Never used it so far, but recently came across the NEO keyboard layout [1]. Unfortunately the website is in German only, but just looking at the interactive graphic should give you sufficient information how it looks like. The only German word you need to know to understand the graphic is „Ebene“, which means layer. What I find particularly interesting is „Ebene 3“, or „layer 3“ and the corresponding repurposing of the capslock key. Personally I definitely intend to try the NEO layout soon.
Thanks for the reply! What I just don't understand is, doesn't that mean every company is more or less data driven? I'd assume most companies act according to some key metrics they collect.
Not necessarily, some are driven by customer demand, some by community features or some by investors. It depends on the stage of the company too. An early stage start up sometimes simply does not have enough bandwidth for metrics. Slightly more mature startups can begin to base project based decisions on data.
Two years ago I bought my first pair of barefoot shoes (no elevated heel, thin and ultra flexibel sole) after listening to an episode of TED Radio Hour, where they featured the talk “Born To Run” and started reading more about the whole idea. I started to learn how to walk forefoot strike and did a running course for how to run forefoot strike properly. This was the start of going down a never ending rabbit hole. Some of the things I learned during the past two years:
* Learning a new walking technique is super hard, it takes at least months, if not even years.
* Wearing barefoot shoes and walking forefoot strike seemed to significantly decrease my lower back pain (although I’m not a 100% certain if there is a correlation, I just know that my back pain decreased a few months after switching to barefoot shoes)
* Got rid of my neck pain completely (I’m extremely certain that there is a correlation here, because my posture changed, more on that in a later point)
* I realized that my leg muscles (especially hamstrings and calves) are extremely tight and possibly also shortened. In the beginning I had trouble to get my heel to the ground without feeling tension in the calves.
* Just because I adapted my style of walking, my posture increased significantly. I walk and stand way more upright than before (I compared recent pictures to older pictures)
* Significantly decreases the number of migraine attacks. I’m also quite sure this is because of the forefoot strike (although not 100% certain) since heel strike puts a lot of pressure in the neck and head. You can easily Test or experience this Stress on the neck and head yourself if you stick your fingers in your ears and walk barefoot with heel strike over firm ground. You should “hear” it. For me it works best when I put in noise cancelling over ear headphones and walk heel strike (no music, just the noise canceling effect).
Of course all of this is highly subjective and many/all things I described may not correlate at all. This is just my personal experience.
Fellow "minimalist" shoe walker/runner here. Running with a forefoot strike makes sense as the idea is to tilt forward slightly and basically use gravity to help pull you forward, naturally landing on your fore-to-midfoot. I cannot imagine how walking with a forefoot strike makes sense though? Do you also lean forward when you walk?
In addition, another benefit of running with a forefoot strike is to keep momentum while leaning forward and avoid jarring pressure going up your leg on each strike as you run. For example, if I try to land on my heel when running barefoot it physically does not feel right and when I do it the collision hurts. But walking barefoot and landing on the heel feels completely natural and pain-free - the step is very light and the contact point is maybe slight-heel-bias-to-midfoot, nothing like slamming a heel into the ground while running. When walking you do not create as much pressure through your heel unless you really stomp down on it for some reason.
We have some research showing potential benefits of running on your forefoot - does any such research exist for walking as well?
AFAIK (spouse is an OT, works with PTs, puts up with my barefoot nonsense & enjoys explaining biomechanics to me) forefoot walking is something to avoid. Leads to shortened calf muscles/tendons, can lead to problems in old age as balance degrades.
There's also some interesting anthropological work by Esther Gokhale about gaits in indigenous peoples indicating that heel-first walking is natural, but very different from the gait induced by cushy shoes - no slamming on the heel, place the front heel on the ground while the back foot still supports all of your weight. She does sell books and workshops, but I found her book at the library, tried out the exercises, seemed legit.
Anyway, YMMV! Don't take my word for it; check out the primary sources, etc. If forefoot walking works long term for you, then go for it - one of my in-laws only walks on her forefeet /shrug.
Please take my reply with a grain of salt, it's subjective and not backed by any research.
Is it really the case that you lean slightly forward when walking forefoot strike? For me it's the opposite, my posture is way more upright in forefoot strike than it is in heel strike.
When I walk (or run) heelstrike, I usually put one leg forward and "fall" on that leg, which causes me to lean forward a bit.
