One example of quality design which I gleaned from reading Don Norman's "The Design Of Everyday Things" is the metal plate I've frequently seen on doors which are meant to be pushed.
The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all the way to the right of the door, in the door's vertical center), is a clear signifier for such push-ability.
Not only that, but it does its job without offering any other confusing affordances (such as a vertical handle which is also technically pushable, but which many would interpret as being meant to be pulled).
Whenever I need a relatable, succinct example of affordances and signifiers for my engineering comrades, I turn to this one. Anyone interested in design is doing themselves a dis-service by not reading Don Norman's classic.
Here in the UK a lot of bathrooms in pubs and other places have push to get in, and handles to get out. Never understood that, I'd like to push to get out once I've washed my hands!
Those doors are often on corridors. You don’t want them unexpectedly opening at speed into passing non-bathroom traffic. Conversely, people approaching the door from the inside will be further away as they have their hand out in readiness to pull, will expect the door to open — it’s generally lower risk.
Inside the bathroom itself, the doors on individual stalls usually open inwards. One pragmatic advantage of this approach is that if the door opens while you are seated, you can push it closed without getting up. Or requiring help from someone else outside. This also drives the use of push-in-pull-out handles.
In the US this is a fire code issue. Doors need to swing inward to avoid people getting trapped inside from outside obstructions.
edit: I seem to be misinformed about firecode. I may also be over extrapolating from what I know about bedroom doors as well. The general idea of obstruction is more valid there. It seems the more common reason bathrooms would not be allowed to swing outward is obstructing the minimum width of hallways.
Whist those in the USA use euphemisms such has 'bathroom' (mate, where is the bath?) or 'restroom' (I don't need a rest, I need a shit), here it is perfectly acceptable to ask the butler in Buckingham palace where the toilet is, or the bog for that matter. :-)
I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle, and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.
When I worked for squarespace, their beautiful new offices had glass conference room doors that swung one way, the other way, or slid on a track, depending on the room configuration.
However every one of those doors had the same handle on both sides, giving you no clue as to which scenario this door was providing. You saw people pull/push the wrong way all the time, and then look up/to the side to see the hinges and where the door stop was. I eventually mentally dubbed that quiet look upwards before you touched a door the, “squarespace peek”.
After a while I’d heard that the original plans had the typical plate and handle for push/pull and the ceo felt like it messed with the design of the doors.
There used to be a coffee shop opposite my office that had a pull handle on the push side of the double doors. The right hand side doors were also often locked. I once sat at the nearest table to the doors and watched a dozen people pull then push on the right door, then pull and finally push on the left door, and often end up visibly aggravated by the time they got in and joined the morning queue!
The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!
I see so many glass doors designed like that. The doors usually have a sticker that says “PUSH” on the push side, however the sticker is invariably printed with a transparent background so you can read it from the pull side. I don’t notice when I am reading something backwards/mirrored, so I am always pushing on the pull side…… Arrrrrrgh!
I can think of one door in a place I frequent for lunch like this which I have repeatedly ran into. Now, 80% of the times I start thinking about it about 20 feet away as I’m approaching it. My internal dialogue goes something like “Ignore how it looks, it’s a push door.” The other 20% of the times I still fumble the opening. It’s the most unintuitive thing I’ve experienced in a while.
I use a similar example when explaining when to document code and when to write it so it is easy to understand. When coding, if you find yourself saying “I need to document this”, you should ask first if it is easily understandable by someone with no knowledge of the code and possibly rewrite it first. Only once you have exhausted how it is written should you document it.
Everyone always nods at this but often do something else in practice, so as an example I use the real-world example of glass doors that only open one way but have identical pull handles on both sides. Users always walk up and loudly and embarrassingly push/pull incorrectly. But instead of fixing the root problem, the people who put them in think, “I know, I will document them!” and put those plaques on each side that says “Push/Pull”. And true to nature, no one reads the signs and still loudly bangs the door the wrong way only then to look at the “documentation”.
Perhaps ironically, the opposite door design (one where it’s not clear whether to push or pull) is thusly called a Norman Door [1]. The term is sometimes applied more generically beyond doors.
I’m guessing the vox office featured door has that bar because a flat metal plate wouldn’t seem right applied to glass? Going without the plate the glass would get dirty.
I like the affordability too, but it also does not take into account edge cases.
Our office door has this metal plate, it pushes outside (I believe it is that way for fire safety reasons). If there is strong wind on the outside, the door has the habit of whipping around after pushing it a bit, leading to shattered glass once every year or so.
Closing the door in strong wind also means grabbing it on the edge and pulling it, the wind kind of reverses on the last couple inches, I have no idea how that did not lead to broken fingers yet (you do it once, then you never try to close it again).
I guess it's a failing to consider all use cases of the door, and the metal plate thing should only be used indoors.
I spent about a year living in Chicago (also very windy and cold) and many office buildings use revolving doors for their exterior-facing entrances/exits. I suspect for the exact reason you mention. I can imagine what a PITA it would be to close a traditional door while battling icy-cold wind gusts.
That is a great book! There is so much discussion around doors, and rightfully so! I can never walk through an unusual door again without thinking about it since reading that chapter.
I'm currently in a country where I can't read the language and memorizing push vs pull feels so unnecessary when you could just design a door with obvious operation mechanics
While this is true I often wonder why so many of those doors don't just open towards both sides. They exist and I think it's the best compromise because it's just not possible to use it the wrong way.
