I hear people complain about laptop ergonomics all of the time and I don't understand it. I have zero issues with either of my Macbooks. I can go for hours and not be fatigued.
If I have it in my lap, the outer ball of each wrist is resting on the body to the left and right of the trackpad and that means my forearms are angled upwards, away from the edges. They never rest on the edge of the laptop until I use the trackpad, and then the puffy outer pad of my palm is resting on the laptop edge. Still very comfortable.
If I'm using it at a desk it's the same story. My seat is high enough (relative to the desk) that my forearms lift up and away from the laptop. Never resting on the edge.
Are people seated so low so that the desk height is at breast level and they're making T-Rex arms to reach the keyboard? It seems so intuitively obvious to avoid such positions.
That sounds like you have your desk too low. You're going to get some major repetitive strain injuries in 10-20 years.
If you have your arms at your sides, elbows should bend 90 degrees. Then just move your arms slightly forward and you'll end up somewhere around 95 degrees. Now you can rest your forearms on the desk. This won't save you from all kinds of RSI, but it might help your wrists, elbows and shoulder joints last a bit longer.
Having the desk low, the chair high, or putting a laptop on your lap is okay. Having the desk or table "high" (i.e. at normal height for writing with a pen or eating a meal) is generally worse but not an insurmountable problem.
In either case, the most important thing is to keep your wrists in as straight and neutral position as possible, with your palms and wrists "floating" rather than resting on anything while actively typing. Having the wrists either flexed downward or extended upward is a really bad idea. Having the wrists turned out to the side isn't great either, but not as bad.
The keyboard should be positioned close enough to your body so that your shoulders can be relaxed with your upper arms hanging loosely. The laptop surface should be roughly parallel to your forearms, so if you have a high desk or table relative to your torso you will need to prop up the far side to tilt it up a bit.
You don’t even need 20 years, I spent the better part of a year in my mid 20s in pain because I was typing with my wrists at an upward angle like GP is describing.
People have differently sized hands too: with my fingers on the home row, 13" and 14" Macs have the heels of my hands resting exactly on the sharp bottom edge.
Glare from the screen can affect you more if you have problems with halos in general (many vision problems can cause them, and fatigue won't help either), causing reflections to disproportionately affect legibility of the screen for you.
Finally, the keyboards are simply bad in comparison to best keyboards (in terms of typing feedback) on small portable laptops like Thinkpad X1 Carbons (though those have gotten significantly worse with Gen 7 onwards too).
Additional gripe I'd have is that they are very heavy in this day and age when we are getting laptops under 1kg (2.2lbs) in 14" size that perform and hold battery adequately well. This only hurts if you travel a lot and carry more than one laptop with you (business and personal, for instance).
But really, ergonomics is hard because everyone is different, and as long as you are outside the 2 SDs from average (and you can be so only on one of those measures, like your hand size or torso height or head size), your ergonomic position might be impossible.
Ergonomics is one of those things where you don't understand it until it effects you. Everyone can tolerate discomfort at some level and at different levels but obviously there best practices that manufacturers can partake in to make hardware more ergonomic.
For example, the monitor should be at eye level vertically but with laptop that's very hard to accomplish unless you position yourself in a reclined fashion to bring down your eye level closer to your lap - on a macbook you get wrist cuts like this.
One of the most important thing that makes a good ergonomic laptop is the ways it accomodates as many positions and setup as posible so your can rotate your working position to avoid excessive strain on one particular area. So when your back is tired you slouch down, when your wrists are tired you straighten up, when your eyes are tired you adjust the display brightness/theme etc.
When taken seriously it's totally possible to work safely even in poor conditions like outside or on a train but devices that completely ignore ergonomics just don't even give you the chance.
This is slightly misleading advice. The ideal place for the display has the top of the display at roughly eye level, or for a very large display maybe slightly above, which puts most of the display below eye level. Humans actually have great ability to look slightly downward for long periods of time while doing stuff with their hands, even while keeping their head held up straight, and indeed our eyes can more comfortably focus on close objects in the lower part of our field of view than straight ahead. What you don't want to do is slouch or bend your neck too much.
