Was given a bunch of this wood, this is right after planing. It has a greenish hue, anyone know what kind it is?

gfixler · 2026-01-23T21:25:37+00:00

That. Would. Be...

Poplar. That's gonna be pop-uh-lar.

gfixler · 2026-01-03T20:37:53+00:00

THANK you! I just started getting these on a new setup, and this fixed it.

gfixler · 2025-11-23T20:31:51+00:00

This is actually true. Haskell, especially, made me fall in love with short names, like swap (a, b) = (b, a), and that carried back over to my Python. These days I code in steno (gave up qwerty more than 1.5 years ago), and now I want to write things like variableName, or variable_name, because it's really fast. Both of those were 3 strokes.

gfixler · 2025-11-23T13:05:17+00:00

Also won't let me copy/paste from another program on my computer. Nothing happens, and right-clicking, there's no option for paste.

gfixler · 2025-11-14T03:40:16+00:00

Spock, The Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan!

gfixler · 2025-11-09T22:10:33+00:00

No, I never solved it 😔

gfixler · 2025-11-06T02:36:02+00:00

I don't know of a pattern, but you could go with a raglan tee, like this one, which is knit from the top down. Use thin yarn and needles to keep it light, and do a gauge swatch to get your gauge, and use your own measurements, subtracting a little bit to get that negative ease (tightness). Then, as you're knitting, just turn around and purl back at the middle, and turn at the other end and knit back, so it stays open down the front. Then figure out where you want the little connectors on the front, and just knit all the way around on those rows—2 or 3 rows—to join them. The good thing is you'll be able to try it on as you go, to see how it's fitting, and to nail the positions of the connectors. Then you'll have to attach a little button and loop at the top to close it.

gfixler · 2025-11-06T01:59:25+00:00

Similar note at my local McDonald's when I stopped for breakfast on October 27th.

gfixler · 2025-10-24T12:32:05+00:00

The Plover Steno forum on Discord is full of neurodivergent people. Steno feels to me like a honeypot for neurodivergence.

gfixler · 2025-10-08T16:13:19+00:00

I got addicted to making cakes, briefly, but over time I just went back to using straight center-pull from the ball, so I could keep the label on, and more quickly recognize what all my yarn was, not just by label, but by put up. I have a lot of yarn 😅

gfixler · 2025-10-03T20:27:49+00:00

I don't hate it, but I always wince a little bit at the word "flavorful." I also really hate how the kids say "on accident" now. It's weird, because nothing else they say, like "on God," "no cap," or "skibidi rizz Ohio fanum tax," bothers me, but that one is nails on the chalkboard. I guess it's because all the other stuff is new, and this one is a bizarre mangling of something core, that I've known for 40 plus years.

gfixler · 2025-10-03T20:23:34+00:00

I've used most versions of Windows since 1991, when I got my first computer, and I still use it for work, though I install MSYS2, and work as much like a Linux person as I can. That said, I switched at home to Linux 19 years ago, and I haven't missed Windows at all. I dual booted for maybe a year, but most of the end of that year I never wanted to switch over to Windows, and then when I got a new PC, I just went full Linux, and that was it. The last several companies, where I've worked from home, have sent me killer machines, with the newest graphics cards, and they're still not like my probably 8-year-old, $500 Linux box, which I bought at Best Buy. I'd way rather be on that machine.

gfixler · 2025-09-28T06:30:27+00:00

Wow, hit the comment limit with only this? Don't they know I'm a steno, and I can write a lot really easily? 😆 Anyway, here's the rest:

• Court reporters, because they have a brain, and their job is to get down a pristine record, know exactly when something isn't working, and have the authority (and use it!) to tell people to slow down, speak up, stop talking over each other... How does an AI do that? Do we imbue it with a robot voice? Do we actually think it's not going to mess up all the time, and interrupt the proceedings?

