the time to understand. It’s IMPORTANT. 

Accidentally pressuring a game character to change her portrayed gender doesn’t make you a “bad person”. Especially since it seems like there’s some debate (judging by the comments) about whether the author’s right on that aspect. But if you end up never taking the chance to learn about the many other  facets of sexuality and identity that are out there, you may continue to pass through life with a biased vision of “everyone I see is hetero and as born at birth except when proven otherwise”.

And that may, in the end, really hurt someone close to you. I guess, when that happens, you can always say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I just don’t think that way.”

But…this says that you didn’t even acknowledge the possibility they could be different from you.  

A lack of education about the subject sends a couple messages:

a) you don’t care

b) they’re not important enough to care about

So, go to the library and get yourself a book.

lamattgrind:

blah blah blah click above to read original

The fact that I used ignorant in at least three different ways in the original post probably makes it hard to keep track of what I was trying to say. Reflects poorly on me as a writer, too, but anyway. Mostly I was refering to different degrees of not-knowing. To my mind, the three different uses are: knowing nothing at all, not knowing enough, and knowing only as much as one can know without experiencing something first-hand. The third is the most problematic, because it’s as knowledgeable as most people can get - but it may still cause a lot of unintentional problems. I just feel like there’s probably some portion that’s always going to be out of the realm of my understanding, no matter how much I may learn.

        An illustrative example: I very rarely have “feelings” as such, and that’s really hard for me to completely wrap my head around. Playing a fun video game/reading a good book/etc. almost always feels the same, to me, as watching a sad scene in a movie. I still have emotions, mind you, because I know from experience that I behave angrily, happily, etc. I just don’t have (m)any cues to tell me what emotional state I’m in. Broadly speaking, anyway, most of the time I have to think back and make explicit judgements on my emotions instead of just “feeling” them. I’ve asked a few people, and this doesn’t seem to be the case for them, so it’s probably not just me subscribing to poetic hyperbole about what emotions should be like.

        You can read the sentence “I don’t feel my emotions about 90% of the time” as much as you like. You can think about what might follow from that, maybe try to imagine it. That’s what I’ve done thus far as I read the article and the original comments (and a few other things in the past). But it’s actually pretty hard for me to even sort out what, exactly, my own experience even is - I’ve needed other people to tell me in the past that I was clearly angry, jealous, and so on. Figuring out what exactly I have, and what exactly I lack, is hard because I don’t know how else life could be. It’s hard to keep track of at times, and often I’m too busy thinking about other things to be consciously aware of how I’m feeling.

        I’m trying to explain this, really, insofar as I understand it and in the clearest way that I can. Hopefully it helps you, the “feelings” endowed reader, imagine what it could be like. I imagine this is the case for most trans people, as well. But I’m not convinced many people can truly, completely understand either of these things - grok them - without experiencing them. Perhaps some extraordinary people have the emotional/social depth to grok the concept from a description in text. But I don’t consider myself one of those people, and so I feel like there will always be something I don’t quite get about gender and sexuality issues. I’d certainly rather understand to my maximum capacity (perhaps some 60-80% of grokking) than understand nothing at all. I’m just worried that the remaining percentage will lead to the majority of well-intended mistakes, each of which would likely be an independent learning experience. So that’s what I was really wondering about - without living that life myself, even knowing a lot of things second-hand, I just might not know when I’ve done something wrong.

———————————————————————

        Truth be told, I’m legitimately upset by the idea of having done the wrong thing in Persona 4. As in, it bothers me to imagine trying to help someone I care about but actually just subtly hurting them. One of the problems is mine - that I didn’t know enough to think that there was a different way to read the situation. The other is just the limited interaction you’re allowed in the game, mostly along the lines of “choose Option A, B, or C” where one of the options is always “right” according to the game. To even advance your relationship with Naoto, you pretty much have to tell the game what it wants to hear. Unlike with actual people, you can’t ask a video game character what they want. You have to impose more of yourself on the situation, unless you’re aiming for maximum gameplay benefit.

        As far as explaining things to me, what I had in mind in terms of was something like Dys4ia. It's a game (of sorts) by a transgendered woman who goes by Anna Anthropy, which covers the events around her decision to undergo hormone therapy. I feel like it was a great way for Anna Anthropy to tell her story. It’s quick to play and a few of the scenes are more striking, to me, than words alone would have been. I get the idea, a little bit more than I did before. And I wish that all the effort that goes into arguing with people on the internet could be turned into something more useful, like Dys4ia. It just seems like a waste of everyone’s time for knowledgeable folks to respond in anger and start a futile cycle of retaliation, instead of explaining to people how/why they have the wrong idea. Far be it for me to tell people they can’t be upset, obviously, but it makes me a little bit sad to see people getting themselves worked up like this. It just begs for them to be upset again by the exact same people, saying the exact same things, the next time the discussion comes up.

