As I am living an almost mouse free life, automatically setting the input focus at the window (or input field) that I am currently looking on, would be a very nice comfort feature.
Last time I researched this, I could not find a solution, that works on Linux and also has widescreen support.
I am mostly mouse-free too, so I feel inclined to answer.
For many pieces of software it's possible to use it with a keyboard-only. This is neccessary for accessibility, but it's also just what the good old hotkeys do.
Doesn't work for everything but it already gets you very far.
On top of that, there is some software that is made to cater specifically to keyboard-only use. Many tiling window manager work well with just a keyboard ( I personally am partial to i3[0]) and even for webbrowsers there are extensions like tridactyl[1] that make it easier to use without a mouse. That doesn't work for everything. It's possible to do 3d work without a mouse - but I find it easier to have access to a mouse. Specifically a trackpad.
This can of course be turned on it's head, and you can use something like dasher[2] to do your typing and - to get this back on topic - dasher can be used together with eye tracking to live a "keyboard free life"
Inflation of specific asset prices is also playing into this. Money is losing its value. Try buying a house with a regular wage nowadays. Politicians, central banks and economic experts are sleeping at the helm.
Cheap wants, expensive needs. This is our economy now.
"I love my iPhone, but I worry about health insurance." as I've heard it put here on HN.
Ironically, the Soviet system fell from opposite. Expensive wants, cheap needs. Everyone saw the West getting cheaper and cheaper consumer goods and central planning failed to keep up.
Once Perestroika liberalized their economy, they had distribution issues, sure.
But before then, housing, food, clothing all were cheap and available. The food was simple, the apartments small and the clothing dull, but it was all there and for very little cost.
But they liberalized their economy in order to compete on the consumer goods boom in the West. That desire for consumer goods had a big role in destabilizing the system.
And today, the converse desire for cheap staples and necessities in the face of intense asset inflation may be destabilizing our current system.
I suggest talking to some people who actually lived through the pre-perestroika era in the USSR.
Yes, there was generally clothing in stores. Whether there was clothing in your size (no matter what size you were; pretty much all normal sizes tended to be hard to find in practice) was a big gamble on any given day.
When you say "apartments were small"; I just want to make sure we understand that we're talking about things like a family of 4 living in a 16 sq meter room plus shared access to a small kitchen (this is personal experience here).
And note that if we're talking about smaller towns or villages the situation was different yet again: more living space, but running water might be a real problem. Heck, consistent hot water was a problem even in reasonably large cities.
The 80s brought their own set of problems, but it was not all rosy before that, by a long stretch. Saying "it was all there" elides the fact that what was there was quite poor quality, especially compared to what was available even just across the border in Romania, much less Western Europe or the US.
I'm not sure this is true in the US. There were multiple stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits. A lot of central bank money ended up in the hands of regular people. This is something that should have happened a lot sooner than 2020-2021.
Land values going up is how the system is rigged. That has nothing to do with your money.
Here is the one thing, that works for me, if I must read a text:
While reading I use a Text-To-Speech-Engine to read out the text at the same time. TTS-reading speed should be at least 1.5x. It should not be too easy to keep up.
I have no explanation why this works, but it does. Maybe someone else with ADHD finds it useful.
You may also want to try reading with earplugs in or over ear hearing protection if you find plugs uncomfortable. I didn't realize how distracting normal background noise is until it wasn't there.
Assuming that people didn't like all year round DST, it's presumably because a lot of people actually like the shift depending upon where they live. DST year round means that where I live sunrise would be about 8am in midwinter. Meanwhile someone far west in a timezone is getting a relatively late dawn in the summer in spite of the fact there are lots of daylight hours.
I suspect a connection with the intestinal flora.
Bacteria in the intestinal flora are able to synthesize all kinds of neurotransmitters from carbohydrates.
I myself become very lethargic under a normal carbohydrate-containing diet. On low carb I have a lot of motivation and a lot of energy.
> because people have little control over when their day starts.
This is actually one of the best arguments for standard time all year around!
If we force people to start the day at a specific time, we have the obligation, that for as many people possible, this time will be in sync with their circadian rhythm. And this can be guaranteed best with standard time.
> If we force people to start the day at a specific time, we have the obligation, that for as many people possible, this time will be in sync with their circadian rhythm. And this can be guaranteed best with standard time.
Neither Standard Time nor Daylight Savings Time align with our circadian rhythms, because our rhythms change in response to external stimuli like the sun. The rising and setting sun varies a lot and differently depending on your latitude.