A laptop display attached to the keyboard usually isn't an ideal placement, but it's generally not too bad.
Welcome to "tech neck" - upper crossed syndrome, from looking slightly down.
You're inviting some surprising symptoms, not just neck and back pain, but things like numbness, tingling, or pain shooting down your arms. Really not fun.
Key posture correction seems to be pulling head back. Some physical therapy exercises can help as well.
In trying to picture this, I suppose there are certainly some stock photo models who'd feel the sharp edges:
google.com/images?q=person+using+laptop
I totally know what you mean about shifting positions. All the positions I've been in where I've felt the edges have been quite unergonomic, but perhaps not for everyone.
You may have smaller hands (no offense meant); imagining my hands in the position you explained, my fingers would be well outside of where they need to be. I have the same issue as OP, the corners dig into my heel/wrist area. I do have big banana hands though.
This piece is fine but one of the sections, entitled 'Why people lie about it' includes this line:
> If you’re selling a travel writing course, a mentoring program, a mastermind group, or a book about how to break into this competitive industry, the implicit promise is that you’ve cracked it. You’re selling the dream that full-time travel writing is achievable and sustainable and wonderful and – hey presto! – you are living proof.
...and after the article concludes very next thing is:
> While you’re here … I invite you to sign up for my free 5-day writing course called Unlock Your Creative Flow. One email, once a day, for five days, plus a follow-along workbook containing further space for reflection. You’ll also join the list to receive my (semi-regular) newsletter. Sign up now!
I guess I appreciate the honesty of this article, but the whiplash from this juxtaposition hurts. Clearly not intentional from the author, but I can't think of a more tone-deaf pitch in this context of this piece.
I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the point of being intolerable. Right up there with "narcissist" and "gaslighting".
The problem isn't so much overuse as misuse, as "gaslighting" gets thrown around for almost any kind of falsehood.
Another example would be "Ponzi scheme", which I've seen abused for any situation the speakers seems unsustainable, even when there isn't any records fraud.
I've got a few thoughts for features, if you're open to them:
1. Ability to specify where your "played" voice resides in the voicing: As the bass note, as an inner voice, or as the top line.
2. Options for first species, second species, third, florid, etc counterpoint for each of the generated voices. Ex: You play a single note and the upper voice plays two notes for every one of yours, etc, etc.
3. If you want to get real fancy, make the generated voices perform a canon of your played notes.
Have you been able to try it as well would love to hear what you think! Coming back to the features, regarding 1. you can already choose between soprano, alto, tenor or bass. I have still filed an issue for this, will help me remember to take vet this feature. Sometimes it's not as strict as it should be but that's also something I need to work on. Regarding 2. it's a good idea, helps you be in control of the kind of counterpoint you are doing, filed an issue for the same. Please feel free to comment on the issue. 3. is just feels is a little goofy as well I love it. I haver filed an issue for this as well check https://github.com/contrapunk-audio/contrapunk/issues/
If someone wanted to start making computer music I'm not sure I'd recommend this or Curtis Roads' book as a starting point.
These aren't resources for getting started. They're more like encyclopedias for learning about DSP and tech once you've established the fundamentals of music and sequencing.
If a beginner wants practical knowledge for making records with electronic instruments I'd give them a DAW, teach them to record and sequence, teach them basic music theory, and then point them to something like Ableton's synthesis tutorials that will teach them about oscillators, envelopes, filters, LFOs, and basic sample manipulation.
As another commenter below has said, "mathematics might be a useful way to understand music", but it's not how compelling music is made.
Mathematics are fundamental to scales and the harmonic series, and knowing about them will help you refine certain choices, but it's not going to help you write a dramatic melody or an emotionally resonant chord progression, or play an energizing rhythm, even if there are mathematical explanations sometimes.
Good music comes from being a good listener, having a strong sense of what's possible, where it could go, and then delivering something surprising. Telling a story with your melody and supporting the arc of that gesture with harmony that accentuates or contrasts it.
