I'm interested for the same reasons - I can't hold much of an image in my head for very long, and being able to persist what I can imagine so I can examine it in detail with my actual eyes would be extremely useful.
FWIW Tibetan Buddhism has concentration exercises revolving around visualisation that might help develop this ability. Not sure if it would work for 'true' aphantasia.
For anyone who wants to look into that, it's called "kasina practice." There's a chapter about it in Daniel Ingram's book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, though he describes it as an advanced technique for people who already have a high degree of concentration.
There's also "image streaming" which is similar, and might be more accessible:
From what I know, Kasina practice involves visualising certain simple shapes or objects such as candle flames and coloured disks.
Tibetan Buddhist practices involve visualisation of fairly complex 'deities'; supernatural beings wearing certain clothes, certain ornaments, surrounded by certain other complex objects. As the visual complexity of the imagined scene is much more than in Kasina practice, the 'phantastic' benefits might be different as well. The deities are convenient as visual object because (I suppose) Tibetans are familiar with their visual appearance. Choosing any other similarly complex familiar object should work as well.
Ingram described Kasina as gradually increasing the complexity of the images, after success with simple ones. But I confess I don't really know much about this.
I've stumbled across the "Image Streaming" notion before, on those same few websites. Is there any third-party support for the idea? Such as a published study, slatestarcodex-style book review, or (at this point) a few redditors claiming "it worked for me"...
It unfortunately sets off my BS radar in full:
* Most references to the technique appears to originate from a book called "The Einstein Factor: A Proven New Method for Increasing Your Intelligence", by the same Win Wenger as you linked above.
* Win Wenger is always written as "Win Wenger, Ph.D", but I can find exactly one paper from him on Google scholar [0], written solo, written well after he was already publishing books [1].
* The "Reinhart Study" cited by the book is listed on this website [2] with the heading "Reviewers have found that this study was statistically inadequate. Further and better studies are requested, please contact wwenger101@aol.com".
* The author of that not-published paper is listed as "Charles P. Reinert, Ph.D., Dep't of Chemistry/Physics" (not psychology).
* Other works attributed to Win Wenger on that same site are very obviously nuts [3], containing such gems as "It is unclear at this point whether anyone in fractile theory or in interference pattern physics has noticed yet the relationship between these two fields, each of which by itself is and will be totally transforming our understanding of our world and of ourselves within the next decade or so."
In short, Win Wenger appears to be someone without any actual credibility who is nevertheless attempting vainly to forge it. And I can't find any actually credible references to this technique working.
For younger readers, or those who prefer a lighter reader, Dawkins "The Greatest Show On Earth" covers similar material in a more accessible (if less rigorous) manner. I forgot to mention it in my own recommendations, but it is one of the books I recommend at every opportunity.
* Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson
Much of our upbringing and education is underpinned by the assumption that "talent" is a real thing. Peak dismantles that assumption pretty thoroughly. The implications are far-reaching and I recommend it to everyone.
I like Listary - I haven't used Everything to compare, but I'm aware that they're similar.
For text file contents I'm a huge advocate for ripgrep , and for metadata...to be honest I don't have a great solution, so I'll be keeping an eye on the recommendations here.
School libraries working to support an established curriculum? This was totally normal in my high school - the texts that would be studied by a particular grade were stable for several years at a time, so they would acquire enough copies for 2 classes (60 students).
The first computer I used had Windows 3.1, so I'm not sure if I "grew up with" XP.... but no, it looks super dated to me. The icons are OK, the rest of Luna is fairly ugly.
There might be something to your theory, though - I think the Windows 2000 design still looks pretty good, although the colour palette is broadly too dark and saturated by modern standards. Perhaps we just get attached to the systems we remember liking.
This - nostalgia is a huge factor. However, I used OSX very little and still think their pre-Yosemite traditional skeuomorphic icons were the best ever. Other elements of their UI weren't good, but the icons were simply beautiful to work with.
Grep might be fine 99% of the time, but there's no reason to not drop a ripgrep binary on every machine I use regularly.
Ripgrep is faster across the board and has better defaults for working in Git repositories. Since I'm working with a large codebase managed in Git, it's a no-brainer.
grep is usable on very large code bases, because after the first scan, all the sources are loaded in the file system cache, so the successive grep are done in RAM and are very fast.
So much so that I almost never use ctags despite the improved semantic search (you can find more easily the exact identifiers and distinguish them by category). grep is just as fast and precise enough.
