new braintidy()

I made a thing :)

BrainTidy is a desktop app which I am developing to help myself, and others organise their day from the outset.


Follow the link and see if this free alpha is worth developing any further, then by all means get back to me here, on the website or on twitter @medthepirate

Synergy Shift Problem with Windows Server (windows 10)

Just thought I'd get this down as all I found on the net failed to help me.

A while ago there was a windows 8 update that caused machines to crash. Said update also stopped Synergy servers from sending the shift key to clients. See the link here for information on that.

github discussion about windows update k27blahblah

None of the workarounds or fixes worked for me as I'm currently using Windows 10 tech preview.

So I found a solution:

Either switch to the linux machine as the server...

Or:

[step 1]
On whichever distro you're using workout how to assign keys to a command. Then pick two keys you don't think you'll need as much as shift..

[step 2]
Make sure you have xdotool installed:

code:
(ubuntu/mint/deb)

             sudo apt-get install xdotool

[step 3]
Open the keyboard shortcut settings menu

[step 4]
Add a shortcut and assign it to a key, naming it shift_up.

[step 5]
In the 'command' field type:

             xdotool keydown Shift

[step 6]
Repeat steps 4 and 5 for a shift up key using 'keyup' instead of 'keydown'

I did this in mint. It will have a similar equivalent in Ubuntu and is definitely easily figured out in Suse etc.

If your machine is quick you could write a shell script and point the shortcut to it which has an if else statement so you can use just one key.

paradigm problems

The more I think about it, the more I think that our education system has things backwards. It seems to me that learning to count in decimal is fine, but why not introduce the concept of powers earlier? Or rather, when powers are introduced, why isn't it applied to our base ten counting system. This would give kids an extraordinarily powerful understanding of how number systems are formed. I can't remember it being explicit in our learning material; maybe it was. 

That said things may have changed a lot in 20 years..

By the by, I feel the same way about radians and degrees. I don't think they're harder. In fact I think that both of these concepts *could* help some kids conceptualise numbers and mathematical problems far better if they didn't have to see it from the point of view of their educator. Ask yourself how big a degree is.. then ask why. Apart from it having many possible factors it seems almost arbitrary.

Whereas radians have an iron clad concept.

Rant over. Off to my exam.