        Anyway, I’d be happy to read books and inch my way closer to the limit of my understanding (if there is one). Truth be told, I have literally never in my life independently thought “I should find a book about this topic.” For better or for worse, I’m a child of the internet age. It works pretty well for the topics I consume the most information on - there’s very few good books about the things that flow through my RSS reader on a daily basis. Seems I was led astray in this case, because the quality of discourse in my corner of the online world isn’t that great. Not surprising, since it’s probably full of folks like myself. Scary to consider how much we can hear what we want to hear, these days. Best not to stare into that abyss for too long, lest it stare back and undermine some of the more basic beliefs in your beautiful foundationalist inverted-pyramid (or otherwise ruin your favourite epistemic visualization).

3the standard deviation·Source: lamattgrind

How can an ignorant person do the right thing?4

[click for a response from a concerned friend and take two of this whole idea]

Fortunately for me, I’m pretty much your typically privileged, white, middle-class, heterosexual male. I try to keep an open mind, though, especially after moving to Ottawa where diversity is the norm. At least, when I realize there’s something I have a limited point of view on - something easier said than done. Depression, perfectionism, and a handful of similar mental health issues are about the only things I can really understand. One thing I have a lot of trouble with wrapping my head around is gender and sexuality issues, because being a straight man makes me about as far removed from them as you can get. Part of the problem is the us-vs-them mentality that seems so prevalent among people who have to deal with these issues first-hand. While I can’t claim to be extensively educated on the subject, it does happen that a couple times per year I run into a piece like the linked article.

        The formula seems fairly predictable: the author stands alone against the tides of unforgivable ignorance and spits vitriol at those of us who have the misfortune of being - and I think this is important - more or less incapable of understanding their position. There’s just no way for me to conceptualize being of a different sexual orientation or gender than I am. What I do understand is being hurt, and having a desire to lash out at injustice, and taking one’s frustration out on innocent bystanders. And that’s what I always seem to see, and it kind of sucks, because I don’t think it makes things better for anyone. It keeps the injured parties in a cycle of rumination and anger, and it drives away people like myself who would really like to hear their stories and try to understand just a little bit more.

        If you read the article, take a moment to read through the comment thread. It’s not horrifically long, actually. You don’t need to read a whole lot - just enough to see NonsyM (the original author) only make aggressive/negative comments and say things like “it is not my job to explain to you why this is a problem”. I think that last comment is actually the opposite of the case - it seems to me that the whole reason that trans characters are treated the way they are in Atlus games is because no one on the team knows it’s an issue. They’re ignorant of their ignorance. If no explains to them that, say, their treatment of Erica and Naoto is harmful, why would they stop? Obviously making a minority the butt of a joke is wrong, but with those two characters, the transgression is more subtle.

        From my point of view at the time that I played Persona 4, the thought of Naoto as a transgendered character never entered my mind. I didn’t consider it because it wasn’t part of my view of the world. I saw Naoto as a girl who didn’t want to be a woman because of the way it lead people to treat her - the only motivation for presenting herself as a man was to get the respect she deserved. If she could get that respect as a woman and be more comfortable with herself, all would be well. So my take on the romantic path with her was a familiar sort of white knight role - help her gain confidence and overcome what I perceived as insecurities over being a woman. So the comment that frames the final scene with Naoto as “peer-pressuring those you love into changing their gender presentation to better suit your sexual preferences" comes as a complete surprise to me - I thought I was doing the right thing.

        I really don’t think that makes me a bad person. Now that it’s been suggested, I can understand a reading of Naoto as a transgendered character. If I had looked at the character in that way, I would have made a different choice. But this is an argument based on a handful of lines of dialogue, and not the rich discussion you would have with a real human being. You have a limited number of dialogue options with Naoto, and they’re offered to you by the game’s writers. In real life, you could suggest that someone try to work out whether they’re a woman who is uncomfortable with themselves or a man who is stuck in a woman’s body. Rather than having to guess or impose your own desires on them, as you have no choice but to do with Naoto, you could follow their lead. At a guess, I would imagine that the developers are people like me - people who can’t help but see Naoto as a woman made uncomfortable by society, and don’t necessarily think a discussion about their gender is necessary.

        Ignorant folk like me won’t know any better unless someone can explain it to us in a relatively reasonable manner, and saying "you have nothing to contribute to this discussion and I will not educate you” doesn’t help anyone. If the people with first-hand experience are too fed up to enlighten the rest of us, how can we possibly do the right thing? You can kinda sorta enlighten yourself if you extrapolate through the profanity and the other anti-pleasantries that arise in internet debates, but it shouldn’t be so hard. The easiest, and probably only, way for us to really understand is for someone to swallow their frustration and teach us.