The plate also makes it easier to clean as without it peoples handprints will be in a wider area. For wood doors its even better as wood can be time consuming to clean well.
I always avoid touching that metal door plate, I've gotten 'stainless steel cleaner and polish' on my hands too many times for me to consider using it again.
They're traditionally made of brass, which is naturally anti-microbial (the copper, specifically). Not clinically secure, of course, but far better than nothing.
You can push them with a covered elbow as well, of course.
BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.
Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.
BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.
A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.
EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.
I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).
But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.
No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.
He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".
> Unfortunately, bad design won.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.
He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.
You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.
Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.
Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?
Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted?
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).
Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following:
* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps.
* Large amounts of data makes client performance worse.
* Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.
I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products.
Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here"
Like, from. The short url, I'm already looking at the products.
I think it works because it is like the best parts of a part catalog without being too cute or clever. There are issues with searching sometimes if you want to browse to the part you have in your mind but cannot think of the name of, but usually it works. And yes, it is expensive to buy everything from McMaster, but that isn't what they are for. They also can be quite good about identifying the actual product/source if you ask.
Drilling down into different categories is better than any other site I’ve used. And like Costco, they curate pretty well and just have one supplier for each part, although the supplier may change. If you need a type of gear or screw, there is one option only, no need to compare various brands.
It was just as good 15 years ago too! And it’s probably not true not but it used to be the least possible friction to order things. Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
> Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
This feature RIGHT HERE is probably what lends to McMaster’s retention. No futzing around with account numbers, customer IDs, etc. Nope. Just a real accounting department talking to your company’s accounting department. Onboarding 20 new engineers today? No problem, just tell them to make an account with the company email and fill out the billing info with accounts payable and the finance guys will take care of all the rest.
McMaster honestly is such a gem of a company. Quadruply so if you so happen to live within the same-day delivery distance of one of their regional centers. Then McMaster turns into a super power.
Only downside is that McMaster fails some more rigorous sniff tests on part traceability/quality/reliability for certain kinds of engineering orgs but honestly so much manufacturing is held together by the glue of McMaster.
And if in the odd case they ever fail to deliver, there’s always Grainger!
yes, despite peoples complaints that it’s not mobile-first and pretty, it feels extremely futuristic to find a part number, download an stl, and 3D print to check for fit. never had a problem with ordering from them.
Love mcmaster.com. I spend plenty of time just browsing.
Might benefit from an image search feature.
Am noob DIYer. I often only have a vague sense of what I'm looking for. Usually by analogy. So I'll spend a lot of time both foraging as well as using any search term I can think of.
eg Most recently, I'm looking for "banker's clips", my SO's term for really long money clip looking things. Like sewing hemming clips, but wider, and with a finished edge (non sharp). Great for securing paper to backing boards. So artists can carry around their work.
But the app is excellent, FWIW. No ads, more functional than the website on mobile. The website makes use of desktop screen resolution layouts and has mouse-appropriate links, checkboxes, and comboboxes for an appropriately dense layout instead of big touch targets.
Also the banner is easily dismissed, and doesn't come back when you revisit the site.
FYI: Just noticed that McMaster-Carr now seems to ship internationally - at least to some European addresses I tested. They didn't, for the longest time.
I love this site so much. I was amazed the first time I ordered when the parts showed up the next morning. Now I just deal with the shipping cost because it saves me so much time navigating websites to order from them. I wish there was a version for small computer bits, like generic HDMI cables or USB-SATA dongles.
That “ugliness” is beautiful because imo McMaster’s interface facilitates turning unknown unknowns into known knowns.
Having all the options and important specs laid out on one giant page lets you discover blind spots in your thinking. Need an tube adapter for a fluid systems? Open up that page and as your scrolling through, discover that you forgot to think about the pitch of threading when you find the size and psi rating adapter you were looking for comes in several thread pitch options. Not sure which? Open up the handy explainer at the top of the page that explains to you the different options available and what they mean.
McMaster is primarily a B2B tool whose goal is to facilitate their users finding what they need, buying it, and building in a manner that is fast, convenient, and informative.
McMaster is a masterclass in UX and understanding what is really important to their business model, and resisting the urge to switch to trendy, sleek designs simply because it looks prettier.
McMaster-Carr has the best shopping website I've ever seen. The UI is beautifully intuitive; even if I don't know exactly what I need, odds are I can easily find something that will work and they can have it at my doorstep in under 24 hours, no matter how obscure. Even if I don't plan on buying anything, it can be helpful to click through the site just to see what is available. Because most categories of parts have surprisingly well written descriptions and breakdowns, the sire can actually be a good engineering resource.
I've bought from them many times before and have yet to be disappointed with what I got. It is definitely expensive compared to other suppliers or Amazon, etc. But you pay for the convenience.
I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
This has actually created a huge bias in my company. People try to solve problems with parts from McMaster because it’s so easy to search, but we often overlook other company’s (e.g. Cole-Palmer) products (which may be much better suited for our applications) because it’s a pain to find them on their websites.
> I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
I hope that this comment won't be interpreted harshly, but their familiarity with mainly American measurements really handicaps them elsewhere. It's not really their fault, but counterintuitively from where I am it's still miles better than other (domestic or international) suppliers for smaller quantities.
I was more referring to issues with shipping and ordering outside of the US. But you are entirely right about them focusing on American measurements, their selection of metric parts is much weaker and more expensive than their customary (main?) Sizes of parts. I do wonder if they are or will be working on improving that any time soon.
