A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
All of the evidence I have seen suggests that touchtyping is worth learning.
To what extent is that because you're a slow typist? (Do you know your wpm?)
Dvorak, Colemak, or the superior QGMLWY generally will not increase typing speed for touchtypers, as typing speed for most applications is limited by thinking speed. They will increase efficiency, and one can estimate the reduced effort for any particular corpus with an effort model like carpalx's, and so alternate layouts are primarily useful for people who want to prevent or manage repetitive stress injuries.
Links? :)
(Or, if this evidence is anecdotal or otherwise not easily linkable — please do elaborate!)
I don't know my wpm, but your question baffles me. How would my typing speed affect the fact that at some given moment I need to read several pages of documentation, sketch out a UI layout, look through code, think, etc.?
Your yourself say in your very next pa... (read more)