As for the obligation you propose, let's say I work for CompanyCorp. And let's say they normalize on starting work at 8:00 am Standard Time. That means Larry who lives 5 miles from CompanyCorp wakes up at 7:30 am and makes it to work on time. I live 5 miles from CompanyCorp in the other direction and because of traffic I have to wake up at 6:30 am to make it on time. So does CompanyCorp have an obligation to Larry or to me? What about Greg, who is a headbanger, and has long, luxurious locks that necessity an extra 15 minutes getting ready?
Additionally, CoffeCo has to open up to provide service for all of the commuters who work at CompanyCorp, so they open at 6:00 am to be open in time for me to get coffee before work. And, of course, the schools have to be open so parents can see off their little ones before work.
I'm frankly not sure how you do this for "as many people as possible" without just moving the time forward an hour to help everyone who isn't currently best served be served a little better.
>one of the best arguments for standard time all year around! [...], this time will be in sync with their circadian rhythm. And this can be guaranteed best with standard time.
To clarify because of possible imprecision around the word "standard". I think what you're saying is that circadian regularity is best achieved with "unchanging" time instead of "standard" time.
There's Standard (capital 'S') time where the high point of the sun roughly at ~12pm. And then there's Daylight Saving time where the high sun is roughly at ~1pm. A circadian rhythm can be compatible with either of those systems if it's kept the same all year long.
Sorry for being imprecise, but I actually meant Standard Time (as in noon at about 12pm). Our circadian rhythms are not as flexible as many people think. There are many studies showing that people sleep less if the sun sets later, causing a net sleep loss with related health problems.
The sun sets when it sets. We are choosing what clock label to put on that moment.
Getting up an hour earlier and thinking of the same clock position as "later in the day" is exactly the same as using DST— except clock noon and solar noon won't be permanently misaligned.
You know solar noon is not necessarily noon. Right? Pretty sure it changes throughout the year, too. If so, that seems more an argument for dst. I'll check in a bit. Someone may just know, though.
DST doesn’t have anything to do with the oscillation of the true noon at any location by +/-15 minutes around the year (that cycle is not even summer/winter).
The chart shows at what time noon happens when you have a 24-hour clock calibrated to get it right on average. For example, a clock showing GMT assuming you’re in Greenwich.
If you add or subtract hours to your clock instead of keeping a 24 hours day length then yes, you will have jumps. But those jumps are caused by you playing with the clock, they are not real.
The fact that Daylight Savings Time exists doesn’t have anything to do that the duration of the day is sometimes a few seconds longer and sometimes a few seconds shorter than 24 hours.
If noon was always 24 hours after the previous one the line in that chart would be flat. With discontinuities if you want to include DST shifts in the chart, but I really don’t see the interest in doing so.
The rationale for applying DST has nothing to do with that variation, it would be just the same if the time from noon to noon was always 24 hours.
This feels like a classic case of talking past each other.
First, I will acknowledge you answered precisely what I asked. Thank you.
I would like to get DST back in context, since it is in that context that I asked. The assertion seemed to be that solar noon being at local noon had some advantages. I agree that is begging the question to assume it, but I am just exploring the consequences.
So, assuming I was asking for drift of solar noon to local noon, we have to account for our messing with the clock. Because we do and did. Would there be advantage to us having a mechanism that more closely aligned them? More, what would that mechanism look like? I was guessing that it would look similar to DST, just with 30 minute swings, not 60.
Let’s assume you’re at longitude 0 and noon happens for you at 12:00 (on average). If there were 24 timezones of exactly 15 degrees of longitude each there will be places at longitude +/- 7.4999 which are in your time zone where noon happens at 11:30 or 12:30 (on average) and never at 12:00. If you want to “fix” this problem you need to add timezones, not to mess wit the clock.
If you only care about your (latitude 0) time of noon which is given by that chart and you want to make it closer to 12:00 by splitting the year in “winter” and “summer” time (with only two changes in the year) you would have winter time from late-december to mid-june and summer time from mid-june to late-december and apply a time shift of about 10 or 15 minutes. This is just a guess, you may take that curve and optimize the timing and magnitude of the shift to approximate the curve with two constante segments. Or more that two, if you want.
I hope Germans also reconsider and start listening to the scientists!
This is again one of those issues where people voted against their own interests, because they associate summer with warmth + light and winter with cold + darkness.