When I walk (or run) forefoot strike, I do the opposite. I slide one leg backwards and thus push my whole body forward. My other leg lands directly under my body, I don't have to stick it out much to land on it, compared to heel strike.
Try to walk in heel strike very very slowly (like in slo-mo), maybe you'll feel that "falling" sensation and lean forward like I do. But it could also be that you walk slightly different than I do and don't experience the same.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any research, but I also don't actively search for it.
> Learning a new walking technique is super hard, it takes at least months, if not even years.
I guess that this might strongly vary with age. Anecdotally, the two times I consciously adapted a new gait, it went pretty quick:
- At around age 13 I adapted a "bouncy" gait with outward pointing toes, because I thought that it looked cook (cringe). Took about a week IIRC.
- Around 17 I switched to what I would call a standard gait (toes pointed straight ahead), because I was afraid my previous gait would cause bowlegs (probably an unfounded fear). Took me about two days (with a lot of walking though), and also had the benefit of better posture in general
I remember watching this David Attenborough program where he was talking about the hunting techniques of some bushmen in Africa. They did a close-up shot of their feet while out on a hunt and they were wearing regular track shoes:
> * I realized that my leg muscles (especially hamstrings and calves) are extremely tight and possibly also shortened. In the beginning I had trouble to get my heel to the ground without feeling tension in the calves.
I recommend "Squat Clinic 101" video to address this issue
What brand did you buy ? The first result from google https://www.vivobarefoot.com/eu seem to have let go of the vibram finger look. Is it still the same thing ?
My first pair were the "Gobi 2" from Vivobarefoot. Later on, I also tried Zaqq and another brand I don't recall right now, but didn't like them since the toe box[0] was too small for me. My toes spread significantly since I started walking in barefoot shoes, so a big enough toe box is the most important factor for me.
The Vivo's are definitely not in the vibram five finger look, nor were other brands I tried.
[0] Toe box: Front part of the shoe, were the toes are. Here's a comparison of a regular shoe and a barefoot shoe. If you follow the link below, you can see that the toe box of the barefoot shoe is significantly wider.
https://www.botyluks.cz/user/documents/upload/Rozd%C3%ADl%20...
Go walk outside without them on something mildly unpleasant, like "chipseal" pavement or gravel for short distances - the increased feedback will encourage you to walk gently (advice stolen from Barefoot Ken Bob's book, which is rather nice).
Take it slow. Don't feel like you have to go 100% minimal-shoe all the time. Take your shoes off at home. Maybe get a pair of thin sandals - I personally like Xero Shoes (they also sell a kit if you're into that, and they're one of the only pairs of sandal I've had that actually last for multiple years). Moccasins are also lovely, if you can find some with a thick sole (or buy some buffalo hide and DIY!).
Minimal shoes don't last any longer and generally aren't any cheaper than regular shoes in my experience - getting comfortable with your feet on the ground when possible is the cheapest long-term option.
Find somewhere where the ground isn't artificial and walk around in bare feet. How you walk changes very much when the ground isn't a firm flat plane with shoes on.
As obvious as it may sound, just buy a pair of barefoot shoes. Go into a store close to you and ask the staff for help choosing the right shoe for you. Definitely get some insoles for the shoes as well (since the sole is usually very thin). This reduces the stress on the sesamoid bones (I think they're called like this) a lot in the beginning.
Then just start walking outside. Watch some youtube videos on how to do it and just experiment and adjust the way you walk all the time (to give you a bit of perspective, occasionally I even play around with my walking style today, 2 years after starting). I tried to see it a bit like a stretching exercise in the beginning. If I felt a stretch of tight muscles (usually calves), I assumed that "I did it correctly"; like in stretching, where you only feel a deep stretch if you do it correctly. But important note: This only worked for me because my calves were indeed tight. If this is not the case for you, this analogy won't work for you.
But most importantly, listen to your body(!) and don't be afraid to look stupid in public (experimenting with your way of walking, while learnign a new way walking, will definitely get noticed by others the beginning; at least that was the case for me).
Keep in mind that it might just be a trend, cause damage, and keep you from running long distances. It's good for selling products and courses, if you want to go that route though.
They did an AMA on Reddit a few months ago[0]. I remember this AMA in particular because they thoroughly explained why they designed some features in certain ways. Overall they said their target customers are the ones with absolutely no IT knowledge.