        Leaving people to wallow in their ignorance only perpetuates the problem. It means someone else will probably have to put up with them the next time they feel entitled to share their opinion. You can’t make ignorance go away by avoiding it; greater education is the only permanent solution.

In which I socialize, go to PAX East, and host a pot luck

Hello, Internet. Long time no see. I’ve been doing things, lately, which is keeping me busy. With what? Well, shockingly, I’ve actually made new friends over the last two months. People I speak to outside of class/whatever location I met them, even! And, like, hang out with. I haven’t done that very often since moving to Ottawa. Mostly, these new friends are all cog sci majors, so we have lots of classes together. But we bonded over PAX East, and that’s the first topic of today’s long-overdue post!

——————————————————————–

        A while ago, Vael mentioned that he was going to PAX East with a friend. The timing worked out for me, so I decided to go. I was only able to find one person from Ottawa to come with me, though, and it wasn’t someone I knew very well (my fault). That problem resolved itself when a certain outgoing individual in CGSC 2002 piped up at the end of class to suggest a road trip to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC to see an exhibit they’re having about video games (still in the works). “While we’re on that topic, anyone want to go to PAX East?” said I. And lo, our merry band formed on the spot.

        So off we went around midnight on the last day of class for Carleton, April 5th. My dad and I taking turns driving, everyone else sleeping. Most of us arrived at PAX before noon on Friday - those of us who had bought our tickets in advance… It was good. We saw things. I literally had nothing I knew I wanted to see on the show floor. Though I did want to see if Cryptozoic had anything new on the Penny Arcade card game (which is great), and in fact, they did! They had a new expansion, and it is greater. Anyway, yeah, Friday was a day. That’s not to say I wasn’t excited; I don’t feel like boring you with the details anymore. This is a rare instance of restraint - enjoy it while it lasts!

        Saturday tickets were sold out by the time we got ours, so those of us who didn’t receive a free ticket from a random dude simply hung around Boston. In the evening, though, we went to a gathering for Extra Credits fans, plus James himself, and that was fun. I would have liked to socialize more, but anyway. Doesn’t help that I uh… gave my PSN ID to the few people I spoke to and told them it was my Steam ID. Oops! Those of us without tickets to the show hung out with some guy for a few hours after the event ended. An air traffic controller, he was. Forgot to provide contact info to him AT ALL.

        i am good at people ok why does no one ever believe me when I say this

        Sunday was the most interesting day for me, because that’s the day that Vael was going with Eve Victus! We played a bit of the Penny Arcade expansion, wandered the show floor, went to an OC ReMix panel, met a dude from Ottawa, lost a member of our party for a while, and went out to dinner together. All in all, it was nice to have a short break from work and I think we were all quite inspired by the things we saw and the people we spoke to.

——————————————————————–

        Personally, it was a lesson in how much more effective I am at making friends when I, uh, actually spend time with them. Strangely enough, I had no trouble at all being around everyone. We had plenty of things to talk about, and it’s easy to find things to do together - playing games (digital and analog) is an easy option, but we’ve all got some shared interests in film, anime, books, and so on. After the end of exams, I was even so bold as to invite everyone I knew in Ottawa over for a pot luck/games night. And it was good! And we barely played any games because we just ate dinner/chatted for hours. I’m thinking I’ll have another before the end of the summer, but I don’t want to burn everyone out on having to cook.

        In the mean time, I’m spending more time with various folks, and chatting over IM/text when I’m at home (and my hands don’t hurt too badly). Feels good, man. Feels like being back to normal, in fact. Like coming home after spending a while as a cave hermit. It’s funny, really, because it seems like every few months I go through some slight change and declare myself “happy” and feel like I’ve come closer to being the person that I want to be. An anonymous reader noticed this, and sent me a very kind e-mail a few months ago. They weren’t too sure I was as happy as I claimed to be, but they assured me that socializing would get easier as time went on. It was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: I think this stranger’s kind words helped push me to talk a little bit more and worry a little bit less about what other people might think (because they probably don’t think the worst of me).

——————————————————————–

        Events like that are exactly why I have my e-mail address listed on my tumblr page. It’s part of why the internet is so awesome! People I’ve never met, who I don’t actually know are reading what I write, can reach out and share a bit of themselves if they like what I’ve shared of myself. It was a little bit strange when a friend of my father's told him what I’ve been writing about. But it’s kind of cool, too. This is me, and I’m happy that there are people who enjoy it.

        I guess what I’m getting at is, if you read this stuff, I would be happy to talk to you. And I will try to be normal and not monologue at you. I learned my lesson, I promise! Shoot me an e-mail, or better yet, IM me in a way that makes it easy to tell you’re not a spambot. If you go for an e-mail and I don’t answer, send it again, because it may have wound up in my spam folder and I don’t wade through that cesspool very often!

Decreasing My Misery Quotient

This post has been in the works for a while - part of why I haven’t posted in a while. I was originally going to write it as commentary on academic culture works. Then I questioned whether I could generalize like that, so I thought I would focus on my own behaviour. Then I saw a post on Facebook linking to an article by a student at University of Toronto touching on many of my own points. The article is slightly tangential to this post, since it’s primarily about mental health in perfectionist university students (who, contrary to what some people may think, exist at every university). But it’s a topic I would love to see discussed more openly, so please read it if you’re interested.

        This problem shows up in varying degrees, obviously. There’s individuals like me and most of the people I’ve met - we want the best and we push for it. Then you’ve got people in programs like engineering or architecture, who regularly camp out beside their workstations. A friend with an undergrad degree in one of Carleton’s engineering programs used the same terms as the article does: it’s a “badge of honour” to work that hard. There’s a twisted form of glory in managing to succeed despite taking on far too much work. It’s a stupid thing to do, but we’re bound to respect anyone who studies more than they sleep.

        There’s even a bit of shame, to a certain degree, in being less overworked and miserable than somoeone else. When people like me complain, it’s almost more like bragging - after all, we all know I’m not going to quit. But when you start complaining to somebody who has more reason to complain than you, well, they must be better than you. Not only are they working harder, but they’re likely getting better grades in the process. How dare you complain about getting five hours of sleep for a couple of nights, to someone who regularly sleeps three?

        For the sake of argument, let’s say we want to quantify this. After all, there’s something to measure and compare. The way I see it, there’s four components involved:

  • degree of success (inside and outside class)
  • success in spite of oneself (“I started the assignment the night before and still got an A+!”)
  • level of challenge (can be directly related to amount of work, but there are other types of challenge)
  • amount of sleep

        Taking inspiration from the misery index, and to make things catchy (which is important to scientists), I’ll call this value the misery quotient. MQ = (Success + SuccessInSpiteOfOneself) * Challenge / Sleep. Roughly speaking, it’s the amount of success you have per unit of sleep. More sleep makes for a lower value, with higher values being better. Granted, it might be more accurate to adjust the sleep values according to individual differences, and instead measure it as a percentage of what each individual ought to be sleeping. In this case, if we say I need 8 hours/night and only get 6, it’s the same as someone who needs 5 hours/night getting 3.75 hours - a value of 0.75. Keeping the same formula, higher values are still better, but you get way more credit for barely sleeping.

        Anyway, here’s where I’m going with this: I’m tired of bragging about this. I hate that I still default to “complaining” about work. I have more interesting things to talk to people about than not sleeping, or working too much. That, and I don’t like being miserable. So I’m planning to change things up in the future, which will hopefully allow me to sleep more while still doing well and taking on interesting challenges. I could even have a bit of a social life on the side! It’s a simple change: I’m going to take four classes per semester instead of five from now on. That gives me three hours I would have spent in lectures, and whatever other time studying and doing assignments. It fits perfectly well with the timeline I already had - five years for the degree. I’m also working diligently on time management, these days, so I can make the most of the time I do have.

        So here’s how I’ll end: will you join me in lowering your misery quotient? Can you find a way to do what you want to do, without depriving yourself of valuable sleep? It’s one of a small number of things that people need universally, but it’s not a direct survival need so we skimp on it all the time. Some people don’t need to socialize to stay emotionally healthy, and some people don’t need any recreational activity aside from work. But they still need to sleep, and you don’t know how much it affects you if you never take the time to catch up. Give it a try for a month or so, see how you feel on a good eight hours per night. You may not even be able to sleep properly, at first. But it’ll come, and once you’re properly rested, you’ll actually notice when you’re tired in the future. Or you can stay tired and work sub-optimally forever - it’s your choice, I guess.

Keyboard > Mouse4

vael:

I want you to take this post very seriously. This could save your right index finger.

http://www.lytebyte.com/2009/06/09/how-to-change-double-click-to-single-click-mouse-selection-in-vista-and-windows-7/

Recently I installed Linux at work, and I have found very little reason to continue…

Ha-har! You think this is the best thing you can do for your mouse, but you would be wrong. The best thing you can do is to stop using a physical mouse at all. At first I thought it would suck, because not every program is keyboard-shortcut friendly. Then I installed something called AT Mouse, and I’m happily mouse-less.