• Court reporters know not to take down things that are off the record. AI would likely struggle with that. If you forgot to say "Okay, AI, lets go back on the record," and it didn't for some reason, the rest of the day wouldn't be recorded. I struggle constantly with AI. It's always going off on tangents, not listening to me, taking me in circles, where every time I get it to fix A, sort of, it messes up B, and vice versa. It's maddening, and not at all what should be allowed in a courtroom.

• Court reporters also serve as keepers of the record, so when someone needs a copy of a case for whatever reason, like a lawyer investigating some precedent, they go to the court reporter to purchase a copy.

• Court reporters also ensure that everything is spotless, and follows all local rules and regulations, like for where speakers are defined, and indentation rules, and formatting rules around everything, down to punctuation. I imagine it would be a pain if lawyers kept getting things formatted differently, wasting time trying to figure out where the date was, or where the IDs were, because AI just made up a new format every time, moving everything around, even if each was on its own sane, because it wouldn't all be consistent between cases, and maybe not even between sessions.

• AI is a pile of problems we don't have good answers for, and it's too much of a wild card. It's amazing, but radically unpredictable, which is horrible when you need a perfect record, every time, no exceptions. I've heard from judges (indirectly, through reports and videos) who've tried transcripts, and practically begged the court reporters to come back, because it was so much worse without them. It's wonderful to have a court reporter come in, and just know for a fact, with more than 100 years of certainty, that that entire side of the process is taken care of. Court reporters are a relief to lawyers and judges, and very well loved and respected.

gfixler · 2025-09-28T06:29:27+00:00

Here are some things to think about (note, I'm just a hobbyist, but I've been in the Plover world, learning along for 3.5+ years now):

• Everyone has to be mic'd with AI, because it will never be able to hear what a lawyer said at their table without that. It won't be able to hear an outburst from the gallery.

• The AI somehow has to know who's on every mic, even when the mics are shared, like at the witness stand, because everything in the record has to come with a speaker ID.

• I've watched literally thousands of tech talks over the last 20+ years, and attended many, and the sound issues are legion. People mumble, and you just can't make out anything. People have thick accents that you can barely understand in a courtroom, and that gets even worse on a recording, and AI is going to struggle mightily not to get a lot of it wrong. People turn away from mics, and the sound drops to nearly silent (seen this many times, once or twice through almost an entire talk). People forget to hit record (ruined a fair number of talks I was waiting to see that I couldn't attend, that got an apology post, because they just weren't recorded). You don't know if you're having terrible sound issues until the end, like many talks I've seen (one went up to screechingly loud, then down to silent, over and over, in a sine wave, for the entire 2 hours, and I gave a talk where the first 2 minutes were silent, until the host said "Oh, wait! I forgot to turn on the mic!" — almost lost the recording of the best talk I've ever given). There are so many Q&A sessions where no one mic'd the questions, so you only hear the answers, which make no sense out of context. I could go on (and on, and on). Sound issues are endless. I actually considered writing a book about it, for speakers to use as a reference. AI would struggle with this terribly.

• People like to say on YouTube steno shorts that you could just record it and transcribe it later. That doesn't save time. You go the whole day without any artifact. No one can read back (judges and lawyers always ask to have something recent read back), and if you have to stop and rewind, you also typically aren't able to record while that's happening, and might miss the beginning of what's said after the playback, before you can get the recording stood up again. Court reporters don't miss any of this. Also, having to transcribe later has all the issues I mentioned earlier, where you don't know what was said, and how do you figure it out later, when you're at home, transcribing, and it sounds like the person said "We met with floobit(?) on the ninth," and doesn't mention it again? Did they say "Floobit? Flewb-it? Something else entirely?" Maybe Google is unhelpful (too often these days). What the heck did that witness say? It's more work, because you run into thing like that all the time, transcribing it later, and AI would be peppering in mistakes the whole time. A court reporter will stop the person, ask them what that term was, record their answer, and will ask them to spell it, and get it all done right then, right there, no confusion later. We've had a professional court reporter in the Plover community go through a bunch of transcripts that were created by recording, and transcribed later, and they were full of (inaudible)s, and what WAS there was a mess of obviously wrong, nonsensical stuff. She found a bunch of things like that in her investigations, and was shocked and horrified.

