Eternal battery life for my smartphone
I technically can choose to never run out of battery power because I can portably always charge on the go without being tied to any wires or power outlets
Outcome you can reliably ensure might be a better way to phrase this and other submissions but you get what I’m saying 🕵
I work in broadcast engineering and I get calls 24/7/365 because broadcast TV is always on. I will get a call at 3am on a Saturday that something isn’t working and they need it for the morning show that starts in an hour and a half. I will get up, drive into work, walk up and ask them to show me, and It works just fine every time. People will tell me that things only work because I’m there. I think they are a little more careful stepping through procedures because I’m standing there looking like I’m about to kill something.
I can tell the time at night, most of human history needed the sun to have any chance at accuracy
I can semi accurately read up to 24 volts DC with my tongue, any higher hurts too much as the next step up is usually 48v. I have also seen the unmasked truth in humanity by gazing into the void for too long…
I can go from idea to physical object in minutes using a $200 tool that fits on my desk, with materials purchased by the KILO (suck it printer ink!).
My glasses are strong enough and with high enough refractive index that if I look at a point light source through the edge of a lens I can see a rough spectrum of it. I can easily tell a true violet LED from red+blue or yellow from red+green. Used to be able to tell white LEDs from incandescent but the LEDs got much better.
My glasses are strong enough that they caught my book on fire.
I have to wear a hat or sit in the shade if I’m reading in full sun.
I took one typing class in 8th grade and became faster than 99% of typists. Can sustain about 145wpm for a typical paragraph of text, but can burst up to 200wpm for shorter, simple bits of text.
Not a particularly marketable superpower in this day and age, but is a fun flex once in a while at the office.
I’m curious if you were already pretty quick prior to learning proper home key usage and such, similar story for me if so. I was already pretty quick (parents got me on PCs at a young age) then took keyboaridng in middle school and that helped a ton.
I think I was fairly slow before learning home row typing. I just hunt-and-pecked whenever using a keyboard. We got our first computer some time around 1998, so I was introduced to computers a few years prior to taking the typing class.
Ten years later: “Tell us again about typing, Grandpa!”
Out of curiosity, is this with a QWERTY keyboard, or do you use another layout? (And if so, which layout do you use?)
Just a standard QWERTY layout. Nothing fancy.
Similar story - my dad got a used electric typewriter from work and I LOVED typing on that thing, so I went to summer school to take a typing class. In my 20s a coworker called me “machine-gun <me>”. For some reason my typing is shit on laptops tho.
The low travel on the keys is probably the issue. The machine gun sound of your typing is probably because of long travel with speed making a lot of force hitting the key bed, so having a longer travel will probably help there. Also, chiclet keys are really different to standard keys, they are super flat and have no centering dip so you tend to slide to the edges and have reduced accuracy. Add that to the dense layout and you have a recipe for disastrous typing.
The “machine gun” name was from my first job, “technical typist”, waaay back in the late 70s. We were using glorified typewriters with rolls of actual paper, that also recorded the output so it could be fed into a typesetting machine to print books. That’s why it was loud. But somebody in college made a similar remark when I was writing a term paper on a typewriter. I had to show her there were actual words on the paper because she thought I was faking it.
I read about people getting magnets implanted so that they can feel magnetic/electrical fields
Not quite ready to commit to implants, but i did try gluing some tiny magnets to my fingernails once.
I suspect that the implants are a bit more sensitive since they can kind of wiggle around under your skin more, but I could definitely feel some things, the two that stuck out to me were a forklift charger and an electric pencil sharpener.
I also got really used to picking up paperclips and other small metal things like that with them. I only had the magnets for maybe about a week, but I caught myself still trying to pick up paperclips with them for probably about a month afterwards.
I wonder what this would do to those Hall effect keyboards
Someone’s gonna destroy an MRI machine doing that.
And their skin at the same time
Luckily most people with those sorts of implants I’ve seen are fairly scientifically-minded, and I’d like to think that’s the sort of thing they’d think of and would wear some sort of appropriate medic alert bracelet.
It’s not like there aren’t other sorts of medical implants, piercings, situations like people with shrapnel embedded in their bodies, etc. out in the world that could potentially cause issues with an MRI machine.
So - you have a non-immediately-lethal aneurysm. They can strike anyone, at any age, and are almost impossible to predict in advance.
Seconds count. Your doctors now have to… what, locate your magnets and remove them before they can put you in an MRI to locate the issue and perform surgery?
I have a spinal implant; I got this specific model because of one key feature: unlike all other SCS devices in the market, the battery does not have to be drained before it goes into an MRI.
Shrapnel isn’t an optional decision, and they do try really hard to remove all foreign objects in surgery.
Magnets are a neat body mod, but IMO a stupid completely optional modification. At least tongue studs are visible and easily removed, and those are the most hidden optional… oh. Ok, I just thought of another awkward optional body mod they’d have to check for. Still external and easily removed, though, not like something implanted under the skin, and highly reactive in an MRI.
With an arduino and a relay, I made a light bulb turn on when I passed my hand by a sensor. That’s like, basically telekinesis
Knowing how to write code and monkey with electronics has enabled me to do all kinds of fun things. Like create my own D&D utilities to make DMing a game easier.
like what
Rolling multiple attacks & saves all at once for groups of NPCs or monsters. Generating random monsters and treasure items. Generating names for many things - npcs of different races, dragons, books, towns, inns, etc. A lot of the randomizing can be done with AI now, but using mine is faster, and it creates names that sound culturally consistent for my world, using parts of names and rules for combining them. I can construct a pretty decent new generator in like 10 minutes.
I also have a Discord bot that maintains parties, keeping track of everybody’s XP and level. I put in the total XP for a game session, and the bot does all the arithmetic to distribute it amongst the party, factoring in multiclassed characters and those who get a 10% bonus for high ability scores (this is for 1e/2e AD&D campaigns). I can also award individual XP for outstanding deeds etc.
that’s awesome! what language do you code in? got any screenshots of the output? i’m curious about how software development assists in GMing
Thanks! It’s all in javascript (node.js) with a very simple web UI on my home network. Here are a couple screenshots, not much to see.
Main page:
Party page, after clicking Party Levels:
