🔗 Classroom Technology Was a Mistake - by Paul Musgrave:

For every minor friction that technology has removed, a giant weight of superfluous expectations has been added. If the net impact is still positive, it is much less so than the boosters promised—so much less so that one wonders whether we would have gone all-in on this. And I also find myself wondering if at least some of the lack of grit that many of the younger generations display when confronted with an obstacle has to do with being raised in an environment in which everything just works—where you never have to slap the side of a TV to fix the image, or when you never have to parse “Abort/retry/fail” when trying to load a program. To the extent that computers do make everything “just work”, they do so by bounding the ability of users to ask for anything — limiting their requests, and their imaginations, to what’s easiest to deliver. But that is far from what’s possible and often remarkably distant from what’s desirable in any given case.

After using the Olivetti Lettera 22 as my desk-side typewriter the last few days, I have switched it out this morning for the Smith-Corona Super.

While not the oldest typewriter I own, the Silent is the one I’ve had the longest. It is the machine that sent me down the road of manual typewriters and probably the one that I have used the most.

For no good reason, I had fallen out of the practice of keeping a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it on my desk and using it regularly over the last few months. I have made a minor project this week of getting back to that practice, and have been reminded of why I like it and started it in the first place.

I think I might loath grocery shopping less if it were just grocery shopping, rather than:

1. Coming up with a week’s worth of meal plans for a family of four
2. Checking the fridge and all the cabinets to see what we have and what we need
3. Dragging myself out to the grocery store and dealing with all of that
4. Getting home and then having to put all the groceries away

No, this is not a request for whatever recipe management, meal planning, and shopping list app you are about to recommend.

One of my neighbors the next block down on our street is an urban planner by trade. He has a small kid, as do several of the people in the houses right around him, so he has organized with them to all park their cars on the street even though they all have driveways and garages.

As a result, the street becomes effectively much narrower through that block, which has a traffic-calming effect similar to curb bump-outs and chicanes.