You are describing Real Time with Bill Maher. People continue to watch his show. At least, I think you are, because I’m not sure what a “questionable guest” even is.

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.

My purpose in life is to be happy. My primary challenge in life is to find the things in life that make me happy and try to find ways that those things can make other people happy.

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Our system of measurement. There can be only one!

Thank you for posting this. I have been avoiding updating to synergy 3 and now I’m glad I did. I still like version 2. I would still recommend it. I even use it with gaming.

Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.

how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

Choose not to save at all or

To my knowledge, this can’t be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The “Save changes before closing?” dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the “Don’t Save” button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.

Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.

For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:

1. Command-Shift-S (Save As)
2. Command-Shift-G (Go to)
3. ~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab) (which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)
4. (enter)

But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let’s walk through that now.

In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:

touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don’t have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:

nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

Now I’ve opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.

Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.

bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn’t even exist until you save it.

So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.

Oh, one more thing: if you don’t know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I’ve ever come across for computers.

Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.

Exactly. These things seem common because we see examples of them amplified on social media. Most of them are vanishingly rare.

Be sure to get a nice headshot of the CEO. Something lighted from below. Make sure he or she doesn’t smile; tell them it’s more professional that way. Desaturate the image so it’s black and white. Take the picture from a low angle to give it that look of distinction and confidence!

Now this has some potential! I have something for my nighttime reading list! Great post!

Most people pick an instance by collecting a list of instances that are physically close to them, and then reviewing the /instances page to see how big the block list is. Lemmyverse.net can tell you how many users are on those blocked instances.

Heck yeah! I can’t believe how popular that game was. Every time I bring up this era, everyone talks about it.

I was a big Tradewars 2002 fan, myself. You can still play it, which is what made me start to think about connecting it to Lemmy somehow. That, and Nethack.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We’ve had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that’s difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Paradoxically, Apple has regularly introduced features over the years that result in me needing to use my devices less. When I got my first iPhone (an iPhone 4, I believe), every little notification would light up my phone’s screen. These days that doesn’t happen, and Apple has further cut down on those intrusions with focus and bed time configurations. I’m big into using HomeKit for home automation. And while it annoys me that home automation is still such a simple application, Apple has done a good job of insulating me from the need to use my devices when I want things to happen in my home.

In short, letting myself take advantage of the Apple ecosystem reduces the touch-points of the technology I use. I just have to invest the time to learn about features and how they work, and to tune them to my preferred lifestyle.

Religious people clearly use critical thinking. They just base a lot off of flawed premises.

I live in Utah. Mormons are absolutely required to tithe in order to participate in temple ceremonies. I’ve never been LDS, but my understanding is that the accounting for how much you tithe is carefully monitored. It’s also my understanding that you must participate in temple ceremonies to achieve admittance into heaven.

As an atheist, I had to ask myself how I know people are worshiping a god. In the US, it seems to boil down to a few things:

1. Giving money to an organization in order to participate with the community
2. Showing obedience to authority by allowing them to dictate some (but not all) of one’s behavior
3. Being hyper-focused on how the organization got to where it is today and whether what they do today aligns with its initial values and goals
4. Performing rituals in hopes of causing specific outcomes

Based on this, I am already worshiping Apple.

Could you expand a bit on step 4? Do you have to create just one shortcut, or do you create multiple shortcuts?