Bit of a meta note: grown adult here who never got into cubing earlier in life. Recently picked one up as some non-screen entertainment for some long haul flights and train travel. Highly recommend.
Same here! I recently picked up a cube after a lifetime of thinking that I didn’t enjoy this kind of puzzles. A couple months have passed, and I carry the cube everywhere I go as I work on getting my time below 30s.
If you’ve got disposable income (and you might if you’re here), I highly recommend getting a pro-level cube. Even the fanciest ones don’t go above $60 or so, and it’s a lot more fun to play with a cube that glides on auto-aligning magnets than it is to fight a poorly-built piece of plastic that keeps locking up.
Fellow adult who also started late, also would recommend! Quite soothing activity. Using the abacus gets me in a similar way too, even though it's not a puzzle specifically. Something about the tactile focus and modest brain activity is pleasant.
Same experience with an induction cooktop with touch controls. At least once a week this is what that looks like:
1. Place pot of water on element to boil
2. Enable boost mode
3. Water reaches boil as I'm distracted with other prep / child / HN post, and overflows
4. All controls (including ability to disable boost, reduce heat, or turn off element) rendered completely inoperable due to liquid on glass surface impacting pcap sensing
To my enormous relief, the Samsung stove that came with our house gets this right - even covered in water the controls still work. I was previously dead-against induction just because I couldn't find a good quality stove-top with physical buttons, to the point where I'd already budgeted replacing it with gas when we bought the house. I don't know how they've done it, but it's the only one I've ever used that manages. (For comparison, the high-end Miele and cheap-and-cheerful non-branded ones I've used in various rental houses over the last 20 years have all had exactly the problem you describe above).
A few of the new home models (in Europe at least) come with physical knobs.
My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.
I moved into a new apartment with an induction cooktop and radiators with the same type of "buttonless button" controls and those continually give me problems. You can't just touch them, but you have to slide your finger over the controls in just the right way, and hope that (for the radiator) you've hit the 1 in 3 chance of it actually working.
My next cooktop will probably still be induction, but it will definitely have knobs.
My Whirlpool stove does the opposite thing: after I've finished cooking and it's cooling down, it will activate the Warm oven setting on its own. I find that the Warm touch button is especially sensitive on its own, so there must be some small flexing happening somewhere and activating it.
Solution: Immediately after cooking I walk over to the junction box and turn off the breaker to the stovetop.
Another solution is to downvote / not upvote comments which place an unreasonable burden on the reader. The best comments are those which can be broadly understood without a need for Googling acronyms or "expanding" the comment using an LLM.
That history extends back the other direction too with mechanical tide prediction machines, or even early marine chronometers for navigation - the OGps if you will.
That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the landscape.
Living in a country where it's the norm, the concept of (any) locked bathrooms is wild. When travelling I always always find restricted access (either by key, or payment) public facilities extremely jarring.
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