Allow me to direct you to their help page, which describes its usage. You can move slowly for accuracy, you can move quickly for speed (double-press), you can pop the mouse from one side of the screen to the other (press left/right when at the edge), you can quickly jump across the screen (repeated presses of 7/9/1/3) - all using the numpad on your keyboard. If you’re one of the few people in the world who type so many numbers that you use the numpad, good news: you can still use it when you want! Though it no longer turns on the “Num Lock” light on my keyboard, but if I find the mouse isn’t moving, I just press NumLock+/ and we’re back in business.

In all honesty, it’s responsive enough that I can browse the web with it (though I’ve never tried Firefox’s Caret Browsing, and got too lazy to try out the mouseless Firefox dubbed Conkeror). Enough that I can stop using my laptop’s trackpad, which is the bane of my existence. Check it out, ‘cause it’s free. I’m a bit upset with some of their keybindings of other keys, mainly because it messes with my AutoHotKey scripts. Luckily, there are many alternative options that use AutoHotKey, which provide the benefit of being easily modified to add some of the nice features of AT Mouse.

So, to summarize our options:

  1. Quick and easy
  2. One or two of many AutoHotKey versions
  3. Take one of the AutoHotKey versions and add your own features

I can’t ditch my existing customizations, obviously, so I’m going to cheat and steal take inspiration from AT Mouse to add things to one of the scripts I just linked to. It may take a while, because I have actually important things to do, but I’ll post here when I’ve got something worth using. Toss it up on GitHub or something, make life easy.

3net slum

Publishers, What Are They Good For?4

This is a quick post with relatively little of my own commentary, but I just want to share the story because it’s so absolutely ridiculous. Plus, in light of the hyper-popularity of Kickstarter these days as a good way to fund video games, it highlights the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Namely, the shitty way to fund games, in which publishers have all the control.

I’ve linked to an article on Nightmare Mode, mainly because it adds some commentary to the original story from Destructoid (breaking news on an independent video game blog!) You don’t have to read it, though - here’s the basic summary:

  • Obsidian Entertainment made Fallout: New Vegas, which was published by Bethesda
  • It sold really, really well
  • Obsidian Entertainment received no royalty payments from the game’s sales, because their contract required they get a score of 85 on Metacritic to receive their “bonus” of an actual cut of the sales
  • It got a score of 84 on Metacritic

According to Nightmare Mode, the game sold five million copies. 5,000,000 copies. $60 each (well, they probably weren’t all full price, but it’s a lot of money at any price).

Obsidian Entertainment didn’t get a single cent from any of those sales. All they got was a flat rate for completing the game. Since then, they’ve had two rounds of lay-offs.

F*cking what?!

Kickback: All The Right Reasons

Years ago, when I would listen to songs that made me think of anything related to relationships, I didn’t stop to put into words what the song made me feel. I’d get a vague approximation of some thoughts, and I’d be appropriately happy/miserable/both, and that was all I needed. Now that I’ve got more time between myself and the relationship in question, I don’t get the same feelings, and so I literally can’t remember what it was that I liked about these songs. Listening to them now, I know there was something about the song, but can’t quite grasp it.

        You can see the vague, unformed idea effect in some of the music posts I made back in 2010 - I’d post the song and the lyrics, but not say a whole lot about it. A prime example is this post about Kickback UK’s All The Wrong Reasons. I was listening to the song last night and thinking it meant something to me in 2010, but I couldn’t say what it was. At a guess, I’d say I felt like I was trying to help people so I could feel better about myself - the most cynical way of reading my behaviour at the time. There were a couple people I was “friends” with at the time mostly for that reason, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t the way to go. But that’s only a guess - I can’t say for sure what I was thinking when I made that post.

        What I can tell you is what the song makes me think now, which you will (hopefully) be glad to hear is much more positive. I was up late writing an essay for my Linguistic Analysis class, and I took the lyrics in a very different way. (Chalk it up to vague interpretations, I guess, when the same song can mean a totally different thing two years later.) I was feeling good about the essay and wanted to reflect a bit on how I’ve changed lately, and where I’m heading in the future. Moral of the story, for the tl;dr crowd - I feel like I’ve gone from “all the wrong reasons” to “all the right reasons”, and I’ve got big plans. Read on if you’re interested! Best if you take a stop by the old post, first.

        "Head’s in the future, but your heart’s in the past" is an apt description of me circa 2010. Things were looking up, but definitely not all the way up. Which is a stupid metaphor if you try to picture it, but it works verbally. “And we’ve seen it all before, you’re holding out for more” follows from that, obviously. Neither of those things still apply to me, which is a good sign. Head and heart are both set on the future, I suppose. Getting to the future I want means working hard in the present, but it feels more and more and more natural as I put out work I’m legitimately proud of. Nobody’s ever going to look at the C++ assignment I’m working on right now, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it good and shoot for a mark of 110%.

