archduck · HackerTrans

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Hell yeah. I bought the Milwaukee shop vac a few weeks ago. Didn't realize it comes without batteries... which come without a charger. But I couldn't be happier with it. We have a cat that will create mounds - tall mounds - of cat litter in front of the litterbox entrance. Just hurls it out the hole somehow into a big pile. I just empty out the big tray at the bottom of the shop vac, suck up the litter in a few seconds, and dump it right back into the box. It's quick, clean, and easier than trying to change a cat's behavior. And for cat barves, like when they eat too fast, I just take the filter out and vacuum that up no problem, and it's powerful enough that you can't even tell that anything happened on the rug. (It's always on a rug, never on the hardwood floor. Naturally.) It's a game changer for this cat owner.

archduck

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I'm the same, for the most part. I worked at a small dev shop with two coworkers. One liked to put on classical music, and the other would often play whatever the hell kind of music Pat Metheny is, and while the richness of those particular genres appeared to _stimulate_ their ability to code heads-down, it rendered me pretty much useless. My attention would glom onto the scales and arpeggios of Vivaldi's Four Seasons or onto the weird proggy time signatures of the other stuff.

However, I have had much success with black metal bands that shriek (or whatever) in a foreign language. The fullness of the sound - blast beats, distorted guitars - just really does it for me for some reason. And I don't get distracted by the vocals because I don't understand e.g. Finnish (and with bands like Horna, it's probably better that way). It makes finding that flow state much easier, and I suspect it may be working as a fidget spinner does: a certain base level of constant but predictable sensory input soothes whatever it is in my brain that gets me antsy when engaging in an activity that requires a lot of energy expenditure without proportional immediate feedback. But as soon as you up the complexity of the music past a certain point, it swings all the way the other way and makes willful concentration pretty much impossible.

Yep. It's ADHD and its weirdness with the rewards system, for sure.

archduck

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I totally forgot about Ad Nauseam! I used to use it instead of uBlock Origin (which, if I remember correctly, is what Ad Nauseam actually uses for its adblocking). Google banning it from their extensions marketplace only strengthened my loathing for Google and my resolve to use it. I don’t remember why I eventually stopped - probably the inconvenience. Now that I’m a Firefox user, I should pick that back up and give it a spin again. It was entertaining to see the visualization of all the ads it had clicked on.

I also used to use Chaff (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chaff/jgjhamliocfh...), which opens up a tab and browses on its own when the browser is idle and disappears when you start using it again. As with Ad Nauseam, the means of protecting privacy behind it is not anonymity, but rather obfuscation - muddifying your actual browsing behavior by flooding the data you leave behind with junk data (at which point it ceases to be data, I suppose). The problem with that extension was that I would sit back and wait for it to start browsing, and then I’d waste too much time watching it / customizing its behavior.

The book _Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest_, written by the authors who developed Ad Nauseam and TrackMeNot, has a great chapter on chaff (the obfuscation tactic, not the Chaff extension mentioned above).

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