I'd love it if they added a price filter option! If I want a clear plastic tube I don't always know whether I'll get a cheaper price with acrylic, UV-resistant acrylic, static dissipative acrylic, ultra-strength polycarbonate, high-temperature polycarbonate, etc... It can take a lot of clicking to find the cheapest option!
Unfortunately I don't see them creating a price filter as they are mainly geared at businesses vs. hobbyists or consumers, where "get it here fast" is more important than saving a few dollars. That being said, I find adding all of the prospective parts to the cart works well for me when I want to compare prices
McMaster-Carr's website is great for finding items, but it's really irritating if you're just ordering one or two things and want to know what it'll actually cost. Unless it's changed in the last few years, they won't let you know the grand total until AFTER you place your order. Maybe it helps them simplify order fulfillment, but it's really annoying.
GearWrench ratcheting wrenches. They're compact and fit in places that sockets never will. The ratcheting mechanism is very fine, with low backlash, which matters a lot in those tight places. They feel great, and they're a delight to use.
Wirewrap tools. They're mechanically simple, easy to learn, and let you create neat, dense hobby prototypes faster and easier than soldering.
Wago Lever Nuts. These let you join a wide range of wires, from 24 to 12 AWG, stranded or solid. They're quick: strip, insert and flip. They're verifiable: you can check that it's done right just by looking at it. They're reliable: the spring pressure ensures they never come loose, even with vibration and heat over many years. I'm never going back to twist-on wire nuts.
Ruby. The seamless blend of OO, functional, and imperative programming is beautiful. It can be dense without being obscure. irb and pry make it easy to explore code and data. The syntax is mostly conventional and easy to learn. The standard libraries are well designed, and have consistent interfaces. The documentation is concise and easy to scan. I won't say its "The Best", but of the dynamic, interpreted languages I know, Ruby is the most fun to use, and it starts with the clean, well-considered design right at its core.
Pliers wrench are also excellent and a far better alternative to adjustable wrenches. The parallel jaws and pressure added from squeezing prevents rounding of nuts.
There are also hex bit ratcheting wrenches (go by a variety of names). They key is they take a standard bit, and are only the depth of the bit + a few millimeters. Lifesavers on doorknobs.
If you really needed the clearance, you could probably grind part of the hex end of a bit down too.
For quality hex wrenches Bondhus is a good brand. Having a quality set makes working on motorcycles, putting furniture together, etc. much easier: https://intl.bondhus.com/pages/hex-end
These are great but you need to strip a specific length of insulation of off the wire - within a certain range, that is.
That's not that difficult but I wonder if there is an adjustable stripping tool that can be fixed to a certain length to get repeatable strips over and over ?
I use manual strippers because I only do small jobs. I compare the length against the template on the side of the lever nut and it's easy to keep it in tolerance.
If you want to do a lot of connections, I recommend using an automatic stripper.
Google flights is fantastic. Don't know if it is "the best-designed thing I've ever used", but it is on top of my mind as I just used it yesterday. Google doesn't get enough credit for the things that they did do well - including Search and Maps.
Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great sound - there is so many things I love about Macbook hardware. Such a beautiful marriage of form and function.
I must disagree with you on maps. Google maps is a fantastic geographic aware search.
It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare.
I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) primarily instead.
I have OSM and Google maps installed. If I'm trying to navigate to a specific town or street, I'll use OSM because it's "just a map" that isn't trying to sell me shit. But if I'm looking for a business (restaurant, shop etc) I'll always use Google Maps because they're trying to sell me shit, and because OSM is absolutely pitiful in this regard.
I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals. Google, on the other hand, almost defaults businesses to being on the map even when they don't want to be. (My wife ruins a small business that doesn't have a bricks and mortar store - it's just online. Since it's registered to our home address, she absolutely didn't want it in Google Maps, but it took a good bit of clicking to get it off the map. Hence, they're reliable A.F. for finding businesses, even if they don't want to be found
I agree with this 100%. And there needs to be something in the design to allow you to zoom the text size. It's comical to witness myself trying to read too small text and reflexively zooming only to have the same sized font.
I just got an M1 Macbook Air this week to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro. Performance is cool (lots has already been documented about that), but the battery life is on another level. Charged it on 4 days ago and after about 7 hours of use, it's still at 48% at the time of writing this post. Ditto to what you said about "a beautiful marriage of form and function".
Typing from M1 MBA I picked this weekend. I don't think I enjoyed any device since 2012 MBA so much. Love keyboard, unlock by watch, portability, and unparalleled battery life. Screen is a compromise (coming from 2019 MBP 16") but I am okay with that.
It's great that exists (I have long legs), but an extension for...legroom? Why is something that important treated as esoteric and not a native search feature or setting?
I have multiple close family members who are still using the old Magsafe Macbook Airs. I ask them every year if they want to upgrade to a newer model, and they decline, they just love the laptop. I replaced the battery in each one to the OWC upgraded battery kit.
One incredibly irritating thing about Google Flights is it ignores and overrides my currency settings every time. And often my language settings too.
At least on Safari.
No combination of being logged into Google and selecting the currency in the sidebar will result in the currency, rather than the local currency, being set for next visit.
That means every single use of Google flights involves going to the sidebar to set currency, either first or more likely upon searching.
One time I was in a foreign country but looking for hotels on Google Maps for a future weekend getaway in my home country. Despite being logged in and Google having my home address, and with each account needing a country to comply with differing data protection laws, it was still showing me prices for hotels in my home country in the foreign country's currency. Helpful? Not!