I guess this part from one of their answers fits your complaint quite well:
But here is the thing -> YOU can work around this problem, the naive customers CANNOT. Honestly, they are too computer-illiterate. But even computer illiterate people deserve to have their files backed up, and they are the target market for Backblaze Personal Backup. [1]
From this point of view, I guess a "delete" button could be fatal for some of the older folks out there. But I don't use Backblaze, I don't know if my comparison makes sense and we both talk about the same thing. The Reddit quotes refers to their "Backblaze Personal Backup".
I'm the Backblaze employee that wrote that quote. :-)
> YOU can work around this problem, the naive customers CANNOT.
That was specifically in response to a Backblaze Personal Backup feature request.
> I guess a "delete" button could be fatal for some of the older folks out there.
Just to be clear, Backblaze offers two product lines: 1) Backblaze Personal Backup which is designed to be simple and easy to use, and 2) "Backblaze B2" which is designed as a toolkit for programmers and IT people. So in this particular case, we SHOULD have a "delete all files" button (for IT people), and we know this currently sucks (it's on a roadmap to add the feature).
You can select "some group of files" (like one folder) and delete them all at once from the web GUI, but if you have like 1 million files (which is a perfectly reasonable and normal backup) the web GUI will "time out" and fail to delete all the files in one operation.
The current recommended work around is to write a very short "life cycle rule" in the web GUI that deletes any/all files 1 day after it is uploaded and let it run for 24 hours and come back to an empty bucket. Yes, I know this is lame. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/lifecycle_rules.html
To paraphrase my quote about computer naive users, the reason we don't prioritize this particular feature higher is the IT people (like yourself) are capable of doing the crazy work arounds like spinning up an EC2 instance. :-) But we will get to it, I promise!
In our defense, we have 5 open programmer job recs, and 5 open IT job recs, and we're having trouble finding enough (qualified) people who want to come help us build these features for customers. If you want to work in a really fun employee owned business in San Mateo, California where you can bring your dog to work, please come and join us! https://www.backblaze.com/company/jobs.html
There are all sorts of ways to created a delete-bucket button that avoids tech-illiterate fat fingering. Like simply burying it in options. Requiring end user to make a billion individual requests is almost as bad as making me call a number to delete my bucket.
I’m voicing this here because I was surprised at the UX. I was happy with my backblaze experience otherwise. My bill was incredibly cheap for the amount of data and access I was using. I’d consider using it in the future for things we generally default to S3 for.
We all know the type of people OP is referring to. Pretending they do not exist does not really make anyone's life easier, especially when the discussion at hand is literally about trying to make their life easier by reducing the possibility of a mistake.
The people OP is talking about are ones who are not computer literate. Those people can be of any age. There's just no reason at all to related it to age.
Or perhaps an overbroad generalization? If you work in adult day health dealing with backblaze personal backup IS in fact beyond the abilities or interest of many of the folks there.
Or do you not have personal experience working with the very elderly? The very elderly engineers are more into electronics (physical) and can run rings around younger folks on older electronics (repair / vacuum tube testing etc). But I've not seen high levels of interest in things like Backblaze personal backup API's.
Very old folks can start to lose decision making capabilites. It has nothing to do with IT knowledge. It's why mostly old people fall victim to email and phone scams and refuse to believe the truth even after you show them mountains of evidence.
There are good UI solutions to this problem... For example, a dialogue box that asks you to type "Yes I am sure I want to delete all my data, forever". We do things like this for internal tools at work, seems to go pretty well.
Bear in mind the specific case being discussed is for B2 buckets, not Backblaze personal backup. Anyone using the B2 interface directly I would hope could be viewed as technically competent. If they can distinguish between the two on their end, it would make sense to provide it as an option for B2 at least.
The best way to deal with 'are you really really sure' is something like send an email with a link you have to visit as confirmation as that breaks you mentally out of the 'keep confirming without thinking' cycle which we are all at least slightly prone to given the number of confirmation dialogues we all see these days.
GitLab makes you do something similar to delete a repo, but not as explicit with the message. I think you just have to type the repository name in a box (to confirm you read the instructions) and click the delete button.
> How do those customers ever delete anything? Click every single file?
