So, you can get a mini keypad to go with your mini keyboard and that mini keypad can have programmable keys.....
Or, you could just designate some keys on your 67% to be rotatably programmable.
My 60% keyboard has fn1 and fn2 keys, so I have done things like fn1-Esc = ` and fn2-Esc = ~ you can fn up your whole numeric row for whatever you usually need.
And e-mail, and FB Messenger and the rest, but people don't get that. People responding to posts in public forums think they are just talking with one other person because "I don't see anybody else here" - meanwhile, the post will stay up open and searchable for decades.
What people "don't get" is that their "private" snapchat messages are more or less equivalent to shouting in a quiet theater.
I fear that we are training our population to suppress the signs, to just "go off" without warnings. If we deploy SWAT every time somebody repeats some violent threat joke they heard in 785 movies and TV shows over the past 20 years, people are going to get better at filtering that - and actual signs that they're about to "go postal."
As for that, what happens when I'm watching some indie movie from a DVD that Alexa doesn't recognize and Alexa hears the character in the movie plotting to do some (better not say it here in detail) very plausible copycat of something like Timothy McVeigh and his little truck bomb? Alexa mistakes that audio snippet for actual people in the house and reports it...
I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.
Unfortunately, as a young moldable mind, you probably would have been owned faster and harder by the unregulated internet than any school teacher ever could.
important for Americans to cross examine sources
It always was. The difference for Bush Jr was that Americans could pull up Al Jazerra, RT, and directly chat with all kinds of people all over the globe - so the press had to start pressing harder. Back with Bush Sr in Kuwait, I had a friend from Jordan who spent his evenings listening to his short-wave to get "real news" about what was going on back home - what he heard was apparently a lot more accurate and complete than what we got from TV. It has always been like that, since forever.
cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.
The "facts" on the internet evolve over time. My favorite to repeat is, God rest his soul, Scott Adams' case of ideopathic aphasia - he lost much of his ability to speak (probably a mini-stroke, definitely some kind of brain damage) - he blogged about it openly, candidly, it was an engaging story. Then a few years later he underwent a rather strong shift of political outlook he felt he had "worked hard for all his money and shouldn't be forced to share any of it" - his touchy feely sharing about his brain damage was expunged from the web (to the best of his ability, which, with all that money he worked so hard for, was pretty effective)... but he can't erase the thousands of memories of people who read his writings at the time.
We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school.
My parents were teachers from the 1970s through the 2010s... my father crusaded to spread the teaching of critical thinking, he did his part, made a difference as much as anyone, but he was on the losing side through those decades. Maybe things will turn around someday, they usually do go in cycles.
utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn’t like deviance very much.
If anything has deluded you into the idea that deviance is more persecuted today than it was in the past, you have been fed a whopper of a lie. Again, back through my personal knowledge of the 1970s, the open racism, LGBQT intolerance, etc. that was widely practiced back then makes what goes around today look like playtime.
I’m neurodivergent and I’m queer
Go around saying that openly in the 1970s, you wouldn't get far in most US towns before being beaten into a multi-week hospital stay, or worse.
I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access
I suspect a large part of our current troubles come from "the masses" having internet access, because that gives the internet access to them, and through that we got Cambridge Analytica, and much much more...
robust training in media literacy
Nice sentiment, but the who exactly is going to teach them? I think this is actually a big motivator in the destruction of the US education system.
than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).
Yeah, I don't think those are helping anything either - more symptomatic of yet another authoritarianism flex.
that has been around since Bush, and 15 years ago it wasn’t as bad as it is today.
Real change takes time. Trickle down started with Reagan and it's still getting worse.
no child left behind on crack now.
Revenge of the Nerds came out in 1984. 40 years later we've got revenge of the stupid and proud of it. NCLB started the threats of de-funding failing schools, now we're just defunding all the schools.
obnoxious parents and admins who have no spines. Oh, and the shitty teachers who don’t teach but babysit. The whole industry is fucked.
Those issues were around in the 1970s, and probably for hundreds of years before as well - I just didn't experience any of it personally until the 1970s - both my parents were young teachers. Obnoxious parents aren't actually as bad as apathetic parents in a lot of ways and apathetic parents have dominated throughout history - 90%+ Admins with no spines, admins who serve the almighty dollar first last and always - I met plenty of those throughout my schooling from 2nd grade through my Masters' degree. Shitty teachers who just babysit, plenty of those 50 years ago. And to hear my parents tell it every day after work in the car, the whole industry was fucked then too. Sexism and racism was alive and well in Florida in those years I was in school, intolerance for gays was the norm, complete denial that lesbians actually existed was another norm... there has been actual progress on those fronts, but now the revenge of the proudly stupid is trying to push back. And the proudly stupid were always there, they just didn't have enough self-esteem to stand up for themselves as a group in the past.
Those phone cords were a mess, always tangled and over stretched... 5GHz house-range wireless landlines were peak.
We used to be a proper society
When was that?
Digital literacy should be exactly about not getting used by tech engineered to hook you and grab your attention, instead using the tech to give you actual value.
Bad administrators are the worst part of the school systems. There's a mix of good and bad at all levels, but a bad administrator can screw up the education of students even when the students have what would have been good teachers.
My fn2-# keys are the F# keys, it's not too bad, even F11 and F12 are just the next two keys to the right of 0