Recently bought transatlantic flights through Google Flights and it gave better results than all the traditional players in the space (skyscanner, kayak, etc). It's not just something to pad out search results, they put some effort into it.
Also, for every single flight they have the mass of carbon emissions displayed right next to it? Seeing that huge figure (1 ton!) definitely made me more hesitant to fly. Could this be... an altruistic design decision? From Google?
New MacBooks seem to be good again, especially the model with MagSafe. However, non-replaceable SSDs is a big deal for me. I know that a MacBook can have a long life span, but I'm not sure how long its SSD will work with any issues.
Still using my ~10 year old MacbookPro pretty much every day. The little plastic feet have fallen off and I'm on my second power adapter (and that is looking a bit ropey), otherwise it still works great.
ZFS. Complete research companies unknowingly depend on the utmost reliability and flexibility ZFS has to offer. Started right with the first version included in FreeBSD in production use and never failed once while being the central storage connected to multiple HPC clusters with millions upon millions of rather small but also some vary large files. While offering five nines of uptime we even had to ability to send efficient binary forever incremental differential snapshots to remote DR locations. Meanwhile we saw many large crashed sites at companies which had downtimes of weeks using lustre. ZFS even got hated by management because it's not giving them fancy relationships with the normies using HP/Dell. So the last ten years are probably the best ZFS got here because some instructed architect is looking for commercial replacement but nothing better seems available.
This. I replaced a couple of NetApp and Isilon arrays at a smallish HPC cluster with 1.2 PB of research data. Ended up saving a few million Danish Kroner every friggin year, and got so much better reliability than the commercial offerings. ZFS (by extension, FreeBSD) truly is an engineering marvel in our world.
The documentation is shit though, I spent a full hour digging through forum answers trying to increase my swap space. All this bpool zpool crap.
And then my system /boot got full of some snapshot (wtf I never asked for this), apt-get failed to live up to its promise of magic, got more hell about a 20% preservation rule (again wtf).
Was cutting and pasting some zpool zsysctl zc -a -f -foo -bar and then some sudo zfs destroy bpool npool zpool/blah/autosys@ubuntu_h2h3rc4h stuff. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff off the forums I didn't understand until apt-get worked again.
I didn't understand a word of it, and there was zero documentation in the obvious places.
Solaris used to come with a user manual, it was easily the best thing about the buying experience because it was so detailed and obviously written for engineers.
If you can find one of those manuals on the internet you will be set for life on understanding ZFS and dtrace.
There’s also a C, C++ and ASM manual that is bundled too, but you can skip those.
If you can’t find any, I’ll send you mine.
I know it sounds like I’m asking you to RTFM- but the experience of reading these manuals is really a joy.
Well, it's an ROI judgement call at the end of the day. ZFS explicitly takes on significantly more irreducible complexity than ext4 so that it can cohesively tie together the features it offers into a complete system that is consistent for users to work with and for developers to maintain while introducing as few bugs as possible.
This reminds me that I wrote a little a while back about the occasionally nontrivial challenge of absorbing complex structures (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25760518) when learning new concepts. I would personally absolutely love to be able to ingest complex ideas while not having to deal with the heightened semantic overhead, but I think that might be the human-learning equivalent of the P=NP problem. (The only solution seems to be finding neat elegant ways to represent things that happen to take advantage of subconscious shortcuts intrinsic to how we reason about the world, but there sadly seems to be no research being done on how to find and exploit those paths.)
ZFS itself seems to suffer from a bit of an above-average "newbies on soapboxes" problem sadly - a bit like the Rust community's "memory safety" crowd that don't completely understand what's going on, except in ZFS' case there are more than a few people who only know just enough to be dangerous, and are excellent at articulating themselves, loudly.
The collective consensus about ZFS is thus mostly comprised of many small pieces of arguably technically correct anecdata that miss just enough nuance that the overall perspective is shifted from reality by a nontrivial amount. My current favorite observable example of this is this downvoted (grey) comment by one of the ZFS developers clarifying that the system truly doesn't need a lot of RAM to run: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11898292
Completely independently of this vocal-minority problem, ZFS' licensing situation inhibits the cohesive direction and leadership that would produce a fundamentally cohesive, holistic platform integration effort along with supporting documentation. There are hobbyists figuring things out as they go along on the one side, and commercial vendors providing SLA'd documentation as part of their enterprise support on the other, with a giant hole in the middle that in this case would probably be filled with a kernelspace documentation effort (which would be absolutely rock solid and excellent).
So if you can ignore all the vocal minorities and read between enough of the lines of the documentation you can find (is this valid for my OpenZFS version? is this FreeBSD-kernel specific? was this written by someone who knows what they're talking about? etc), you should be fine. You just have to accept the status quo and the tug of war that sadly tagged along with the excellent codebase.
Regarding the specific use case you described, I would point out a few details:
- AFAIK, ZFS pools (aka-but-not-exactly a partition) can't easily be resized; you generally have to recreate them
- When I was setting up my own ZFS configuration I repeatedly found warnings (without looking for them) in multiple setup guides and GitHub issue comments that swap on ZFS can cause deadlocks - hopefully you were using standard Linux swap partitions
- You aren't required to use the defaults of "bpool" and "rpool" (I chose my own pool and dataset names)
- Automatic snapshots on /boot sounds like a misconfiguration error (I never configured snapshots)
- Naturally I can only say that blindly copypasting commands that directly edit your filesystem is an excellent way to say goodbye to your data, with extra steps
My own experience was with configuring ZFS from scratch on Debian (following https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb..., but mostly ignoring the Now We Setup 23489573647823 Separate Datasets Because We Can bits - I just have /debian (/), /data and /boot).
