Chen

I have been doing the sit-forward-on-the-edge thing for years without ever registering it.

It is a rented flat's built-in desk sadly, otherwise I absolutely would.

Logging in the original currency is the rule I was missing last time. We had three people doing mental conversion at three different rates.

I timed myself for a fortnight because I suspected I was in the same hole. Hand writing the first 30 minutes of any task, then handing off, cost me about 15 percent on total task time and eliminated the situation where I could not answer a question in review. The 30 minutes is not enough to finish anything, which is the point: it is enough to force me to find the files, read the surrounding code, and form an opinion about the shape before anything is generated. The opinion is the thing you are currently not forming.

Numbers version. First long trip I left with a bag at about 14kg and by month two it was 8.5kg, and everything I removed fell into three groups: spare clothing, a full first aid and pharmacy kit that duplicated things buyable in any pharmacy anywhere, and single-purpose gadgets. The only thing I went back and bought was a second pair of decent socks. Shipping the discarded pile home cost more than the items were worth, which is the actual lesson.

Reviewing the rejects deliberately never occurred to me. That is a good habit.

Mine got wet on a tarmac in a rainstorm and the soft cover soaked through into the grips and the bag itself, which took two days to dry and left everything smelling. Not a break, but not nothing. Whatever you buy, a bin liner over the clubs inside the cover costs nothing and solves it.

Top edge at eye level is the standard advice and it is slightly too high for a lot of people, especially with progressive lenses — you end up tipping your head back to read through the bottom of the lens all afternoon. If you wear varifocals, try the monitor 10 to 15cm lower than feels right.

Move the subject away from the backdrop. Two metres is not much — at four the background falls off on its own, and if you cannot go further, put the background in shade and light only the person.

The hang is almost certainly not the sleep, it is the request. If you call an HTTP library without passing a timeout, the default behaviour on many of them is to wait indefinitely, so one connection that never answers parks your script forever with no error and no output. Pass an explicit timeout on every request and the symptom you describe usually disappears. Everything else in your setup is fine for a script of this size.

I paid for a planned itinerary once and regretted it, because what came back was six pages of the same headline sights I had already shortlisted, scheduled tightly enough that we abandoned it on day three. The failure was that they never asked what pace we like or what we hate. If you do go ahead, judge them entirely on the questions they ask you before they write anything.

Two months of four times a week from nothing is a lot of new load on a joint that does very little else in daily life. Some of this is simply that your wrists are not conditioned yet, and it does improve — mine took about three months. Do a minute of wrist prep first: gentle circles, then palms down with fingers pointing back, then the same on the backs of the hands.

Buy something small from them and stop worrying. Most good shops know the fitting is the service they sell and they price accordingly.

Reasonable for the pure travel packs, though several bags in that size class now come in two back lengths, and getting that wrong is not fixable at home.

Two hours is worth it once, not for the bag but for the fitting. A shop with staff who know what they are doing will measure your torso, put twelve kilos of weight bags inside and let you walk around for ten minutes, and that tells you more than any review. Once you know your torso length and which harness shape suits you, ordering online afterwards is low risk forever. Go, get measured, and feel no guilt about buying elsewhere if the price is silly.

Check whether you are gripping. Heavy CAD work makes people claw the mouse and the tension runs up the forearm into the shoulder. Deliberately let the hand go slack for a few minutes and see whether the burn changes — if it does, the mouse is probably too small for your hand or too heavy in its glide.

Consumer wearables infer stages from movement, heart rate and heart rate variability, and they are far better at telling asleep from awake than at telling one stage from another. Every validation comparison I have read against proper polysomnography shows stage level agreement is substantially worse than the overall sleep and wake agreement, and deep sleep in particular is the one they get wrong most. So treat the absolute minutes as decorative and the night to night trend as weakly informative. Do not buy a mattress because of a stage graph.

Two separate things are happening and both are normal. The back screen is a 3 inch display showing a downsampled image, so almost anything looks sharp on it and it is not evidence of anything. The real issue is that at f/2 on a 50 at two metres your depth of field is a couple of centimetres, which means the eyelashes and the cheek genuinely are at different distances and the camera picking either is plausible. Use eye detect AF if the body has it, and if you are focusing and recomposing, stop — swinging the camera after focus moves the plane by more than your depth of field. Then shoot a ruler at 45 degrees on a tripod at f/4 and you will see immediately whether it is technique or a front/back focus problem with the lens.

Modern fast primes are pretty good wide open. The softness people blame on the lens is usually missed focus, and a tripod test separates the two in ten minutes.

Consistently behind across distances means back focus, and most bodies have a micro-adjustment for it, or you can send body and lens in as a pair for calibration. If it only misses at close range, that is a different and more annoying problem.

The cushion is embarrassingly effective. Got three seconds today.

That works once you can already parse. At one word in twelve it just gives you faster noise.

Start with content far below your reading level. Kids shows, slow news, anything where you already know about 98 percent of the words. Listening does not improve by fighting hard audio, it improves by hearing easy audio at speed until parsing is automatic. I wasted four months on films I could not follow before I worked that out.

Expose for the highlights and lift, but do it properly: expose so the sky just holds detail, shoot raw, and lift the shadows in the raw converter rather than from a JPEG. The greyness you are seeing is partly that lifting shadows flattens contrast, so you have to add contrast back locally on the face afterwards. Noise is a real limit though — two or three stops of lift at base ISO on a modern sensor is fine, five is not.

For portraits I would rather bracket the background and blend a single frame of the person in. Faces and blending do not mix well.