…

Great. You’ve managed to conjure up the imagery of him inventing TSL, or Trump Sign Language.

Time to go look for some cat videos.

Reminds me of the Abbot in Sir Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time.

He’d never pick up a single bit of trash

With those hands?

I’ll see myself out

Why say lot word

I have a friend who is graphic designer for a small shop. Customers drop off work at the front desk, and depending on how much effort it works out to be, it can land on his desk.

Some customers insist on explaining to “the designer directly”. They get told/warned that it’s more expensive (hourly) and that the clock starts as soon as he walks up to the counter. And some customers agree to these terms.

It’s always entertaining to hear his stories.

I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.

That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.

Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.

I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.

I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)

Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.

Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.

I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.

Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.

I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.

Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.

As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.

Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.

In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.

A similar suggestion to the other poster:

Try relocating one of the troublesome units to someplace nearby but not mounted to the ceiling. The top of a bedroom dresser, the floor, a bathroom countertop, the top step of the stairs, halfway down the stairs, hanging from a wall (picture hook)… just get creative.

And since you haven’t mentioned it, I presume these are all smoke detectors? Do you have any heat detectors or carbon monoxide detectors installed?

Brb getting my name legally changed to Absolute Truefacts

and what looks to be some sort of dried landlord repair fluid.

Not that the landlord needs to be really broken before you’re able to see the benefits of using the repair fluid.

For slightly broken landlords, don’t waste perfectly good repair fluid on them.

I did that for one neighbour in one apartment complex where we lived. Her laptop sucked ass beforehand.

Dunno about “usually”. Our last house was fairly nice, but didn’t have this sink feature. That said, you could walk around and see where the builder went for the cheapest option available.

That said, this kitchen sink feature should literally be the absolute minimum for consideration.

Dude needs to get with the program.

Use a single plate, cup, knife, fork, spoon, lot, pan. Never unbox the rest.

Either that, or just eat over the sink.

It really comes down to apps.

The only flag you mentioned that caught my attention was Word and Word templates. I’ve not tried Word templates.

I figure your options are either Libre Office or something cloud based, eg, Google Docs.

One thing you could try is to set up a VM or boot a live CD (USB) and try on the things that most concern you.

Around 15 years ago or so:

Everyone got a $5 Starbucks gift card for Christmas.

There had been no raises or COL adjustments for years.

I’ve taken to using a checklist on my phone that I update daily. However, remembering to use it is still a problem at times.

So my B-tier power would be Remembers To Use Checklist At Least Once A Day Man.

Trade-off: anyone you want to be intimate with falls asleep from your relaxing touch.

So much for sexy time.

The trade-off is you now have a 1d4 chance of stepping on LEGO bricks in the dark. Even if you don’t own any LEGO.

A residence floormate I knew back in university also worked as a bartender at a hotel.

His one story relevant to this thread is he once poured a drink for a customer over ice without measuring it. Think scotch or whiskey. Customer said there’s no way that’s an ounce. They argued for a bit; my friend poured everything from the glass into a shot glass minus the ice, and it was exactly on the line. End of argument.

He admitted to me that some of that may have been water from the melted ice.

In my teen years I used to be able to do a pretty solid rendition of a dentist drill. Much to the discomfort of everyone within earshot.