A Norman door is a nonintuitive #design feature that needs extra instructions for how to use. Like a door that needs stickers saying "pull" or "push" because the handles look the same on both sides.
The #R Tidyverse designers try to make a consistent API so that the whole ecosystem starts to feel intuitive when you learn a part. They follow the principle "avoid making Norman doors" among others. I guess some software ecosystems are nothing but Norman doors.
The other races have multiple worlds with dense populations, while humans are mostly on Earth, with a few scattered colonies. On a galactic scale, the other races are the United States, China, and Germany, while Humans are (say) Iceland. Awesome, skilled, and empowered by good home resources, sure. But there’s no scenario where, over a single generation, Iceland becomes so powerful that a single fringe group within Iceland can become a standalone superpower capable of conquering the capital city of one of the major nations.
Eshell, Dired, Never learn Bash
Maybe no one told you, but Dired and Eshell go together. Try to learn just one without the other, and enlightenment will be tardy.
For faster enlightenment:
cd. It's not sufficient to "try to use it less"; either run something
like alias cd=echo in .bashrc, or have cd open a Dired
buffer for the target.ls, or have ls just switch to the Dired buffer for that directory.cd or ls output, and this may have made the scrollback more interesting. That ties into the next point: when using the shell, aim to never repeat a command. Decline to engage in the ancient workflow of iterating on shell commands, trying different switches and building pipes incrementally. In fact, you could set a counter for eshell-send-input (RET) such that you can only send 20 commands per day, and display this counter in the modeline or prompt.
ls -l | grep .jpg | cut -f1, use C-c M-o
(eshell-mark-output), narrow-to-region and carry out the appropriate
buffer-editing commands to get the same result that the shell command
sequence would have. This is the hardest part by far, but the skills you
gain in text transformation are general and carry over everywhere.'var, and
access it as $var in eshell. Write custom functions to instantly pipe
selected region to xargs. That sort of thing.More, if you like going off the beaten path:
if you follow the earlier advice, every directory already gets its own shell (remember that you disabled cd). With this last advice, when you enter a new directory's shell, you may be shown scrollback from weeks ago! Relevant or not, it can be fun to see, and anchors you in the passage of time. If you realize you wanted to use the output from earlier commands, from before you changed directory… simply go back to the previous directory's shell and grab it (hopping between shells should be a hotkey, that's faster than cd .. and cd -). Of course you'll still want the recent command history, things you used just minutes ago in another directory, which is why they should be brought along on the ride. The difference from usual history-tracking is that only the commands this session get saved to only those directories in which you have opened a shell, which is going to be a minority of all the directories you've visited with Dired.
I could ban the pipe (|) operator as part of a learning process for text munging.
They have much less risk of overwatering, due to multiple factors:
That matters because watering should be dead easy, especially when you have to travel and let someone else water your plants for a while.
If I cannot have this, I must have a glass pot so I can see how much water is inside.
Re. the pot-and-plate method. Big plates let you water plants "from the bottom up": you fill the plate with water and let it be sucked up into the soil. Watering this way 3 weeks out of 4 keeps the topsoil dry most of the time, which discourages gnats (fruit fly-like pests).
When you water top-down,
When you commit to watering bottom-up,
Give it a good deep pot. In a shallow pot, it ends up splaying rather than standing straight up.
If you want window plants, this plant is one of the best, because it doesn't twist its prettiest side to face the window. It also handles rough transportation without any trouble, good if you move often. Spiderplants break apart if you so much as look at them.
The vines can be fragile. Specifically, when you have a side shoot growing out of another vine, that side shoot is forever at risk of snapping off, even if it's grown to a healthy 8-meter beast. The connection to the parent stem is still so weak that a flick of your finger can be its end. In nature, this is fine because the vine is supposed to be securely wrapped around a tree trunk or some such, so jostling a part of it will not jostle the entire vine.
For a pothos in the home, it's nice if the main stem(s) are be responsible for most of the plant mass. If you have side-shoots near the base, bury the base in a lot more dirt. The dirt will keep things from jostling and breaking. If this is not realistic, stick the vine's tip into a new pot where it will start over more strongly. Bury the tip deep!
Or find some kind of safe sealant to strengthen where the side shoot branches off from the parent stem.
Unless you like the weeds look, don't get these. It can be very pretty if a single spiderplant grows in the middle of a pot and has not been jostled or touched since birth, but as soon as someone touches it or looks at it wrong, leaves start bending and breaking and now it looks like weeds.
If you must use an opaque pot lacking drainage… do it right. It's hard to improve later.
Rig a water reservoir in the bottom and install a watering tube.
((If you don't want to bother, a good minimum is to stick a pipe through the dirt, so you can pull it out and make a proper watering pipe at some point in the future.))
It's easier than you think. Ingredients:
Put the pipe in the pot, making it stand perfectly vertical.
Cut the cork down to something that will fit inside the tube.
Stick a steel wire into the cork. Drop the cork into the tube so it hits the floor. Don't cut the wire just yet.
Fill the pot up with a few centimeters of clay balls. Then add water until it matches the same level.
At this point the cork will be floating in water. Now cut the steel wire at the exact point it exits the tube. That's your marker! That's how you see that the reservoir is full.
Put down some nylon or polyester like a mat over the reservoir, blocking roots from growing down into it. If you can, seal tightly around the tube and also line the walls, but don't be a perfectionist… it's just a plant.
I prefer pots with drain holes or glass pots, it sidesteps all this work.
Want a pole for it to climb on? Install it before you need it, i.e. when the plant is still young. That also lets you center the pole in the pot, which is impossible later.
You might be tempted to use a broken broomstick or something else lying around, but pick a material that won't rot or rust. A plastic broomstick or a PVC pipe is good. You can even take a short pipe now and a longer pipe later inside the first pipe. Make it a thicker pipe than you think you'll need, having a too thin pipe is the kind of mistake that's hard to fix later. I mean, now you imagine a half-meter pole, but what if you want to extend that to eight meters (the maximum length of a golden pothos vine) at some point?
For any climbing plant, bonus point if you can find a permanent spot for it (ideally a corner) and let the vines climb the walls. Vines like climbing on things and this encourages the leaves to grow big, I hear. This may scrape the wall surface, so decide if it's worth it. Further bonus if you're willing to spray water directly on the walls: aside from motivating the vines to use the wall, this gives you the freedom to apply and rinse off insecticide without moving the plant.
Check it at the shop. Undersides of leaves, etc.
Bring it into the house in a plastic bag. Wash yourself since you've been at a greenhouse.
Quarantine the new plant for 40 days. If you don't have an extra room, you can put a plastic bag over the pot.