Same, I love Pebble and Pebble-like devices precisely because they have long battery life. I don't want or need payments on my watch. I'm also not a fitness junkie, so I don't use GPS tracking either. I mainly enjoy the well-designed UX Pebble provides and its simple functionality like alarms, stopwatch, and notifications.
With watches that need charging every one or two days, I get this Sisyphean feeling that I am owning a constantly dying device with a battery indicator that exists solely to be charged. The amount of functionality a watch can provide me (versus a smartphone) just doesn't justify the amount of charging I need to do.
Maybe I'm not a smartwatch power user like OP. But the Pebble and its ilk are a great fit for the niche audience I belong to.
There are other full featured smart watches like the Garmin Enduro 3 with several weeks of battery life (or even longer with solar charging). Of course it's larger and more expensive.
No one really needs payments on their watch but I'm surprised that anyone wouldn't want it. It's quite convenient, and gives you a backup option in case you forget your wallet or something.
Using C-r is a little too much navigation overhead for me personally. For things that I'll need long-term, I just use a pair of aliases to add a new alias to my .bashrc and source it (alias vib='vim ~/.bashrc' and alias .b='source ~/.bashrc'). I also have 'vit' and 'viv' aliases to do the same thing for my .tmux.conf and .vimrc.
For short-term stuff, I use https://github.com/dp12/fastdiract to save frequently used commands and run them instantly with a two-key combo (f0-f9).
Play CTFs, maybe the Flare-On challenge if you particularly enjoy reversing. Microcorruption is a just small taste of what the full CTF scene has to offer. picoCTF and pwn college are good starting points for beginners.
If you can find a competent instructor from a lineage that preserved the fighting applications of tai chi, you can see some pretty interesting grappling and joint-locking techniques. It's not all snake oil.
Here is a pretty good example of a very large trained fighter and a very excellent and much smaller tai chi guy going at it reasonably hard (like maybe one of them walks away with a concussion type hard).
I think that's a pretty good example of what "people who can actually fight well use tai chi techniques" looks like. A lot of force is going into those throws, bodies are flying, and they aren't students doing a demonstration for a crowd. Legit.
It's better than most of bullshido videos but it's obvious that the greco wrestler is acting and not really trying: no head control, no wrist control, high center of gravity, dramatic throws.
That "very excellent tai chi fighter" is, if I'm not mistaken, Chen Ziqiang - son of Chen Xiaoxing and nephew of Chen Xiaowang, part of the family that the Chen style comes from. He's the current master of the original Chen village school of Taijiquan, one of the biggest winners of Chinese push hands and wrestling championships (for his weight) and one of the most serious practitioners I know. I've been there and seen it, it's lots of heavy exercises, hours of daily practice and sparring.
He is indeed excellent, but if that is the level it takes to use Taiji in practice, you won't find many people in the world who can.
I have heard it takes roughly ten years of practice of tai chi to be able to fight reasonably effectively using tai chi principles, assuming you have a very workable base of kung fu or something equivalent established (say ten years) before that.
If it's just about learning how to fight really really fast the WW2 combatives courses seem to be the best available system. I don't think any martial art is suited to the speed and directness of modern life.
My Tai Chi teacher (Yang Family) is also an Aikido teacher and he teaches Tai Chi as a martial art, interpreting the form in terms of blocks, grappling moves, joint locks, etc. He learned at least some of that from earlier Tai Chi teachers who treated it as a cryptic martial art.
The purpose is to practice slowly with care to learn the moves thoroughly so that when it's time to perform them quickly you'll know the form and can flow quickly - the teacher was showing slow demonstrations.
I've never fought anyone, but as I've been taught the moves in Tai Chi's martial technique are generally intended to put people down quickly and hard by doing things like breaking elbows, eye gouges, and other grappling intended to severely injure the other party, essentially breaking every MMA rule that would get you disqualified.
This all varies significantly depending on the teacher, my teacher studied Chinese grappling, Mongolian wrestling, Aikido, and other arts that I'm sure he brought elements in from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3Q6vqvemA this is pretty much what high level skills in Tai Chi look like. You can see that it's mainly very, very secure footwork and explosive coordinated force delivered when the opponent is off balance -- this is a grappling situation but the logic is pretty similar if they were hitting each-other or even using swords / spears.
Not an online website, but I found my typing ability increased considerably after playing the typing-of-emacs game (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TypingOfEmacs). Because the penalty for mistakes is extreme (losing 1 out of the 3 lives you have), it encourages you to type with perfect accuracy.
There's a 2-3 second timeout to motivate you to type fast. Also, it pulls words from the buffer you have open, so you can practice on a set of words that you use regularly. It starts with short words and gradually moves to longer and more complex words to see if you can keep up.
Nice, it works in evil-mode on emacs as well! Although for emacs I would just use query-replace, which does the same thing with y/n confirmation, and it can also be run on just a selected region if desired.
