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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It really awesome when it comes to reading and annotating PDFs. That’s the main reason I got it — so many e-readers I’ve tried over the years have been horrible for PDF documents and as a professor that’s like 80% of my day. For ePub documents, it’s very capable now — even if that wasn’t the case a few software versions ago. That said, the experience is a bit idiosyncratic among e-reader devices. The Remarkable basically converts the ePub to a static document so that the UI can more or less treat it as a PDF, which is a different user experience than some other e-readers. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s different.







  • Indeed! I teach an introductory web design class for undergraduates and despite my best efforts it takes a lot of students the whole semester to figure out file paths. If I had more time in the term, I think I’d dedicate a unit to it, just to get everyone up to speed — and I may have to do it anyway. In fairness to the kids, even Mac and Windows machines these days do a lot to minimize users’ exposure to file structures in the name of usability. Meanwhile, the phones and school Chromebooks they’ve grown up using completely obfuscate this information.



  • Not lesser known, but maybe under-appreciated. I rewatched “Oblivion” the other evening and enjoyed it. I perused reviews afterward and they all panned the movie for being too long and plodding at two hours, which makes sense I guess. But, honestly, after the subsequent decade of three- and four-hour blockbuster schlock, “Oblivion” now feels like a taut little thriller.



  • For me the benefit of the various mismanagement crises at Twitter and now reddit is that they push enough people to alternatives to create a critical mass there. Mastodon will likely never be what Twitter was, but enough interesting people and enough of my professional network now have a presence on the latter that it’s become a viable alternative for me. Same thing here. Whether or not Lemmy ever reaches reddit’s proportions, there are enough interesting links and discussions here to keep me occupied. And if not, I could probably stand to spend a bit less time on social media anyhow.




  • I reached the stage of a (non-fiction) writing project where I had tons of notes, but no sense of what an eventual manuscript might look like. I discovered Zettelkasten and it was a revelation, not because I think it’s the only way to write, but because it was an answer to my precise problem of how to turn a ton of notes into a manuscript. I’m still a long way from being finished with my project, but I can get my pen moving every day and that in itself has been an enormous relief.