It sounds like you were fighting Ubuntu's autoconfigured setup, without understanding what defaults it picked or what things it did for you at install time. This is not at all ideal from a system-comprehension perspective.
So, it might be fair to shift some (maybe more than some) of the blame to Ubuntu for your negative experience, and not just associate ZFS on its own with that negativity.
I can highly recommend setting up Debian on a physical machine (that always helps me greatly, I find VMs too... intangible) and yelling at it until a) you understand everything you've done and b) ZFS works. In that order. Getting it working without needing to completely reinstall (ie breaking something, then fixing the breakage, without needing to wipe and starting again) would also be an excellent goal... perhaps on the 2nd or 3rd reinstall :P
I've also found it extremely useful to create a ~4GB or so partition at the end of my disk to store a "recovery" system; what I'll do is debootstrap Debian onto the recovery partition, boot that, install ZFS support, configure pools and datasets, debootstrap Debian onto the new dataset, get that working (might take a couple goes - I always miss a step, like configuring GRUB, or remembering to run `passwd`, or edit /etc/fstab, etc), and then I have a 4GB ext4 partition that knows how to mount ZFS if I need it.
This strategy actually came in handy bigtime a couple months back when I broke GRUB boot (unrelated issue) and was able to fallback-boot into the recovery partition to get everything working again: the recovery partition was able to mount / as needed so I could chroot into my main system and reinstall GRUB correctly.
I recently borrowed a Fiskars x25 for the first time, after reading about them for many years. They really are better.
Splits better than my maul and weighs less. I was surprised to find that the latter was more important. If it takes less energy to cycle, you can split the same log more times without it feeling like a burden to do so.
The next time I need to split more than a trifling amount of wood, my first step will be to acquire a new splitting axe -- the overall time to completion will be faster.
Someone I know designed a wood-splitting axe where the central part of the blade has a high center-of-mass and freely pivots in order to kick apart the pieces once the axe hits the wood. It’s an ingenious design based on simple physics, and works quite well. There’s no purchasing info at the link below; it’s a small company whose main focus is on machines for metal roofing, so I suppose it requires a phone call or email to them to find out more.
I love Rotring pens and pencils - I used a Rapid Pro mechanical pencil throughout college. Nowadays I use a Rotring 600 or 800 with Ohto ballpoint refills. The knurled grip is great, the the overall weight of the pencil is much better than your average plastic pen.
I really like my Pentel Graphgear 1000s. The retractable tip means it doesn't stab you if you want to carry it in a pocket and at least somewhat reduces the probability of it being ruined by a drop.
So happy to see the Fiskars mentioned. Grew up with farmers in the midwest US but love my fancy little splitter hitter from across the pond.
I find a subtle lift on the handle right at the end of the stroke, almost like a whipping action, seems to help a little. It may be in my head, but it seems to stick less.
Use the full length of the handle, the horn at the end provides a positive grip and you get more speed.
On large rounds don’t start in the very center, bisect the round but start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side and has a better chance to propagate through the length of the round. Work your way back towards you and repeat if needed.
Always focus on where your strike lands. Most smaller logs will be one hitters but aim precisely anyway. On larger rounds stitch strikes together in one continuous line across the face. Don’t get sloppy, if you’re more than an 1/8” off left or right hit it again. Repeat across until she gives. Precision beats percussion.
Set your rounds on top of the biggest round you can find when splitting. This flattens the contact (tip #1) and the large round below provides some inertial resistance. Splitting directly on the ground provides more bounce, reducing effectiveness, and the bit gets dulled by contact with dirt and rocks.
Keep the cover, its durable, provides a great hanging handle. The blade doesn’t need to be razor sharp like you would want with a cutting axe, but it should be sharp and clean.
I split about three cords a year, all by hand. It's mostly hemlock and alder. The biggest rounds are 24-30" in diameter.
I thought I'd need a heavy maul for the large rounds, but I use the axe for everything. On the larger rounds, start at the edges and work your way around. One nice thing about working in from the edges is that the edge pieces with bark are thin and have lots of split surface area, and all the inside pieces have no bark. So everything dries faster. I don't have any trouble missing strikes with this method.
The knottiest pieces for me tend to be spruce rounds from mid-trunk. I use the axe to get as much off as I can, and then either stack the larger knotty pieces in one area and burn them whenever they've dried enough, or use the chainsaw to cut through them one more time.
Perhaps explain why it is better? A personal opinion is not as useful as an insightful explanation.
> was useless
You haven’t said what was wrong with it. Also I think your wording is awfully close to breaking site guidelines: "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Disclaimer: not a mod, I’m just a hippy that wants us all to get on well together!
Unless you want to make a fort at night, I really would not bring an axe along. Finding firewood for a campfire is usually not a problem.
But a too heavy bike is.
I did it bike camping a lot and my advice is, only bring what you absolutely need. Without extra burden, everything is much more enjoyable and you will have more energy to reach the nice spots.
X11 or X7 would probably be a bit lighter and more durable. I know its ‘plastic’ but I’ve beat the shit out of mine for 15 years and it hasn’t loosened up at all. Wood handles get finicky in the elements. The Fiskar plastic handles are hollow, too, you might be able to pack a flint kit up in there for energency use.