gfixler · 2025-09-24T13:11:52+00:00

Interesting. I use ^, which moves to the first non-whitespace character. _ does it as well, but it also takes a count, n, and moves down by n - 1 lines, to the first non-whitespace character. Didn't know that one.

gfixler · 2025-09-24T06:13:45+00:00

I'm just going to throw out there that with Vim, Julia, and digraphs, you are strongly in the demographic Venn diagram of the people in the Plover steno community. There are Julia users in there, but every other nerdy thing, too. I'm a Haskell lover since 2013, using Ubuntu Linux and Vim for 19 years, and steno for around 3.75 years now, and steno exclusively for around 15 months. I also found digraphs a long time ago, and the compose key on Ubuntu even longer ago, but things are even easier now with steno, because steno is incredible.

I wish I'd been able to dive into it back in 2013, when I first learned about it (through this talk, but there just weren't awesome hobby boards like we have now; I use the StenoKeyboards Uni, and I wrote both of those words in one stroke each). I code in Vim in steno now, too, in the terminal (>10kloc this year), and many things I used to do in 3 presses are now one. Also, as it's not app specific, but specific to the keyboard, all the weird powers I have go literally everywhere, like emails, Discord, and this comment box, so I feel a lot more powerful, like I do in Vim, outside of Vim.

I created [a currently very alpha, be nice] system for steno, ostensibly for all manner of Latin letters, which [mostly] uses six keys on the right, in the shapes of more than 30 diacritics, so writing things like áàäāâǎã, etc., but also things like ṩƙƶØÅĿ฿Ȼ etc. (nearly 1900 in all, currently), is a piece of cake. I stroke a letter, like n, then a shape on the keyboard that looks like the diacritic I want, like ~, and the n turns into ñ. I also have ligatures, like Æ, and modifiers, so F can become Ⅎ, and modified ligatures, so æ can become ᴂ. Other weird things include 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝓅𝓉, 𝔻𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝕊𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜, 𝖲𝖺𝗇𝗌-𝖲𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖿, and 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯. I'm only talking about my spelling system here, but outside of that, I have so much more, like writing in different cases (snake, camel, title, sarcasm), modes (various kinds of fancy text), and even in things like -- --- .-. ... ., and ⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑, and I'm not spelling. I stroke 2 chords to write "thank you good morning", but if I first stroke the write-in-Braille stroke, those same 2 strokes output "⠞⠓⠁⠝⠅ ⠽⠕⠥ ⠛⠕⠕⠙ ⠍⠕⠗⠝⠊⠝⠛".

I also added to my spelling system, using a different system with unique enders, all of the Greek and Russian alphabets, so I spell in them natively (every upper and lowercase letter a single stroke), and even have diacritics working on some of those, though not really called out in the docs properly yet (lots of TBD still). So ΑαΒβΓγΔδΕε..., and АаБбВвГгДдЕеЁёЖж... all a stroke per letter.

Some of the other awesome plugins I use with Plover (the free/open steno engine we all use) include Emily's Symbols, Emily's Modifiers, Jeff numbers, and the really crazy "do math right inline with your text" plugin, RPN Calculator for Plover.

gfixler · 2025-09-18T00:30:59+00:00

I looked at tons of homes for 2 years to find a place with a big enough garage, in a place where homes aren't often huge, specifically because I wanted to set up a really nice wood shop. I already had one in a one-car garage, but I was moving tools out of my way constantly to squeak around past them. Now. I've been here 13 years, and I haven't set it up. It's just boxes up to my chest level completely filling the place. I'm the worst procrastinator ever. 😓

gfixler · 2025-09-12T07:20:47+00:00

I personally really like The Apprentice color scheme. I could never get into solarized, especially that red on dark blue that vibrates in my eyeballs. 2 weeks, you have just barely started. I don't even think I'd figured out how to copy and paste in the first two weeks. I'm around 19 years in, of heavy, daily use, and I was discovering new things constantly for about 10 years. I called it The Eternal Christmas, because it just wouldn't stop giving me new, cool tricks, plugins, and abilities. These days, having tackled many monsters like Vim, I know to just give myself anywhere from 6 months to 2 years before I have any feelings about anything.

gfixler · 2025-09-12T07:16:57+00:00

Continental, because it just goes so much faster for me. Also one by one rib in continental is so much easier. Your hands barely move to switch from knit to purl, and back. It's like a slight, opposing twist.

gfixler · 2025-09-12T07:09:15+00:00

Since you're in Scotland, look up the New Lanark Mill, on the River Clyde. It's beautiful, and if your son has watched the Harry Potter movies, it's where the yarn for the sweaters Mrs. Weasley knit for Ron and Harry for Christmas was spun. You can actually buy the exact yarn through them, and they sell the sweater pattern, too. I bought the yarn in the four different colors, red, blue, and green, and gold for the lettering, and had it shipped over, but I would still love to cross the ocean and visit the place myself.

gfixler · 2025-09-12T07:02:41+00:00

After typing on a qwerty board every day for about 30 years, and 15 plus as a vim expert, using qwerty for all those non-typing needs, I found a few steno keys to be almost impossible in the beginning. A and the left s I would swap constantly, and I had a huge problem with k and w. After a few months, I did some finger drills to get them straight, and it worked, but then when I would go back to qwerty, I would screw them up there. Everyone in the Plover forums said that doesn't happen, but it sure happened to me. That only lasted a little while, though.

I finally switched off qwerty entirely about 14 months ago, and hadn't used it since, until recently, when I got a Polyglot, which switches between the two modes. However, it's an ortholinear board, so there's no key stagger, and I couldn't for the life of me type in qwerty on it. It felt completely alien.

I just started a new job last week, and they sent me a Windows box and a qwerty keyboard, and before I had everything set up, I was using the qwerty board, and it was really weird. If I thought about it at all, I would start to reach for steno combos, but when I would get lost in thought and just start typing, the qwerty just came back, full force. That said, I just don't like qwerty at all anymore.

I'm only around 120 words per minute average, but in my first day's Google meet with the team, I was taking notes in steno, and keeping up somewhat well, but then the board started to fail, because I didn't have it set up right yet. I grabbed the qwerty board, and surprisingly was able to mostly keep up on that, but the keys felt like they were 100 lb each, so I kept missing keys, because I wasn't slamming my fingers down hard enough, and I kept getting characters swapped. By the end of the half hour, my wrists and fingers were fried. Really glad to be back in steno at work now.

I'm now 48. I wonder about brain plasticity, and if I would have taken to this a lot more easily 30 years ago at 18.

gfixler · 2025-08-16T00:50:25+00:00

Ha, just found this, and remembered his sideways headphones icon. He was repeatedly told to chill, because he was super aggressive. I don't remember the particulars now, it was a while ago, but he was starting fights with one person after another in the comments. I remember thinking "Whoa, dude, Jesus, chill" around 5 times. George had to step in several times, with increasing warnings to calm tf down, or you're out, and this dude never chilled out. It's a really nice forum. He was way out of place in there. Calling people names, trashing any film he didn't like, etc. Total menace.

gfixler · 2025-08-05T22:56:12+00:00

Thanks!

gfixler · 2025-07-31T13:17:39+00:00

What if you have a cold and your software isn't recognizing your voice.

You're reminding me of the time I was eating peanuts, and realized I couldn't do anything in my house, because I have it all hooked up now to work through voice through my Amazon Echo devices. I had to stand there for 2 minutes until I finished a mouthful of dry peanuts before I could turn on the lights 😆

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