The solution is ancient.

You need a small pouch with a hole in the bottom.

Thread your chain/strap through the hole.

Fasten the end of the chain/strap that is on the "outside" of the pouch to your pants.

Fasten the end of the chain/strap that is on the "inside" of the pouch to your keys.

Pull on the chain/strap and the keys zip inside the pouch and will not wear your pockets down.

When you are about to open a lock just pull on the longest key to extract the keys from the pouch.

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Making such a pouch is trivial for the crafty geek, or you can just go to your local leather-workern and get one made for you.

http://www.valleycountry.com.au/catalogue/country_lifestyle/accessories/key_rings/leather_key_pouch

Back in the days we traded our warez by physically swapping media (floppies or tapes). With increasing monitoring of the Internet I would not be surprised if trading warez reverted to swapping media offline.

Put some mp3s on a cheap USB-stick, take it to work and trade it for a coworker's stick with random mp3s. Take the stuff home and put something else on the stick and trade it with the neighbour... All offline you don't leave a trail of transactions in Big Brother's databases.

Wait.

Just because we did it does not mean it is a good idea. We used to dig down copper cables to each and every house to get telephone connectivity, back in the old days.

These days many of the emerging economies build cell phone networks instead, since those are cheaper to build. Most would agree that they are better too.

Perhaps those economies should do the 'right' thing and invest in better public transportations instead of slavishly following in our footsteps. It has worked well in one area, chances are it will in others.

When I was a student I compiled the applications I wanted and installed them to my $HOME. No need to be root in any step of the process.

Here in Sweden you usually see a line to sign on, and below that another line to rewrite your name in a readable manner. That sort of makes sense, so I guess that is the common way to do it.

As for my own typing I went through school writing unreadable, I could not even read my own writing most of the time. Things changed when in my late teens when I started hanging out with the home guard and learnt how to write the army-style all-caps block letters.

15 years later I still use that style of hand writing, some letters have changed a little, but I think they still would pass the test as close enough. And I can actually read my own handwriting, even if I seldom do any these days.

So you were in a different time-zone?

Following the Mona Lisa article two days ago I sat down with Python and pygame and did my own version in an afternoon.

It struck me how easy it is to do simple graphical stuff with the pygame library for Python, and I think it would make a nice beginners language too.

Give them an editor that helps with Pythons indentation quirks, some code examples and let them loose.

Hello world is a single line program, and they can do simple graphical stuff in ten. And it sort of looks like English when you read it.