Something like an Eastwing is goong to be a better chopper, but these will split better. Both are useful.
To bike camp bring a small foldable saw, so instead of spending 1+ hour splitting wood after a long riding day you can spend that time enjoying camping
I have a carpenter axe which is very compact and somewhat lightweight, but gave it up because I never had to use it
Readit News
The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all the way to the right of the door, in the door's vertical center), is a clear signifier for such push-ability.
Not only that, but it does its job without offering any other confusing affordances (such as a vertical handle which is also technically pushable, but which many would interpret as being meant to be pulled).
Whenever I need a relatable, succinct example of affordances and signifiers for my engineering comrades, I turn to this one. Anyone interested in design is doing themselves a dis-service by not reading Don Norman's classic.
edit: I seem to be misinformed about firecode. I may also be over extrapolating from what I know about bedroom doors as well. The general idea of obstruction is more valid there. It seems the more common reason bathrooms would not be allowed to swing outward is obstructing the minimum width of hallways.
Wow! I've never known a pub with a 'bathroom'.
Whist those in the USA use euphemisms such has 'bathroom' (mate, where is the bath?) or 'restroom' (I don't need a rest, I need a shit), here it is perfectly acceptable to ask the butler in Buckingham palace where the toilet is, or the bog for that matter. :-)
However every one of those doors had the same handle on both sides, giving you no clue as to which scenario this door was providing. You saw people pull/push the wrong way all the time, and then look up/to the side to see the hinges and where the door stop was. I eventually mentally dubbed that quiet look upwards before you touched a door the, “squarespace peek”.
After a while I’d heard that the original plans had the typical plate and handle for push/pull and the ceo felt like it messed with the design of the doors.
The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!
Everyone always nods at this but often do something else in practice, so as an example I use the real-world example of glass doors that only open one way but have identical pull handles on both sides. Users always walk up and loudly and embarrassingly push/pull incorrectly. But instead of fixing the root problem, the people who put them in think, “I know, I will document them!” and put those plaques on each side that says “Push/Pull”. And true to nature, no one reads the signs and still loudly bangs the door the wrong way only then to look at the “documentation”.
[1]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
That book changed my life.
Totally agree. Anyone that designs things to be used by other people, would be well-served, reading that book.
Our office door has this metal plate, it pushes outside (I believe it is that way for fire safety reasons). If there is strong wind on the outside, the door has the habit of whipping around after pushing it a bit, leading to shattered glass once every year or so.
Closing the door in strong wind also means grabbing it on the edge and pulling it, the wind kind of reverses on the last couple inches, I have no idea how that did not lead to broken fingers yet (you do it once, then you never try to close it again).
I guess it's a failing to consider all use cases of the door, and the metal plate thing should only be used indoors.
You can push them with a covered elbow as well, of course.
https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/
https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
https://webtorrent.io/
EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.
I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
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No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.
He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".
> Unfortunately, bad design won.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.
He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.
You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.
Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.
I haven't visited a torrent site in years.
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
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He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.
* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.
I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products.
Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here" Like, from. The short url, I'm already looking at the products.
It was just as good 15 years ago too! And it’s probably not true not but it used to be the least possible friction to order things. Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
This feature RIGHT HERE is probably what lends to McMaster’s retention. No futzing around with account numbers, customer IDs, etc. Nope. Just a real accounting department talking to your company’s accounting department. Onboarding 20 new engineers today? No problem, just tell them to make an account with the company email and fill out the billing info with accounts payable and the finance guys will take care of all the rest.
McMaster honestly is such a gem of a company. Quadruply so if you so happen to live within the same-day delivery distance of one of their regional centers. Then McMaster turns into a super power.
Only downside is that McMaster fails some more rigorous sniff tests on part traceability/quality/reliability for certain kinds of engineering orgs but honestly so much manufacturing is held together by the glue of McMaster.
And if in the odd case they ever fail to deliver, there’s always Grainger!
Might benefit from an image search feature.
Am noob DIYer. I often only have a vague sense of what I'm looking for. Usually by analogy. So I'll spend a lot of time both foraging as well as using any search term I can think of.
eg Most recently, I'm looking for "banker's clips", my SO's term for really long money clip looking things. Like sewing hemming clips, but wider, and with a finished edge (non sharp). Great for securing paper to backing boards. So artists can carry around their work.
Also the banner is easily dismissed, and doesn't come back when you revisit the site.
And the website wasn't designed for mobile at all.
Having all the options and important specs laid out on one giant page lets you discover blind spots in your thinking. Need an tube adapter for a fluid systems? Open up that page and as your scrolling through, discover that you forgot to think about the pitch of threading when you find the size and psi rating adapter you were looking for comes in several thread pitch options. Not sure which? Open up the handy explainer at the top of the page that explains to you the different options available and what they mean.
McMaster is primarily a B2B tool whose goal is to facilitate their users finding what they need, buying it, and building in a manner that is fast, convenient, and informative.
McMaster is a masterclass in UX and understanding what is really important to their business model, and resisting the urge to switch to trendy, sleek designs simply because it looks prettier.
I've bought from them many times before and have yet to be disappointed with what I got. It is definitely expensive compared to other suppliers or Amazon, etc. But you pay for the convenience.
I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
I hope that this comment won't be interpreted harshly, but their familiarity with mainly American measurements really handicaps them elsewhere. It's not really their fault, but counterintuitively from where I am it's still miles better than other (domestic or international) suppliers for smaller quantities.
