Foam hand sanitizer, medallions, and updates
You think you write good commit messages until you have a project due in an hour. That’s when they start looking like this:
An update on “Programmable by Design”
Over the summer, I wrote an essay on wanting more digital tools to be directly programmable. I’ve since learned that there’s a name for this idea: end-user programming. It seems like a lot of smart people are putting thought into this. Here’s an interesting writeup on end-user programming from Ink & Switch, an industrial HCI research lab.
Wrangling time
Some things I discovered about productivity:
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Working at home is comically unproductive; libraries, on the other hand, are magical for focus.
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Moving my charger away from my bed has been saving me almost 20-30 minutes every night. It’s that thing where you’re almost asleep but then you remember that one thing that you absolutely must jot down RIGHT NOW.
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Mornings have much more momentum when I "set up" at night. This means getting all my stuff together to leave the house in the morning. When it’s time to leave and my stuff is strewn around my room, I’m more likely to feel a general sense of chaos that kills any momentum.
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It’s important to feel like you’ve accomplished something during a break from work. I’ve started taking breaks by doing other, more fun work, getting something to eat, or just sitting and watching people walk by. If I feel like I got nothing out of my break (let’s say I doom-scrolled Instagram) it slows me down when I get back to work.
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Not all alarm clocks are made equal. I was setting my alarm on a Google Home, but waking up to a robotic death rattle is far too jarring. I’ve taken to setting it using my Apple Watch’s Sleep app, which slowly taps my wrist over the course of several minutes to wake me up.
Foam hand sanitizer
Some cool design I noticed this week: There are two types of sanitizer dispensers at Berkeley. One kind dispenses a gel, and the other dispenses foam. The foam ones are genius. Why? Because you have to rub quite a bit to get the foam to disappear. This is Good Design (TM) if you want to make sure people actually use the sanitizer properly.
(As an aside, I’m not sure if these dispensers have always been there or whether they were put in place during the pandemic; in any case, I hope they stick around, because Berkeley can be downright nasty sometimes. I’d suggest a selection of holy books adjacent to the dispensers.)
Wooden medallions
I made this medallion with the Blueprint logo and values at the Jacobs makerspace. It involved laser cutting a vector file, sanding the cutout, and finishing it with polyurethane. (Design credit goes to a Blueprint member who made this a couple years ago.)
I’m trying to figure out how to align the design on the front and back, since the laser cutter can only engrave one side at a time. I might put a repeating pattern on the back so that alignment becomes a non-issue, but I’m sure makers have found cool ways to get alignment right.
Thanks for reading!