The current recommended work around is to write a very short "life cycle rule" in the web GUI that deletes any/all files 1 day after it is uploaded and let it run for 24 hours and come back to an empty bucket. Yes, I know this is lame. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/lifecycle_rules.html
Just to be clear, there are two separate product lines at Backblaze: 1) Backblaze Personal Backup which is COMPLETELY automatic and you don't need to delete anything, ever, it is all automatic, and 2) Backblaze "B2" which is a toolkit for IT people and programmers. This is only a problem for the "B2" side, and the IT people and programmers (for now) can write a script or write the "life cycle rule". But we will get this fixed, it is on the roadmap.
Fool is a tough word. IMHO it's terrific how quickly you can go from an idea to a local dashboard, but on the other hand it's non-trivial to get it from the one-person dashboard to a >1000 user production application with some uptime guarantees, authorization, metrics, error collection.
Not OP, but many think that Disney's launching it's streaming service will kill Netflix since it will pull all of it's content from Netflix and other streaming sites.
Hyperbole much? Granted I‘m not most people but what keeps me subscribed and using a streaming service is steady new content. Nobody does that better than Netflix. At least for now. Have you seen Prime Video? It‘s basically barren. I can count on one hand the originals they put out this year. Hanna, Good Omens and Homecoming (I think).
It’s not really hyperbole when they’re actually going to be facing a massive content drought in the near future and won’t be able to justify price increases while offering less. There was a quote from the Wall Street Journal even saying “the three companies launching new streaming services have created TV shows and movies that make up nearly 40 percent of the viewing minutes on Netflix.“ Netflix may seem to put out content frequently, but it’s 100 miles long and two inches deep.
Amazon and disney just have more firepower. Amazon has the expertise in hosting, disney in content making. Amazon can drain customers with prime, and disney with the existing portfolio. Both have infinite cash to aquire and create new licences.
No matter how good I think netflix is, and despite their now long and good track record, they are entering a new fight bare handed against machine guns.
But they own about half (Disney Studios, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, 20th Century Fox, Searchlight, NatGeo, and I am sure I forgot a dozen others), and they might never licence it to a "competitor" again unless they are forced to do under some sort of FRAND unbundling of content and distribution.
Netflix only needs to make a few good movies/comedy specials/tv shows a year and I'll keep my subscription. Amazon/Disney does not put out good content
I've started to sleep on the floor (better said, on two or three blankets on the floor) a year ago because I've read somewhere it helps with back aches. The first week was weird and uncomfortable, but I got used to it quickly.
I've never slept that well (frequent sleepless nights before switchting to the ground) and my aches almost vanished.
I got rid of my bed since I didn't need it anymore and realized how much space it took (I live in a single room in a shared appartment). Now my smallish room seems so much bigger, I literally can't even use all that space efficiently (I live quite minimalistic).
Sure, this isn't for everyone, but overall I can't stop thinking that something I took for granted (everyone needs a bed, right?) is in fact nothing but an accessoire that, in retrospect, even decresed my quality of sleep, therefore even my quality of life.
Do you sleep in the same spot every night? I'm chuckling at the idea of you getting tired and just picking a random bit of floor within your house to lie down.
You made me laugh, thanks! I do have three blankets (on which I sleep) that I store in my closet during the day. Most of the time I put my bed on the same spot, but sometimes I move it slightly (towards the windows on hot days, etc.), although not that much.
I slept on the floor for 6 years, only getting a bed several months after I bought my house. No furniture either other than two fold out tables for old Unix work stations and a bean bag.
It’s an excellent method of birth control; no bed that is. The work stations don’t help either.
> I've started to sleep on the floor (better said, on two or three blankets on the floor) a year ago because I've read somewhere it helps with back aches. The first week was weird and uncomfortable, but I got used to it quickly.
> I've never slept that well (frequent sleepless nights before switchting to the ground) and my aches almost vanished.
> I got rid of my bed since I didn't need it anymore and realized how much space it took (I live in a single room in a shared appartment). Now my smallish room seems so much bigger, I literally can't even use all that space efficiently (I live quite minimalistic).
> Sure, this isn't for everyone, but overall I can't stop thinking that something I took for granted (everyone needs a bed, right?) is in fact nothing but an accessoire that, in retrospect, even decresed my quality of sleep, therefore even my quality of life.
Do you sleep directly on the floor with no padding whatsoever? I tend to sleep on my side or stomach and have never been able to sleep well on a bare floor.