Wirewrap tools. They're mechanically simple, easy to learn, and let you create neat, dense hobby prototypes faster and easier than soldering.
Wago Lever Nuts. These let you join a wide range of wires, from 24 to 12 AWG, stranded or solid. They're quick: strip, insert and flip. They're verifiable: you can check that it's done right just by looking at it. They're reliable: the spring pressure ensures they never come loose, even with vibration and heat over many years. I'm never going back to twist-on wire nuts.
Ruby. The seamless blend of OO, functional, and imperative programming is beautiful. It can be dense without being obscure. irb and pry make it easy to explore code and data. The syntax is mostly conventional and easy to learn. The standard libraries are well designed, and have consistent interfaces. The documentation is concise and easy to scan. I won't say its "The Best", but of the dynamic, interpreted languages I know, Ruby is the most fun to use, and it starts with the clean, well-considered design right at its core.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2592927A/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0421107A2/en
There are also hex bit ratcheting wrenches (go by a variety of names). They key is they take a standard bit, and are only the depth of the bit + a few millimeters. Lifesavers on doorknobs.
If you really needed the clearance, you could probably grind part of the hex end of a bit down too.
Something like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/VIM-Tools-1-4-in-Hex-Bit-Ratchet...
For quality hex wrenches Bondhus is a good brand. Having a quality set makes working on motorcycles, putting furniture together, etc. much easier: https://intl.bondhus.com/pages/hex-end
These are great but you need to strip a specific length of insulation of off the wire - within a certain range, that is.
That's not that difficult but I wonder if there is an adjustable stripping tool that can be fixed to a certain length to get repeatable strips over and over ?
It seems like this is what I am looking for:
https://www.amazon.com/C-K-TOOLS-T3757ESD-Adjustable-Strippe...
... but the largest wire it strips is 20ga and I would (usually) be stripping 12 or 14ga ...
If you want to do a lot of connections, I recommend using an automatic stripper.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003B8WB5U Knipex
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OQ21CA Irwin
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BC39YFQ Klein
Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great sound - there is so many things I love about Macbook hardware. Such a beautiful marriage of form and function.
It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare.
I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) primarily instead.
I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals. Google, on the other hand, almost defaults businesses to being on the map even when they don't want to be. (My wife ruins a small business that doesn't have a bricks and mortar store - it's just online. Since it's registered to our home address, she absolutely didn't want it in Google Maps, but it took a good bit of clicking to get it off the map. Hence, they're reliable A.F. for finding businesses, even if they don't want to be found
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https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/legrooms-for-googl...
Also, for every single flight they have the mass of carbon emissions displayed right next to it? Seeing that huge figure (1 ton!) definitely made me more hesitant to fly. Could this be... an altruistic design decision? From Google?
And then my system /boot got full of some snapshot (wtf I never asked for this), apt-get failed to live up to its promise of magic, got more hell about a 20% preservation rule (again wtf).
Was cutting and pasting some zpool zsysctl zc -a -f -foo -bar and then some sudo zfs destroy bpool npool zpool/blah/autosys@ubuntu_h2h3rc4h stuff. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff off the forums I didn't understand until apt-get worked again.
I didn't understand a word of it, and there was zero documentation in the obvious places.
I'm done with ZFS. Back to ext4. It just works.
If you can find one of those manuals on the internet you will be set for life on understanding ZFS and dtrace.
There’s also a C, C++ and ASM manual that is bundled too, but you can skip those.
If you can’t find any, I’ll send you mine.
I know it sounds like I’m asking you to RTFM- but the experience of reading these manuals is really a joy.
This reminds me that I wrote a little a while back about the occasionally nontrivial challenge of absorbing complex structures (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25760518) when learning new concepts. I would personally absolutely love to be able to ingest complex ideas while not having to deal with the heightened semantic overhead, but I think that might be the human-learning equivalent of the P=NP problem. (The only solution seems to be finding neat elegant ways to represent things that happen to take advantage of subconscious shortcuts intrinsic to how we reason about the world, but there sadly seems to be no research being done on how to find and exploit those paths.)
ZFS itself seems to suffer from a bit of an above-average "newbies on soapboxes" problem sadly - a bit like the Rust community's "memory safety" crowd that don't completely understand what's going on, except in ZFS' case there are more than a few people who only know just enough to be dangerous, and are excellent at articulating themselves, loudly.
The collective consensus about ZFS is thus mostly comprised of many small pieces of arguably technically correct anecdata that miss just enough nuance that the overall perspective is shifted from reality by a nontrivial amount. My current favorite observable example of this is this downvoted (grey) comment by one of the ZFS developers clarifying that the system truly doesn't need a lot of RAM to run: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11898292
Completely independently of this vocal-minority problem, ZFS' licensing situation inhibits the cohesive direction and leadership that would produce a fundamentally cohesive, holistic platform integration effort along with supporting documentation. There are hobbyists figuring things out as they go along on the one side, and commercial vendors providing SLA'd documentation as part of their enterprise support on the other, with a giant hole in the middle that in this case would probably be filled with a kernelspace documentation effort (which would be absolutely rock solid and excellent).
So if you can ignore all the vocal minorities and read between enough of the lines of the documentation you can find (is this valid for my OpenZFS version? is this FreeBSD-kernel specific? was this written by someone who knows what they're talking about? etc), you should be fine. You just have to accept the status quo and the tug of war that sadly tagged along with the excellent codebase.