Again, there's a mathematical explanation for harmony and dissonance, but players aren't thinking that granular. They're operating at a higher level of abstraction one, two, or three levels above that: They're thinking about telling a story, evoking an emotion, and exciting an audience in the moment.
You raise an interesting question. How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly?
A little bit is natural and expected, but this kind of change in meaning feels like a consequence of a culture that in the last decade has accelerated the practice of re-framing specific words and concepts as something that's "actually a positive" or "actually quite negative if you think about it".
Part of this is a result of our (in the US) culture wars and hijacking of popular terms, but it's also a symptom of social media culture that's always seeking a hot take and creators who are looking to distinguish themselves with (what seems to me) clever re-framing.
The result is a culture that is increasingly fragmented and in which a word can have dramatically different meaning and insinuations depending on it's use in certain social groups or intellectual cliques.
It increasingly feels like I need to download a massive amount of linguistic context before I step into the world of a niche online community because their tight-knit dialogues and shared experiences have now re-framed a word or concept that was largely understood to mean something else.
It's always been like this, just on a smaller scale. Every time you join a group, some people can read the room, learning and sensing the cultural implications, while others step in all the landmines and don't even hear the explosions. How do you do this? Not sure how to explain it, mostly calibration through experience!
If you think that everyone else who is worse at you than reading social cues is self centered rather than your way of experiencing the world maybe just not being universal, I feel like you might be the one acting self-centered.
I was more addressing the alternative of “stepping on all the landmines”. Every time I have made progress in being a better listener I have found I suddenly also make fewer social faux pas. That I can hang with a wider range of individuals because I am less rigid in my own thinking.
It’s difficult to imagine someone who is very present with what is happening be truly socially awkward. They might be uncomfortable but they will likely still be funny and caring. But it’s easy to imagine 100 ways in which a more egotistical person could offend, confuse, or otherwise put off bad vibes in a social setting.
> It’s difficult to imagine someone who is very present with what is happening be truly socially awkward. They might be uncomfortable but they will likely still be funny and caring. But it’s easy to imagine 100 ways in which a more egotistical person could offend, confuse, or otherwise put off bad vibes in a social setting.
I think I mostly agree with the sentiment behind this, if not the terminology. I would certainly describe plenty of people who are well meaning but inept as socially awkward, but I agree that for the most part they are less likely to ruffle feathers.
That being said, I do think the parent comment was speaking specifically about the ability to adapt to new groups with different expectations on the fly. At least based on personal experience, I don't find it particularly difficult to imagine a circumstance where good intent is not enough for someone who struggles to read social cues to still encounter some initial friction with a new social group that doesn't closely resemble one they're familiar with, but I'd agree that it's probably less likely than someone who genuinely doesn't care about whether they offend anyone.
In any case, I appreciate your elaboration on this! I don't think I inferred the point you were trying to make very well initially, so the extra context was helpful to understand where you're coming from.
I'd be wary of testing this as binary. It's not self centered versus not. It's a continuum, which I think you understand because you discuss making progress.
But, what you don't seem to acknowledge is that you don't hear what you don't hear. Some groups may be quietly judging you in a way that is VERY difficult to perceive because you don't understand their subtle social cues. Or, maybe you have perfect social awareness in all situations. I truly don't know.
> How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly?
We don’t engage. It’s the only shot we have.
There was a useful article at 404 Media recently about our failure to prevent those on the extreme edges of culture from normalizing their language and behavior: We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons[0]. See the article, but essentially by engaging we cede ground. Sorta like how both-sides journalism gives space to anti-science nuts and lets them spread falsehoods.
If I have it in my lap, the outer ball of each wrist is resting on the body to the left and right of the trackpad and that means my forearms are angled upwards, away from the edges. They never rest on the edge of the laptop until I use the trackpad, and then the puffy outer pad of my palm is resting on the laptop edge. Still very comfortable.
If I'm using it at a desk it's the same story. My seat is high enough (relative to the desk) that my forearms lift up and away from the laptop. Never resting on the edge.
Are people seated so low so that the desk height is at breast level and they're making T-Rex arms to reach the keyboard? It seems so intuitively obvious to avoid such positions.
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