Havn (en)

Norsk versjon 🔗 This is my favourite cap (and headgear in general) of all time. And this is also a good example of something I love in general: Simple products, made extremely well. These caps are made at the same factroy that does caps for the Japanese baseball league. Several brands have tried to get the factory to produce caps fro them, but without success. According to Self Edge, Hiro (the man behind Poten, who also has a huge baseball card collection) had to visit the factory several times, over three years, to show them that he cares enough about baseball to have them produce caps for him. Lucky for those of us who don't play in the NPB! But what's so good about these caps then?

(This post is “an email” to David Pierce of The Verge.)

Hey, David! With Neeva shutting down, have you (or anyone at The Verge) ever considered doing a review of Kagi? ? I’d love it if, for instance, a couple of staff members used it exclusively for a month, and then talked/wrote/made a video about it!

One of my favourite tech products!

I like to try things that are less “big tech”, so I tried DuckDuckGo for a while. But I kept having to go back to Google for searches here and there…. But I also love the idea of paying for things online instead of it being ad supported, so I tried Neeva and Kagi. The latter was much better on Norwegian searches, so I’ve been sticking with that over over a year. But as opposed to DDG, I never feel the need to go back to Google! Not only is it “not worse”, it’s “better”. For instance, I’ve ranked up Reddit in my searches. As their only incentive is to make results better for the user, you can do stuff like that…

Ok, so this is by far the most niche thing I've ever written. But after getting a great jacket (that I'll write about some other time!) that only had one problem, I wanted to gather my thoughts on this tiny subject. The “problem” was: It doesn't cuff perfectly.

What's the deal with cuffing anyway??

Cuffing is when you fold the sleeves of a shirt, jacket, sweater etc. It's also commonly used when you do the same to leg opening of pants or shorts. And I'm an avid cuffer! The three reasons are:

1. I'm 1.75 m tall, and my legs and arms aren't especially long – so clothes are usually too long.
2. Related, I like watches, bracelets, shoes and socks – and cuffing shows them off.
3. I often think it makes the clothes themselves look better.

Here's some examples of what I mean by nr. 2 and 3:

The cuffed shirt makes the watch more prominent - to myself and others.

Norsk versjon 🔗

Advice for students and non-techies

These things move up and down – but the fall of 2022 is an excellent time to buy a Mac. Apple’s new processors (the M1 family and the M2) makes the machines very fast, while being very efficient. The latter leading to great battery life and quiet operation (if you’ve ever had a computer that sounds like it wants to take off and fly into the horizon, you know that’s not always the case). This doesn’t mean there’s no great Windows PCs on the market! However, the days when you had to overpay to get an apple on your computer, is passed – so for most people I would recommend getting a Mac (especially if you own an iPhone). There are still several reasons to get a PC, among them:

• If you would rather not pay $800+ for a laptop
• Know that you use software not available for macOS
• Use the machine a lot for gaming
• Or you just know that you prefer Windows to macOS

But this isn’t a Mac vs. PC article – let’s get to the advice!

Storage and memory

Norsk versjon 🔗

Here's a remake of backgrounds from this thread that I made since the links were dead. These were inspired by u/rzalexander and made with free illustrations from illustrations.co. I've tried to adapt the illustrations to iOS 16's new home app, so that the text and icons are visible.

I've also made companion backgrounds for use with iPad and Mac. Since those windows resize all the time, using two tone and illustrations was a no-go. So they are just one colour backgrounds (I have one using the dark colour and one using the light one. I've used the latter). I've made backgrounds for 13 different rooms (3 versions for each room).

Norsk versjon 🔗

And what Apple means when they say “Retina”

I’m pretty sure the Apple Studio Display is overpriced. Still, the discourse after its announcement has been plagued by people not quite understanding the difference between 4k and 5k on a 27-inch display. It’s just one kay difference – why can’t you just buy a 4k screen that’s cheaper, brighter and/or has a higher refresh rate? Why do some Apple fans crave this extra kay so much?

