Annoying others with your new technique...what do you proselytize about in your field or hobby?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This came out of the “Things that infuriate you well beyond their actual importance”.

I was reminded about how there is a neat and effective way of arranging your side mirrors on your car that eliminates the blind spots. The thing is, everybody has done it the traditional way all of their lives, but when someone learns the new way they become annoying in their desire to make new converts. I don’t use the alternate technique because after 40 years of driving I don’t want to mess with something that is now solid muscle memory.

So, that’s the gist of the thread: something that has been always done one way, and you know a vastly superior way and make a nuisance of yourself to the unenlightened around you.

Here’s my contribution:

In black-and-white darkroom photography, you need to make a test strip of paper where you expose the paper for increasing times, making a bit of a gray scale chart, often with 7 sections, so you can pick the one that is right for your photo–that gives you the number of seconds for your enlarger.

Since the beginning of time people have done this by exposing the whole thing for a base exposure (say 10 seconds) and then adding a fixed interval (say 5 seconds) as they cover progressively larger sections of the test strip. This results in a series of exposure times like this: 10s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 30s, 35s, 40s.

But that produces test strips that have detail in one side only. The darker side of the test strip is all muddy and you can’t even see the dividing line between the sections. This is because increasing light works as a geometric progression, not an arithmetic progression. Just like this year is a smaller portion of your whole life than the year when you turned five, each subsequent 5-second exposure is a smaller portion of the whole, resulting in way too little change on the far end of the test strip.

So the cool way to do it is called “F-stop printing” where you use a multiplier, such as root 2, to calculate the exposure times from your base time. (e.g. 10s, 14s, 20s, 28s, 40s, 56s, 80s). This produces a very smooth progression of grays across the whole test strip.

The thing is, even though this is not a new technique, few use it. Ansel Adams makes no mention of it in his works. After its introduction in a book the 1980s, most people who have tried it have been amazed at the difference and go on to make pests of themselves with the unenlightened traditional photographers who have not heard of this technique. I know I do!

2

Sometimes Ctrl -C and Ctrl -V works better for copying/pasting across different platforms. 90 percent of the time just a right mouse click is faster. Especially if your working on one large piece of code. You’re gonna need your mouse anyway to put it somewhere. And perhaps overwrite something. Just do it with one hand.

I do adjust my mirrors for the blind spots. I’ll still shoulder check though. A quick look is important, and a good habit.

3

I’ve been beaten down by life long enough to know that proselytizing is not going to be useful or fun, so I don’t do it (thanks SDMB!)

But I will tell anyone with sinus issues and/or TMJD that they should try using a Neti Pot daily.

4

Ok. A new technique for me. I use to use paper notebooks to keep track of work, work meetings, home, finance and other things.

Got totally out of control. Now I know that most people just type on their computer in windows notes or whatever.

But I wanted something more easy to transport, and not do it on the computer. I type enough as it is.

So, I bought a tablet. I can write on it (not type). I can draw. I can create art. Make a sketch for a contractor.

I NEVER thought I would like one of these, but for myself, its great. I currently have 14 folders. That’s 14 different ‘notebooks’ It’s wonderful.

5

The horizontal cut while chopping an onion. It accomplishes nothing - the onion is already in layers. But if you follow the longitude of the onion while making the vertical cuts, slightly angling the knife - it accomplishes the task of an even dice much better.

6

I will freely tell everyone and anyone that they can eliminate the “soap opera effect” on their TV by turning off motion smoothing.

7

Bandsaw blade drift. Angling a fence relative to the blade is rarely the solution. The problem is caused by improper blade tensioning or a fence that extends past the front of the blade causing binding between the cut wood and the fence.

Also, cooking corn. Do not boil corn! Steam it instead. And add some corn oil when cooking corn in any kind of dish. You sense the flavor from the smell of the volatile oils which are lacking in most corn used for cooking.

8

Some, but not all, software developers are extremely picky about the tools that they use. One of my friends from college was an excellent programmer. For editing, he was a dedicted user of emacs, because he could accomplish so many things without taking his hands off the keyboard. I’m sure he knew the keystrokes to mark the beginning of a block of text, then the end, and to cut, copy, or paste it where he needed it. emacs makes extensive use of the Ctrl key, and he had an old keyboard that had the Ctrl key where where CapsLock is now. When his keyboard broke, he bought the same model on eBay. When that one broke, he wrote his own keyboard driver so he could map the CapsLock key to be the Ctrl key.