I sleep on 2-3 blankets, so a little padding. But too much padding gets uncomfortable for me. Let me try to elaborate what I think I learned during the past year. But take it with a grain of salt, it's just subjective perception:
I slept on my side or stomach most of my life, it was the only comfortable way to sleep for me. I started to sleep on the ground just like that and guess what, the first nights were horrible. Once I started to sleep in different positions, everything changed. My theory is that there is no real feedback on a mattress/very soft ground. I can sleep like I want and it will be comfortable, even though it might be "bad sleeping posture". If I do the same on the ground, there is no padding, my body gets real feedback and reacts with pain in bad "sleeping postures". But what does the pain tell me? In one way: Sleeping on the floor is bad because it hurts. In another way: My way of sleeping is bad because it hurts, so I need to change it.
An example: Sleeping on the stomach on a mattress is still somewhat "comfy" for me (even though I don't like sleeping on a mattress). Sleeping on the stomach on the ground is a no go, because my weight presses my chest against the ground, making breathing way harder than sleeping on my back with no weight on my chest. I just got so used sleeping on my chest that sleeping on the back was horrible at first, but once I got used to it I felt more replenished the mornings after. So if I sleep on my stomach like in this example, is sleeping on the floor bad because I can't breathe properly, or is sleeping on a mattress bad, because I don't get the necessary feedback to realise it affects my breathing? I guess that is something everyone needs to decide for himself, but for me the answer is: sleeping on a mattress is bad.
How does that affect your romantic relationships? I imagine you're single since you don't mention a co-living situation which would otherwise be relevant. I imagine taking a girl home you without a bed might not be ideal.
Also, does it affect your ability to sleep on a regular bed without issues?
I do have a girlfriend, but she's studying in another city. We see each other almost every weekend and agreed that I visit her place most of the time, since she can't stand sleeping on the floor.
It does affect my ability to sleep on a regular bed a lot (I sleep in her bed when I'm at her place). It's super uncomfortable for me, I don't feel as rested the next morning and she tells me that I am snoring very loudly and frequently in her bed. Sometimes I sleep on her floor as well, and according to her I my snoring almost disappears on the floor.
The biggest problem I have with sleeping on floor is that I have to literally walk on the mattress or blanket in order to lie down or get up, which is just so icky to me.
If that is strange you'd find it stranger to know that I am Indian and sleeping on floor is both tradition and sometimes compulsion due to poverty (though I was never poor). I was fine with it all these years and don't know what changed recently.
Your point that sleeping on the floor is "compulsion due to poverty" is something I started to think about alot since sleeping on the floor. It made me realise how much we ("wealthy people") isolate/distant ourselves from the ground. Sitting on the floor? That's weird, better sit on a chair or the comfy sofa. Sleeping on the floor? Even weirder. Walking barefoot (something I don't to, btw)? Ew thats gross!
But the result (or at least what I can say about myself) is that our range of motion gets worse every year, which ultimately leads to aches, pain and even worse stuff.
If one of the main arguments (that I hear all the time) against sleeping and sitting on the floor is "but you have to get up from the floor all the time, I couldn't do that", I'd argue that proves my point. Altough its might be just a biased gut feeling.
I slept in a sleeping bag on a stone tile floor for 3 weeks as a student when my furnishings hadn't arrived yet. When my bed got there, I still reverted to the floor the first few nights a I had so gotten used to it. I think I could have gone your path, but did not because I required (some) more cleaning (dust on a hard floor is more noticeable), and admittedly out of convention/habits.
Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I really enjoy 'The Daily Stoic' by Ryan Holiday [0].
There's a page for each day of the year (so ideally you would read a page per day). Each page has a short quote from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and others, together with an interpretation of Ryan Holiday. For me, this wa an easy way to get started with the whole topic of Stoicism and some of Senecas and Aurelius ideas.
What helps me most is to focus on the steps. This invisible force you describe is nothing that prevents you from doing anything (based on my experience, I can't know how you perceive it), but a step you want to skip, but are not able to.
You mentioned you have a strong urge to get up since everything is settled. Maybe this could be the invisible force?
You think (based on general believe how things should be done) that you need to get up since everything is fine, because that's what people do, right? Things are settled and you want to chase your dreams, thus this is what you need to do now, right? What else should you do?
You may stress yourself subconsciously which puts you in a vicious circle. If that could be the case, do something you enjoy, instead of chasing something.
But again, this is based on my experience, so I share my view, not telling you what the right thing is. I can't know.
[1] https://neo-layout.org/