xkcd Blog

Talking about stuff like this is bound to sound esoteric, I think. So
I want to put this disclaimer upfront that I detest esotericism.

I can only assume that your problems are similar to mine, so I can
only suggest what works for me. And that might not completely work out
for you in the end, but it's worth a try for sure.

Concentration: The problem of not being able to keep distracting
thoughts away can be lessened with meditation. I came across this
suggestion in the book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning [1] and have
found an excellent CD to listen to called Guided Mindfulness
Meditation [2] by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

I tend to try to avoid meditation because for a while I seem to do
fine and so long as I do fine it just feels like a waste of time for
me. Time that I could invest reading a book. But eventually I always
end up having an extreme amount of distracting thoughts to the point
that I cannot learn anymore. I've now had this problem crop up often
enough with meditation always helping that I'm now a lot more willing
to spend the time and meditate. I want to emphasize that for *me* it
was necessary to get to the dead end and suffer from it to become
willing to change something. Maybe you can relate.

Structure: Well well, the way you write it sounds a little bit rigid
to me. I tightened up imagining all that structure you strive for and
I'm thinking you should relax a little bit. Or at least…

When I upgraded Kindles, I had to go without one for a little while after I sold the old one. There was a book I wanted to read at the time, so I picked up a mass-market paperback of it. I found that I preferred reading on the Kindle in almost every way. It's more comfortable to hold, you can make the text bigger, and you don't have to move it around when you change pages (related: http://blog.xkcd.com/2009/04/13/the-pursuit-of-laziness/).

So then I hear people say things along the lines of "Sure ebooks have their advantages, but a physical book just feels better". They often make it sound like everybody either agrees with them or is indifferent, but this isn't the case.

Ebooks are cheaper to distribute than physical books. They are easier to carry around (thanks to the Kindle synchronization service, I _always_ have my book with me, because I always have my phone). The barrier to entry is lower, so we get to see books that wouldn't have, otherwise. Sure, a lot of it's crap, but most of everything is. We get some good stuff, too. The increased convenience and available gets many people (myself included) to read more. Moreover, some people, like me, just like it better.

Then I hear people say that the impending supremacy (in the sense of popularity) of ebooks over physical books is a catastrophe?

What?

More people are going to read more books, more often, more easily, and this is a tragedy? Really? How is this not excellent? How is this not wonderful?

Besides, physical…

Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/)
to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered)
; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.

A few feeds I follow:

News

* Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page])

* Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php)

* ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed)

* TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb)

* Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index)

* iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml)

* TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak)

* r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss)

Blogs

* Securelist -…

Just leaving some links here because I had been researching this intensively before a planned shoulder surgery:

(Definitely adding this to my list)

Frogpad: German language one handed keyboard. Unfortunately discontinued http://frogpad.com/

Mirrorboard (my favorite): Intruiging mirror solution that builds upon the assumption that it is easier to access muscle memory from the other hand when you've learned it before https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard-layout-for-the-lazy/

Mistel Barocco fully split Keyboard: Can (and unfortunately must) be programmed without software. Right half is the main keyboard. Left side connects to it, works also in standalone mode but is not programmable then. https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/bd20945a731491407807e80d48c5d790

Wow, awesome. This looks very very slick, and the Google Reader direct import is just...nice!

Bug report, though: A couple of my blogs that I chose to "turn on" only show up as their comments feed. If I go ahead and turn them on, and click on the feed itself in the left pane, I get the site (fair enough), but the list of items in the bottom pane then only shows up the comments feed items. And clicking on them takes me to the comments. weird.

Haven't been able to figure out why. E.g. the XKCD blag (http://blag.xkcd.com) and Cheap Talk (http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com) feeds.

p.s: when this bug is fixed, and archiving support added, I'm totally premium-ing - hold me to it! Great work once again!

> For a light treatment of the topic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Please don't. The "banana equivalent dose" people make the wrong assumption that the excess potassium brought in the organism by eating a banana stays there for 50 years. Because of the way potassium homeostasis works, the excess is eliminated within a few hours, when urinating.

So let's reduce the average exposure time from 50 years to 12 hours and the radiation exposure from 0.078 microsievert to 0.00000213 microsievert. We're losing respect for some cool comic strip in the process[1], but the reality is worth it.

[1]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/