Regarding the specific use case you described, I would point out a few details:
- AFAIK, ZFS pools (aka-but-not-exactly a partition) can't easily be resized; you generally have to recreate them
- When I was setting up my own ZFS configuration I repeatedly found warnings (without looking for them) in multiple setup guides and GitHub issue comments that swap on ZFS can cause deadlocks - hopefully you were using standard Linux swap partitions
- You aren't required to use the defaults of "bpool" and "rpool" (I chose my own pool and dataset names)
- Automatic snapshots on /boot sounds like a misconfiguration error (I never configured snapshots)
- Naturally I can only say that blindly copypasting commands that directly edit your filesystem is an excellent way to say goodbye to your data, with extra steps
My own experience was with configuring ZFS from scratch on Debian (following https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb..., but mostly ignoring the Now We Setup 23489573647823 Separate Datasets Because We Can bits - I just have /debian (/), /data and /boot).
It sounds like you were fighting Ubuntu's autoconfigured setup, without understanding what defaults it picked or what things it did for you at install time. This is not at all ideal from a system-comprehension perspective.
So, it might be fair to shift some (maybe more than some) of the blame to Ubuntu for your negative experience, and not just associate ZFS on its own with that negativity.
I can highly recommend setting up Debian on a physical machine (that always helps me greatly, I find VMs too... intangible) and yelling at it until a) you understand everything you've done and b) ZFS works. In that order. Getting it working without needing to completely reinstall (ie breaking something, then fixing the breakage, without needing to wipe and starting again) would also be an excellent goal... perhaps on the 2nd or 3rd reinstall :P
I've also found it extremely useful to create a ~4GB or so partition at the end of my disk to store a "recovery" system; what I'll do is debootstrap Debian onto the recovery partition, boot that, install ZFS support, configure pools and datasets, debootstrap Debian onto the new dataset, get that working (might take a couple goes - I always miss a step, like configuring GRUB, or remembering to run `passwd`, or edit /etc/fstab, etc), and then I have a 4GB ext4 partition that knows how to mount ZFS if I need it.
This strategy actually came in handy bigtime a couple months back when I broke GRUB boot (unrelated issue) and was able to fallback-boot into the recovery partition to get everything working again: the recovery partition was able to mount / as needed so I could chroot into my main system and reinstall GRUB correctly.
For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/
Videos of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fiskars+weed+pu...
It's been making difficult weed removal trivial.
Splits better than my maul and weighs less. I was surprised to find that the latter was more important. If it takes less energy to cycle, you can split the same log more times without it feeling like a burden to do so.
The next time I need to split more than a trifling amount of wood, my first step will be to acquire a new splitting axe -- the overall time to completion will be faster.
https://www.esemachines.com/hand-tools Search for “super splitter”
The patent description is more informative: https://patents.justia.com/patent/5020225
Other great pen/pencil:
- Pentel Ortez. I have the 3 mm and, if used properly, the lead wont break
- Zebra delguard. Also wont break. I have it in 0.5 mm
- Rotring’s artpen. My favorite fountain pen, but it appears discontinued :S
https://www.pentel.com/products/graph-gear-1000-mechanical-d...
I find a subtle lift on the handle right at the end of the stroke, almost like a whipping action, seems to help a little. It may be in my head, but it seems to stick less.
Use the full length of the handle, the horn at the end provides a positive grip and you get more speed.
On large rounds don’t start in the very center, bisect the round but start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side and has a better chance to propagate through the length of the round. Work your way back towards you and repeat if needed.
Always focus on where your strike lands. Most smaller logs will be one hitters but aim precisely anyway. On larger rounds stitch strikes together in one continuous line across the face. Don’t get sloppy, if you’re more than an 1/8” off left or right hit it again. Repeat across until she gives. Precision beats percussion.
Set your rounds on top of the biggest round you can find when splitting. This flattens the contact (tip #1) and the large round below provides some inertial resistance. Splitting directly on the ground provides more bounce, reducing effectiveness, and the bit gets dulled by contact with dirt and rocks.
Keep the cover, its durable, provides a great hanging handle. The blade doesn’t need to be razor sharp like you would want with a cutting axe, but it should be sharp and clean.
I thought I'd need a heavy maul for the large rounds, but I use the axe for everything. On the larger rounds, start at the edges and work your way around. One nice thing about working in from the edges is that the edge pieces with bark are thin and have lots of split surface area, and all the inside pieces have no bark. So everything dries faster. I don't have any trouble missing strikes with this method.
The knottiest pieces for me tend to be spruce rounds from mid-trunk. I use the axe to get as much off as I can, and then either stack the larger knotty pieces in one area and burn them whenever they've dried enough, or use the chainsaw to cut through them one more time.
I haven't picked up my maul in 3 years.
https://www.wolf-garten.com/
For splitting wood, I now always use this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ochsenkopf-OX-3509-Log-Splitter-Rot...
Now THAT is really good design.
Perhaps explain why it is better? A personal opinion is not as useful as an insightful explanation.
> was useless
You haven’t said what was wrong with it. Also I think your wording is awfully close to breaking site guidelines: "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Disclaimer: not a mod, I’m just a hippy that wants us all to get on well together!
But a too heavy bike is.
I did it bike camping a lot and my advice is, only bring what you absolutely need. Without extra burden, everything is much more enjoyable and you will have more energy to reach the nice spots.
Something like an Eastwing is goong to be a better chopper, but these will split better. Both are useful.
I have a carpenter axe which is very compact and somewhat lightweight, but gave it up because I never had to use it