2d ago

What's a superpower you've aquired or developed from technology or some external resource or capabillity?

Eternal battery life for my smartphone

I technically can choose to never run out of battery power because I can portably always charge on the go without being tied to any wires or power outlets

Outcome you can reliably ensure might be a better way to phrase this and other submissions but you get what I'm saying 🕵

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I took one typing class in 8th grade and became faster than 99% of typists. Can sustain about 145wpm for a typical paragraph of text, but can burst up to 200wpm for shorter, simple bits of text.
Not a particularly marketable superpower in this day and age, but is a fun flex once in a while at the office.
- I'm curious if you were already pretty quick prior to learning proper home key usage and such, similar story for me if so. I was already pretty quick (parents got me on PCs at a young age) then took keyboaridng in middle school and that helped a ton.
  
  I think I was fairly slow before learning home row typing. I just hunt-and-pecked whenever using a keyboard. We got our first computer some time around 1998, so I was introduced to computers a few years prior to taking the typing class.
- Ten years later: “Tell us again about typing, Grandpa!”
- Out of curiosity, is this with a QWERTY keyboard, or do you use another layout? (And if so, which layout do you use?)
  
  Just a standard QWERTY layout. Nothing fancy.
- Similar story - my dad got a used electric typewriter from work and I LOVED typing on that thing, so I went to summer school to take a typing class. In my 20s a coworker called me "machine-gun
  <me>
  ". For some reason my typing is shit on laptops tho.
  
  The low travel on the keys is probably the issue. The machine gun sound of your typing is probably because of long travel with speed making a lot of force hitting the key bed, so having a longer travel will probably help there. Also, chiclet keys are really different to standard keys, they are super flat and have no centering dip so you tend to slide to the edges and have reduced accuracy. Add that to the dense layout and you have a recipe for disastrous typing.
  
  The "machine gun" name was from my first job, "technical typist", waaay back in the late 70s. We were using glorified typewriters with rolls of actual paper, that also recorded the output so it could be fed into a typesetting machine to print books. That's why it was loud. But somebody in college made a similar remark when I was writing a term paper on a typewriter. I had to show her there were actual words on the paper because she thought I was faking it.

27 comments