Niall's Weblog

One of my personal challenges in physical activities (martial arts, Yoga, weightlifting) has always been flexibility. Some people have quite naturally good flexibility, others have to work on it. What exactly is flexibility? There is a very common perception that flexibility is a physical characteristic – that its a question of muscle, [...]

I’ve been doing chin-ups and pull-ups for a while now, first at the gym and now at home since I bought a $15 chinning bar and drilled it into a door frame. In general it seems that chin-ups refer to the grip with your palms facing you whereas pull-ups refer to the grip with [...]

Weightloss is an emotionally charged subject for dare I say the majority of people in the West. Asking someone’s weight is widely considered rude, suggesting someone could do with losing a few pounds similarly so. Huge amounts of money are spent on dangerous fad diets, pills and the Devil knows what else. [...]

Yesterday evening I went to my first Krav Maga class. I’ve been doing boxing for around three years now, and I like it a lot. Boxing is practical, no-nonsense and one of the most demanding sports physically. Unfortunately the location of the gym I attend forces me to drive, which I don’t [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short entry on some of the software I’d been looking at to reduce my reliance on the mouse. Specifically, I mentioned a window manager, cwm, and a FireFox extension, Conkeror.

Since I wrote that piece, I have refined my setup a little more. I found a Firefox [...]

I am typically typing on a keyboard for many hours a day, and have been in this routine for many years. While I have never had soreness bad enough to prevent me from using a computer, unlike some unfortunate people, I definitely get some discomfort in my hands and wrists. This is pretty [...]