I never thought of cycling like this, but it totally makes sense.

And I’ve always associated bikes with escaping…

Bikes are self-propelled, but after a point they just seem to take over. That saying, “It’s like riding a bike,” is so pervasive, because bike-riding is in our bones. You can’t forget how to ride a bike, because the act is itself a sort of forgetting. A few pedals, and the world whizzes past in a blur. Cars are like little rooms, big enough to carry multiple passengers and, thus, their own set of problems. Buses are even bigger and compound that effect. But a bike is made for one person, and it seems to move just fast enough that problems can’t catch up.

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This app is super-useful for switching keyboard layouts on Windows.

Windows’ normal behaviour is for windows to remember what layout you were using. There’s no built in way to switch the layout globally. This is a drag when I usually use Dvorak, but sometimes need to quickly switch to QWERTY for others to use my PC. This tool adds a shortcut to your system tray, so you can switch layouts globally.

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Aaron Swartz death is really sad in so many ways. I think this is the post about it that speaks to me most personally.

Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was. I am a bright technologist, but I’ve never built anything of note. I have strong opinions about how to improve this world, but I’ve never acted to bring them to pass. I have thoughts every day that I would share with the world, but I allow my fears to convince me to keep them to myself. If I were able to stop being afraid of what the world would think of me, I could see myself making every decision that Aaron made that ultimately led to his untimely death. This upsets me immensely. I am upset that we have a justice system that would persecute me the way it did Aaron. I am upset that I have spent 27 years of my life having made no discernible difference to the world around me. Most of all I am upset that Aaron’s work here is done when there is so much more he could have accomplished.

It’s definitely reading the whole post.

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