        The next line is what gets me now, and probably what got to me in the past as well. “When that call never comes it’s time to face what you’ve become - there’s no point doing all of this unless you know you’re having fun.” At the time, there were a lot of things I wasn’t terribly happy with. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with the work I was doing back then. Although it got me here, so I can’t complain - but it was all delayed gratification at the time. At least now I get some of that gratification! A little, anyway. Still lots of delay right now. But I’ve recently realized what I should be working towards, although I’d been thinking about it for a few weeks. I said I didn’t have many important goals for 2012, but I take that back now! I’ve got two, which I strongly feel I can accomplish, and which all of my work now contributes to:

  • The first: have my name on a publication.
  • The second: learn as much as possible, with an eye towards distinguishing myself from the competition.

Both of these are practical goals that will, hopefully, put me in a great position when I finish my education and set out for a job. So - “what have I become”? Someone who strives to be the best they can be. (Time will tell where I’ll fall on the sweet/awesome dichotomy.) I’m not necessarily having fun, but I’m seeing the big picture now.

        From where I stand, that means a number of different things. Most recently, it means improving my writing consciously, the way I used to while I was in AP English. (If you’re interested in that writing analysis tool but not interested in Emacs, I can look into creating an independent version, with the author’s permission.) Going back a few weeks, I’ve started to really dedicate myself to programming well. I’m getting tons of inspiration on that topic as I dig up tidbits of information about Emacs, and inevitably get linked to some other brilliant piece. There’s Steve Yegge and Avdi Grimm over the past few days, who have both Emacs secrets I can steal and general programming knowledge. Meanwhile, Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman write about quality of life as a programmer - improving your tools, improving your office, improving your lighting, etc. Aside from that, I’m always trying to synthesize what I know about the seemingly-disparate areas of linguistics (at least, that’s what the separation in course content would lead you to believe). I want to say with some confidence that I’m a linguist - not some kid who “maybe heard about that in university, but didn’t think it was important”.

        In a similar vein, I’m connecting all the dots in this “cognitive science” thing. Philosophy is cognitive psychology, cognitive psychology is neuroscience, neuroscience is linguistics, linguistics is computer science… And the whole conglomerate is cognitive science. I may not use every part of it for the rest of my life, but understanding them all matters. Even if I were to be a career programmer, I’d keep usability testing in mind. Even if I were a linguist for the rest of my life, I know for a fact I’d land in a crossover field - computational linguistics and neurolinguistics seem equally likely right now.

        So what I’m getting at is: I know what I’m doing here, and I know who I am. I can’t tell you what I’ll settle on for a job, but I know what the core components of that job will be. This is where I belong. The lows may be low, but the highs are home.

Software I Like

It’s the moment you haven’t been waiting for: a big post about Windows software! I happen to think most of this stuff is pretty rad. I know the appeal isn’t universal, though, so I’ve organized this post in descending order of mass appeal. It’s a five-star scale, with five-stars being “everybody try this” and one-star being “you might find a use for this”. Some of these things may be multi-platform, but if you don’t use Windows, you may as well skip everything after the 5-star section. If something in that section is Windows-exclusive, it’s up to you to find an alternative for your OS! A few ways to do that: the Lifehacker app directory, alternativeto.net, or Google.

Side note: this is partially inspired by the website The Setup, which interviews smart people about how they do what they do. I’ve learned some neat things there, but it may not be worth going through the archives unless you use OS X exclusively. Other main reason: I want to tell people about neat and useful things!

***** 5-star software *****

f.lux
Available for every platform ever created, f.lux takes your geographical location and calculates the sunrise and sunset in local time. Then it tints your screen to simulate the natural cycle of the sun. The red hue at night seems weird at first, but it’s something you can’t live without once you get used to it. If you use your computer in the dark, do yourself a favour and try it. I find that I sleep better, my eyes hurt less, and I actually get tired later in the evening. I actually wasn’t using f.lux for a while - it wasn’t in my startup folder for some reason. I realized something was wrong when I was on my PC at 3 AM, fueled in some way by that disturbing blue glow, trying to read all of the things there ever were. After turning it on again, I got to see the benefits all over again. So yeah, download this.

LastPass
LastPass is the closest you can get to real password security these days. It’s infinitely better than your browser’s built-in password manager, and I want you to use it. Please? I don’t even know my passwords anymore, and I don’t need to! Life is good.