I have no problem with any of that. He’s the one doing the work, and I trust that he knows what tools work best for him. I’ve known other developers who are wedded to the shape or feel of particular ergonomic keyboards, or who need their standup desk at a particular height, or their monitor, etc. The thing that troubles me is that the same people who are so particular about the tools they put so little thought and effort into the tools that they make for other people to use. I test software, and sometimes I have to fight tooth-and-nail to get useability improvements to be implemented. A recent program I worked on would track orders to be filled at a warehouse. When it received a new order, it would generate a UUID for it; a unique identifier that could distinguish that order from any other in the system. But then we were displaying it on the screen. Why? That identifier (it was either 16 or 32 characters long) is useful internally only; it means nothing to any person who could be using the program. It’s gibberish to humans, but unique gibberish.

There are reasons that users love some applications and hate others, in the same way my friend loved emacs and hated vi. They should be useable, even elegant, and present info that’s meaningful and easy to find.

And for a more trivial example, I’m a curler. After all of the stones have been played in an end, the stones are cleared out of the way and put at the end of the sheet, and then the next end is played in the other direction. The stones are numbered. Personally, I like to clear the stones and put them in order, so when it’s my turn I don’t have to look for which stone to play next. Some people complain that arranging the stones takes too long and slows down the game. My point is that if you do it right, clear the even-numbered stones first, then the odd numbers, it wouldn’t take any longer.

(To be honest, the stones are supposed to be the same, and it probably doesn’t matter which ones I play on my turn, but some people care about that, too.)

9

Drink your beer from a glass, not straight from the can or bottle.

10

I work a lot on a laptop with a touchpad, so that’s not practical. But even with a mouse, why would I do the task with one hand, when my other hand is right there willing to help out? I’m gonna be much faster using both hands simultaneously than using one hand to do the whole task.

11

Left mouse button, highlight text to be copied (gotta do that anyway). Right mouse button copy.

Go to where you want to paste it with the mouse (gotta do that too). Right mouse button, paste. All done with one hand. It’s the fastest way to do it IMHO.

Now that doesn’t work so well with a laptop/touchpad. I don’t do real work on a laptop. But I do fiddle on them - surf, emails and stuff. But not work, that’s for sure.

12

Don’t you have to “right mouse button, choose COPY on the context menu, left mouse button” and then “right mouse button, choose PASTE on the context menu, left mouse button”?

13

I like the cut of your jib!

With that said, these days I’m a sort of “enterprise application firefighter” so I spend quite a bit of time in forensic analysis of screenshots sent by someone in, say, Belgium, so I can figure which network traffic to capture and so on.

So I always ask developers to include at least the physical server name in some discreet corner of the screen on web applications. That way we don’t struggle with trying to figure which server they were going to behind layers of load balancers.

I bet having that UUID of an order on a screenshot would be quite helpful for problem solving, so thinking about the support engineers, why not ask the developers to display it in light gray in tiny letters somewhere where it won’t intrude.

14

Wow. That does make complete sense. I wonder why it’s not taught that way. To be honest, after a couple goes in the darkroom, we didn’t bother with test strips, just make adjustments based on an initial print and evaluation of the neg. But the linear method of making test strips doesn’t make any sense now that you point it out.

15

And/or … time for a fresh blade.

16

Keyboard shortcuts in Windows and Windows-based apps. So many people are addicted to the mouse, which means you have to precisely position the mouse cursor over a button or menu, then do it again for the specific item in the next menu or dialog box, and on and on. The right key combos instantly execute a commands, or put the text cursor where you need it, and allow you to work more efficiently.

Also, getting ketchup out of a glass bottle. The classic method is to invert the bottle and repeatedly smack its ass. This is terribly ineffective. A better method:

  1. hold the ketchup bottle in a slightly head-down orientation with one hand.
  2. Using your other palm as a stationary anvil, smack the neck of the ketchup bottle downward against that palm gently and repeatedly. The ketchup will move toward the lower side of the neck, and the air will move toward the upper side. Ketchup will flow quickly and easily from the bottle this way.
17

Don’t you have to “right mouse button, choose COPY on the context menu, left mouse button” and then “right mouse button, choose PASTE on the context menu, left mouse button”?

I think that’s what I said. Perhaps I was unclear?

Highlight the text with the left mouse button. Right click mouse chose copy. Move on your screen to where you want to paste it. If you are replacing text, highlight that. Right click, paste.

Touch pads aren’t so great for this. As I said, I don’t and never have worked on a laptop. That’s for just simple stuff. And If I need, I can hook up a wireless mouse to a laptop, but that’s sort of self defeating with the whole ‘lap’ top idea. If I play chess on a laptop, I will hook up a mouse though.

18

I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t an easier way to do it with the mouse (four clicks plus two menu navigations). My way also has four clicks (Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v), but no menu navigations, and the clicks are in pairs instead of sequential, and with a different hand from the mouse hand. It’s much, much faster to do it with keyboard shortcuts than with the mouse, IME.

19

This conversation sounds like something that got resolved in the 1990s: do it the way you like and stop annoying others.

20

Preach it brother!