gxx's comments

If you need progressive lenses and spend a lot of time in front of a screen do yourself a favor and invest in some "office lenses", preferably "premium" office lenses: https://www.verywellhealth.com/progressive-lenses-3421915

When I first needed progressives I quickly developed severe shoulder pain. I was unconsciously tilting my head up to view the top of the screen through the middle of the lenses. It took two or three years to realize that my shoulder pain was caused my head tilt pinching a nerve in my neck.

"Office" progressive lenses have the middle of the lens focus at screen distance and the bottom of the lens focus at reading distance. Premium lenses are even better in that their region of sharpness is larger. When ordering glasses I also specify how far up on the lens I want the screen distance to be set so it's at my preferred screen distance.

Since I started using office progressives my shoulder pain has vanished.

I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)

At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.

Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.

The article says that apes can't talk because of limitations in the part of the brain that controls the muscles of the mouth. Their ability to sign shows they do have the mental capacity to learn to communicate but with their hands. This may not extend to speech specifically for the reasons discussed in the article.

I have limited eyesight - good enough to work on a bright magnified computer screen. When I bought a new Macbook Pro I couldn't read the Touchbar and of course there's no tactile feedback. It's even worse that the keys can change with context. Due to my eyesight I also often tweak the screen brightness for best readability with the up/down function keys. The slider doesn't work well for incremental adjustments especially when you can't see it clearly.

I returned the Macbook within a week and had to buy a lower model with real function keys.

I tried configuring fixed locations for the most important keys but could not work without the tactile feedback of being centered on a given key. I guess there's some sort of voiceover but it would be annoying and slow. I didn't need voiceover before so why would I want to use it now to accommodate Apples latest gimmick?

Actually I wonder if it would work to add tactile feedback by 3D printing a thin overlay that adds frames around keys configured for fixed location. Or maybe someone could offer a product that is a Touchbar overlay made of clingy silicone?

Edit: Something else I wanted to add: I've tried switching to Windows (several times) but I can't work without Apple's Ctrl + two-finger up/down full screen magnification. Window's magnifier is a poor substitute because it's not full screen. The magnifier can be made the size of the screen but then it's clunky to move the focus of magnifier, and update is jittery. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please look at Apple's screen zoom and give your magnifier a mode like that - a full screen infinitely variable zoom that continually centers the focus on the mouse pointer.

You can append !gvb to a DDG search to directly perform a Google verbatim search. It's the fastest way to do a Google verbatim search - faster than Google's own UI.

Not only does appending !gvb to a DDG search perform a Google verbatim search, it also directly reveals the Google UI for searching a date range.

The combination of normal DDG plus easy access to Google verbatim and date range seaches gives a pretty nice search experience.

Every Macbook I buy I use some sandpaper (medium coarse and then fine) to round the sharp corners between the sides and the surface containing the keyboard & trackpad. I especially round the sharp points on the corners of finger-cutout to open the lid.

I also slightly round the edges where the sides meet the top and bottom surface of the case.

The result is that those sharp unpleasant feeling corners are now silky smooth, around a 1 mm radii. I'm surprised Apple didn't design it this way in the first place.

Note: It's important to be cautious not get any aluminum dust in any of the ports or electronics.