AutoHotKey
What to say about AutoHotKey? It provides a sky-high programming language to easily manipulate things that would be painfully complex any other way. The corollary to this is that it’s a programming language, so you’re limited by the problems you want to solve with it. My current uses:

  • a hotkey to “keep on top” any window
  • handling a drop-down terminal like in Quake or an Elder Scrolls game
  • turning the right Alt button into a Ctrl key
  • remapping Alt+N to Ctrl+Backspace in order to delete whole words without reaching for the backspace key

Lifehacker has a ton of posts about AutoHotKey, though. So look there for some inspiration.

Rainmeter
I love Rainmeter. I love it violently, with every fiber of my being, every second I use my laptop. A quick look at the most popular skins on DeviantArt is all the explanation you’ll need. Exciting new features are on the way: Rainmeter 2.3 brings the option to define a margin around the screen that’s reserved for Rainmeter - maximized windows can’t use the area you define as part of the DesktopWorkArea. This is a fantastic addition, and it’s something users have needed other utilities for until now. Rainmeter is everything I want in software: sexy, lightweight, and highly configurable.

WorkRave
WorkRave is a neat tool I found recently that I highly recommend if you spend hours at your PC. WorkRave lets you set a certain length of time for taking short breaks to rest your hands (I do 15 seconds every 10 minutes) and longer breaks to stand up and stretch/exercise (I’m doing 5 minutes every 55 minutes). It’s partially a health thing, and partially a time-management tool. Did you know you’ve been reading stupid crap for an hour? Do you actually want to be doing that? Go for a walk, stretch your legs, think about what you’ll do after your break. I actually found it quite helpful during Reading Week, and I was grateful for the breaks whenever I was working on a tough problem. Instead of breaking my flow, it helped me focus when I was actually working. Definitely check it out.

**** 4-star software ****

Anki
Anki is, put simply, a digital flashcard program. But it’s also a tool for spaced repetition of anything you happen to want to learn. Spaced repetition may be the second best way to learn, topped only by applying your desired skill in some useful way. One of my professors introduced it to the class as a way to study, and I’ve gotten into it since then. I’m using it for most of my classes, and the Anki decks will accompany my class notes in the future. Your mileage may vary, though - creating the Anki cards is part of my studying, too. I know what the cards are actually trying to say, and I rehearse background info that’s not on the actual card. It doesn’t cost me anything to export my decks, though, so why not? Here’s an article with some guidelines for using Anki, particularly outside an academic/testing related setting.

Microsoft OneNote
This is the only paid software on the list, oddly enough. I’ve posted about OneNote in the past, and I still love it. OneNote has a ton of features-you-never-knew-you-wanted that make editing a little bit faster - they’re simple but appreciated. My notes export to PDF and MS Word documents in a decently attractive format, so I can share them for your viewing pleasure, and for the benefit of students with disabilities that make it difficult for them to take their own notes. I’ve never tried Evernote, but I’ve never wanted to - OneNote is perfect for my needs.

*** 3-star software ***

QTTabBar
I use QTTabBar so frequently that I don’t remember what options I actually use. I can’t use Explorer without it anymore. Download it and look through all the sweet, sweet options it provides. Its most noticeable feature is tabs: how can you live without them? But it adds lots of other useful things, too. Double-click the folder background to go up to its parent folder, hover a file to preview its contents, and many more. Using a light Windows theme, I recommend the Firefox 3 theme if you use a light Explorer frame, and my personal pick to go with the dark background of my Explorer is a mix of two styles: the background image from Adagio and the tab image from NOOTO. Using the settings provided by NOOTO’s creator, I think.

RescueTime
It requires some self-discipline, but using RescueTime definitely helps keep me on task. Although I may have cheated a little by defining my hours of Emacs research as “very productive”. Lifehacker has a brief-ish guide on how to set up RescueTime in a way that works for you. Try it out for a bit - my one recommendation is not to get too attached to the premium features. Unless you need to distinguish between 5 hours spent in MS Word and 30 minutes spent in 10 different documents, a free account is still great. Bonus for laptop users: it’s quite light on resource usage.

Dropbox & Dropbox Folder Sync
I started using Dropbox to access shared files from the DM of the Cognitive Science D&D group, but I stayed because I can easily make backups of things like Rainmeter skins and other tweaks I’ve made. The Public and Photo folders have their uses, too. While the option is still available, you can score some free, permanent space upgrades by testing the photo upload feature. I got 5 gb from it when it first came out, so I’ve got plenty of space - unlike every other Dropbox user, I’m not pimping my referral link!

** 2-star software **

WriteMonkey / Q10
“Distraction-free writing programs” that offer minimal features and, more importantly, minimal UI. WriteMonkey is more frequently updated and provides more features, but I couldn’t quite get it to calculate things like page lengths correctly. They’re worth trying if you get distracted when you want to write, but they don’t have the pure text processing power of other programs.

Soluto
Soluto is occasionally useful, but it’s worth installing to look at your boot times. I’m not sure how the “delayed start” feature works, but I’ve had no problems with it. Soluto doesn’t solve the problem of slow boot times, so much as it highlights the actual culprits for you: all that terrible software you installed with the default options checked.

* 1-star software *

KatMouse
This is a small utility, but a useful one. It only does one thing: makes your mouse scroll whatever it’s currently hovering over. Saves you from having to put a window into focus. I know, you might not have this problem, but if you ever do!

Miranda IM
My multi-client IM program of choice. Best for masochists with hours to waste tweaking. I almost wrote a quick-start guide for it, but then realized nobody would care. Let me know if you care! I still use it over Pidgin almost entirely because of a contact list theme called Malice Tab that gives me a small visual dock for my contact list. Sexy, lightweight, and (with enough blood, sweat, and tears) configurable.

PhraseExpress / Texter
I don’t actually want to recommend either of these pieces of software. PhraseExpress is a resource hog, but it does work. Texter is, disappointingly, the exact opposite (it will break, inexplicably, after prolonged use). But text expansion is extremely cool - being able to type common words and phrases with a few keystrokes would be great for taking notes, or any other situation where there’s common vocabulary/phrases. There are good options for other platforms, but nothing that works for me on Windows (on a desktop, you might like PhraseExpress - but configuration is rough). Check Lifehacker’s posts on text expansion if you’re still interested - I think there’s are some good options on OS X, and maybe something workable for Linux.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker
This is a great tool that bundles many useful registry hacks (both enable and disable) in one convenient UI. It works on Vista and Win7. Check it out, for sure. Personal highlights: disable automatic restart after Windows Update (“Security Settings”), everything under “Additional Tweaks”, especially removing arrows from shortcut icons and removing the ’-Shortcut’ suffix on new shortcuts. Take ownership and ‘open command window here’ are occasionally useful, too, and also under “Additional Tweaks”.

Right-click menu editors
I have two categories of tools here: one for Firefox, and a handful for Windows (Fast Explorer, ShellNewHandler, the somewhat inferior ShellMenuNew, ShellMenuView, ShellExView, and OpenWithView). It’s the same idea either way - remove the useless clutter from the right-click menu. I don’t use LibreOffice file formats, so I don’t need the right-click “New” menu to offer me six file formats I don’t even use. You may not care! But I enjoy this level of control.

Why I actually like customizing my PC

I said I’d write about customization at some point this week, right? Well, I meant to do it earlier, but instead I spent the last couple of days customizing Emacs. I was having too much fun to appreciate the irony of the situation. On the bright side, I’m just about ready to use Emacs for damn near everything ever, which should be fun. This has an unexpected benefit to you, my dear reader, because you’ve been saved from a lengthy post.

        Originally, I was going to write about the process of setting up my system - I figured that someone, somewhere, would appreciate it. I used to get really jealous of people’s desktop setups a few years ago, and I would have loved to see them include instructions on how they did it. I took a bunch of screenshots to build the post around, and I even knew what I was going to write about them. You can still see those screenshots here, if you want (not pictured: drop-down terminal, best used with Cygwin’s bash). If you like what you see, I’ve got contact info at the bottom of my actual tumblr page - I’d be happy to help!

        While some of the changes I’ve made are purely cosmetic, it’s all been about setting up a system I’m happy with. More importantly, setting up a work environment I’m happy with. I use my laptop for taking notes in class, where battery life trumps all other concerns. I use my laptop for writing papers, for writing code, for browsing the web, for keeping in touch with friends - the list goes on. Long story short, I’ve been working for a couple of years now to get a user experience I’m happy with on my laptop. With this latest round of customizations, I think I’ve finally gotten there. I’m embracing the keyboard a lot more to get things done quickly, and with AutoHotKey, I’ve got a lot of power to make things juuuust right. I turned my right alt key into ctrl, for example, which keeps me from stretching my pinky all the time. I found out about using ctrl+backspace to delete the entire preceding word rather than mashing the backspace key a bunch - then I remapped a key combination to do it without taking my fingers from the home row. Now I’m typing away as fast as I can think, and it’s awesome, and I’m genuinely happy to be using my computer.

        When I’m not wrestling with inconsistencies created by multi-platform software interfacing with Cygwin behind my back, anyway.

        So this post isn’t as horrifically boring as I thought it might be. On the other hand, it’s nowhere near as interesting. Hmm. Well, you’ve got the pictures, right? Look at them! I’ll have more interesting things to say in the next post, about software, because that’s where the magic happens. In the mean time, I’d better start actually using Emacs to do work…