Marc Edwards, of Bjango, wrote an excellent piece on this, and I especially like the visual examples of 5k vs 4k on macOS. As a maths teacher, I find this problem interesting, and in this article I will bring some light to this issue the way I would to a high school class. Perhaps this makes it easier to understand why the issues Edwards highlight appear.

What’s in a kay?

To narrow things down, I’m just going to look at 27-inch screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio (so no super-wides here!). Let’s compare the three most normal resolutions at this size: 1440p, 4k and 5k. Humans are notoriously bad at comparing numbers. Every day there’s a new tweet trying to help us understand the difference between a million and a billion by remind us that:

• One million seconds ≈ 12 days
• One billion seconds ≈ 31 years

So, it’s forgiven that people think 4k and 5k are pretty close. However, 5k resolution has a lot more pixels:

Norsk versjon 🔗

«Why?»

Card protectors, or sleeves, are perhaps the most common accessory for games. There are two main reasons for sleeving your games:

1. To protect the cards (kinda says so on the tin)

2. To increase the sense of quality, much like component upgrades

The protection part is especially important if the cards are of high value and/or gets shuffled a lot. Both are true with most collectable card games (CCGs), like Magic The Gathering – and this is why the sizes used for these games has the best selection. Shuffling with sleeved cards feels a lot better than unsleeved, so that affects both point 1 and 2. You can also get them with matte finish, to reduce glare.

Here’s a guide to how you should proceed if you want to sleeve:

Norsk versjon 🔗 Adidas has made their Stan Smiths since the 70s, and you can see them everywhere all summer. They are good-looking shoes, but where the earlier versions were made in France and had high quality, you can’t quite say the same about the newer ones made in India. They can’t be fixed, uses synthetic materials and someone would prefer a bit more modern design.

Common Projects

In later years, Common Projects, with their golden lettering, has taken the sneaker world by storm. With a more modern, minimalistic design, Italian leather and good Margom rubber soles, they aren’t cheap.

But when you pay well over £300 for a pair of Italian designer shoes, you can expect excellent quality, right? Well, it’s superior to the Stan Smiths, but for the price you could do better. The YouTube channel Rose Anvil goes into detail in this video, but the short version is that, while the shoes have some premium features, both the material and construction is pretty mediocre. In this article, I’d like to point at a brand that gives you a more premium sneaker, at a (slightly) lower price.

But in the end I will also share why I still understand why someone would opt for the Common Projects!

Norsk versjon 🔗 I’m going to try something that I know is impossible – talking about a profession as one entity. In Norway, there are 77,000 teachers, and of course, all of us are individuals. Still, there are some things I’m pretty sure many teachers agree on: We are tired of people with little expertise telling us how to do our jobs. The pendulum swings from one side to another, so what was in vogue 30 years ago is now considered the newest hotness. Be it politicians, parents, or others – many teachers want to be left alone, and be free to do a job they’ve many years of education and experience in.

But many have written about this before.

I would like to point at a problem this has led to. It has, in my view, created a sort of hardness in the profession that’s made us impervious to change. I understand why, but we mustn’t fire our clay. By this, I mean that we have to stay like lumps of clay: have some structural integrity while still being malleable.

Norsk versjon 🔗 This post is based on a feature article published in a Norwegian newspaper, Dagsavisen. I’ve attempted to extract the main points, and make it valuable for anyone reading. Some sources I can only find in Norwegian, so let me know if you have questions about the sources!

The introduction of one-to-one digital devices in Norwegian schools was, and is, highly uncritical. Around the country, students and teachers has gotten devices thrown after them without a proper plan. In many places, this has led to schools not able to afford books alongside their iPads or laptops. This again has led to protests from teachers and parents. But while I agree with a lot of the critics, their answer is often «less technology», but I think the answer is «better use of technology».

Why?

First, we have to answer one critical question: Why do students need their own devices? Why do we need to digitise our schools? The answer is twofold: