This article's web page actually has the essential note:
> NOTE: If your finished knot comes out crooked (eg. loops pointing heel-to-toe), it's probably because you tie your Starting Knot the opposite way to mine. This will result in an un-balanced knot, which sits crooked and comes undone more easily. See my Granny Knot page for more information.
Back when I still used to browse Imgur, there was a post illustrating how to identify and fix this easy to make mistake. It turns out that I was starting with the lace left-over-right as opposed to right-over-left (or vice-versa, not sure off-hand).
This quite literally changed my life, just a small muscle memory tweak and now my laces easily stay tied the whole day with a regular knot which is also super easy to release as well.
[0]: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/standardknot.htm
Edit:
I see he has a page dedicated to this mistake here: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
My only advice is to start by approaching the problem. “Hey, do your shoelaces come untied often?”
It's like when you learn how to roll up headphone wires or properly clean glasses.
The temptation to do it for others (and get rejected) is way too high.
To put it more simply, many of them will simply ruin your headphones if they're done with reasonable frequency.
For thin earbud type cords, just coil them loosely in a small plastic bag or use a loose bundle secured with a broad velcro strap.
It made a massive difference in my quality of life and I still have so many velcro straps that I find myself giving them away.
Then blow the droplets off both sides and let the rest air dry. We have soft water here, so no water spots. No rubbing dry with any kind of cloth.
Two cloths are ideal: one for cleaning and another for polishing.
If you're using soap and water, apply a tiny amount of soap onto both sides of the lens --- less than a grain of rice --- then apply water and rub with your fingers until clean. Skip to polish step.
If using cleaner, spray cleaner onto the cloth, NOT onto the lens. Spray onto one side of the cloth so that you have a wet side and a dry side.
(You can use water instead of cleaner in a pinch.)
Three passes.
First pass: with wet side, wipe lens in lines from top of frame to bottom. NOT in circles. (You'll spread the dirt around this way, making the cleaning process take way longer and potentially introducing scratches.)
Second pass: Repeat first pass with dry side of cloth.
Repeat first and second passes until lenses look mostly clear.
Third pass, if you have a polishing cloth: Wipe polishing clothes in circles until lenses are clear.
Your lenses will last forever if cleaned this way.
The cleaner steps above also work on any glass surface, like laptop screens or car windows.
No, it wont. I'm cleaning mine for decades with anything at hand (cotton shirts, napkins, etc) and not a scratch.
And of course there's the little fact that microfiber cloth is a recent synthetic thing. People used cotton and linen squares, or chamois leather ones if they felt fancy, to clean their glasses.
To clean glasses safely you basically need a soft, clean cloth. Cotton is totally fine. You could get away with a soft clean sponge, too. Or even a soft-ish piece of paper (which is what most disposable lens words are.)
It could make their lives so much better, but kind of awkward to broach. Perhaps sholladay‘s advice will work well.
[0] e.g. https://www.coachweb.com/gear/running-gear/heel-lock-lacing-...
You have bad laces. I thought this too before I tried different laces. Turns out different tensions and elasticities give different strengths of knots.
For example I have some military boots which came with slightly stretchy laces. They NEVER come undone, ever. They were the first pair that switched me on to this, and since then I have always bought laces with slight stretch to them, and the knots always stay done up.
In contrast when you buy a pair of fashion trainers, the laces in them are usually terrible and come undone several times per day as you have noted.
It was because I was essentially tying a granny knot instead of a reef knot and anyone who knows anything about knots would realize that of course they would keep coming undone.
And for the record, since learning how to tie the correct knot (over 10 years ago now), I’ve had no problem with laces that have come with any of the following brands of shoes:
- Nike
- New Balance
- Asics
- Converse
- Vans
>Makes a knot both tidy and tight.
I think I'd find this harder to remember than the principle.
If it landed up perpendicular, start over (i.e. the part before you make the loops) with doing the opposite of what you did before e.g. right-over-left rather than left-over-right.
For me it was very easy to fix the pre-loop stage, trying to change the loop stage seemed way harder to me as I was already so practiced at it.
Ditched the granny knot for the Ian's Secure Knot (https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm), and have been using that ever since for every pair of laced shoes I own.
I never taught my children anything but the '(Fast) Ian knot', so they know no other way. They are older now, but when they were younger, they were often the friends of 'first resort' when it came to getting their shoelaces tied when they came undone.
They've also taught many other children 'their way' of tying their shoes.
I should probably donate. It's a small thing, but definitely something that has made our lives (and those around us) better.
I just tried to do the old fashioned knot, it might be the first time I've tied it in two decades.
- http://borntorun.org/shop/howtotie.html
- https://xeroshoes.eu/pages/tarahumara-sandals
- https://importantbutnotatall.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/huarac...
Infinitely many ways to tie these.
I've been rocking these almost daily for three years now. No other sandals like it. My feet feel extremely free.
They are also extremely easy to make; all you need is soling material, barge cement (if you're slapping two soles together), paracord and scissors.
Vibram soles can be had on Etsy or from cobblers. You'll probably want a molded EVA midsole if you want arch support; I haven't made sandals with any, so YMMV.
Leather's a great upper and can be found at leather shops (Tandy's here in Houston is great, and they deliver). You can also use EVA or the inside of a bottom sole as an upper for more friction.
I primarily use these for walking. (They're awesome for running; my knees, not so much.) The arches in my feet are as flat as tables. Getting the knots right enough to prevent the heel strap from stretching out was a massive challenge that I recently figured out. Once I did, these became unbeatable.
I've been debating making a video on the entire process. I'll do it if there's enough interest here. (I don't post on Reddit anymore.)
But the double knot still sometimes comes untied somehow so I've never been entirely happy with it. Maybe if I take the effort to overcome my muscle memory and learn Ian's knot, it will quell the PTSD from being victimized at a young age and I can find inner peace.
Now, maybe that would have been a flaw with that pesky prankster brother of yours around, but I bet it'll be a positive now. Try it!
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/berluti-knot.htm https://youtu.be/ds-EtA4Uw6s?si=cWFXylbmamqCmtw6
On a related note, I have taken to replacing standard shoelaces on all my shoes as soon as I buy them with these elastic shoelaces with buckles[2]. You don't even have to unbuckle them, basically all your shoes become slip-ons. Probably not applicable if you're playing basketball or running track, but they work fine, look clean, and completely remove the need to ever tie laces. Highly recommend and you can buy them for like $1 each from sites like aliexpress or temu, I'm sure Amazon has them for $7 or so too.
[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
[2] https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-elastic-shoelaces.html...
Lightweight handmade HTML and CSS. Very little JavaScript. The site is fast as hell, instant transition between pages, it'd make a React SPA blush.
The URLs don't change. The navigation is familiar and unchanging. Back button works as expected. Bookmarks into the site don't break.
It costs him almost nothing to run, so he isn't compelled to fill the pages with bullshit ads that disrupt or interrupt. It's got a handful of ad banners at the top and bottom, as ads used to be. I'd prefer it had no Google ads, since surveillance is part of the deal one makes with Google, but it's not the worst offense.
Edit: Also, because it uses core/standard web technologies exclusively, he has never been required to change it to keep it working or update a bunch of stuff for security reasons. Maintenance cost is effectively zero...whenever he wants to work on the the site, he can. He's never been compelled to drop everything to perform npm acrobatics to get a security update rolled out.
> Maintenance cost is effectively zero...
His estimates[1] of ongoing costs seem different:
> I spend probably 60 hours a week continuously improving this website, answering visitors' questions, solving their shoelace problems – even granting permission for my material to be re-used by other educators.
> All of this effort earns me less than 1/5 of the Australian National Minimum Wage.
> I'm thinking of calling this my “Million Dollar Website” – not because it's worth a million dollars but because it has cost me a million dollars compared to what I could have earned at a regular job (based on an average Australian annual wage of $50,000 × 25+ years).
Granted it seems like you're commenting just on the cost of maintaining the site's HTML/CSS, and I agree that making the website simpler reduces those costs. But even with more complex websites the development costs are often less than the cost of developing good content, attracting people to your site, paying for hosting, etc.
It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework, for zero benefit over the one-million-dollar website he actually built.
Technical maintenance isn't the only kind of website maintenance. Unless you're ready to put a site into hibernation, maintaining the content is an ongoing cost. For example, Ian adds testimonial photos and quotes that people submit via email not to mention corrections and improvements based on feedback.
> It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework
Sure, and it could have been a three-million-dollar website if he wrote a web server from scratch in a language he invented to host the bespoke CMS and JavaScript framework he created.
But more reasonable alternatives to a personal HTML/CSS site like this would be either an off-the-shelf CMS or a third-party website builder. Those seem like they'd be more expensive in some ways and cheaper in others.
But, I don't see how a static HTML site could be a struggle to keep running. It costs almost nothing to host something like that, even with a lot of traffic. I guess if one wanted to make a living off of it, it'd be a struggle.
To me, it is not that these sites are rarer today than they once were. In fact, I think they are more of these today. It is just that the internet today is way bigger than it once was, and a lot of crap came with it. In fact, the web page dates back from 2000, and believe it or not, what is now known as enshittification was well on its way, though it was more Flash than Javascript. It was the peak of the dotcom bubble after all. The time such websites were "most of the internet" was more of a 1990s thing.
A site like Ian's Shoelace Site is not representative of its time any more than it is now, in that it was, and still is unusually good.
> Also, because it uses core/standard web technologies exclusively, he has never been required to change it to keep it working or update a bunch of stuff for security reasons.
On the client side, sure. On the server side, there is still maintenance to be done, especially with https where you have to manage certificates and their expiration, even though certbot make it simpler. But arguably, that's his host job and he just has to upload a bunch of html file, so you are right on that point. He still kept his page to modern standards, even though he wasn't required to (HTML 1.0 still works!).
It very clearly is, though.
There's no "if you want to keep learning check my book/course". It's not a funnel entrance, it's not adversarial to you as a reader.
I really really miss being able to enjoy content keeping my guard down, not wondering what is a scam, astroturfing, political propaganda...
The good thing about those ads is, it's your choice if they're allowed to run on your machines or not. Assuming your "user agent" isn't really an "ad industry agent".
Honestly, the old way of doing ads was also The Good Internet. No surveillance, the people placing the ads needed to actually think about where to spend their money, the sites had to decide personally whether the ad fit their audience and ethics. The ad surveillance networks launder all the ethical questions into a wash of hateful attention stealing and tracking user behavior.
I’m not sure that’s always true. We have our own homegrown adserver that’s almost 100% context based (a few ads for stores do rudimentary IP geo-targeting, all purely first-party though), and it does well with both banners and text based ads. It’s in the digital photography niche. I’d assume generally places that are strongly oriented towards a niche can do a lot with context based advertisment. CTR is much better than for Google ads (that we also run).
Ian's has it's place in like camping and hiking and such, but for everyday use, it wastes precious seconds and you have to have the dexterity of a surgeon to pull it off efficiently.
You should probably try the Ian Knot then: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm (good video demo here: https://youtu.be/6cBtqhq5P28
Took me about 5 minutes to learn properly some 15 years ago, and according to this chart: https://xkcd.com/1205/ that's definitely worth it.
It's tad unconventional looking for a shoe lace knot, but never has anyone every commented on it.
Looking at knots again, I guess it's just a slip knot.
Here's my story about the secure knot: I used to do a lot of road cycling, and I got back from my first 100mi/day ride pretty tired and went to untie my shoes. I couldn't, because I'd used the granny knot I learned when I was a kid-- so I wound up cutting them off. I'd learned Ian's Fast Knot before then, and decided to see about the Secure Knot. Well, happy to say, over the next 6+ century rides, Ian's Secure Knot was a dream-- it stayed put the entire day and always came undone for me-- a TERRIFIC knot!
Been tying my shoelaces like this ever since.
I love this video because it's both the perfect TED video and the perfect parody of a TED video.
https://cpbotha.net/2010/04/07/weekly-head-voices-20-a-lamar...
It has changed my life. I was also part of mountain rescue at the time, and nobody in the team knew about it. Now everyone swears by it.
So if you're part of any kind of first responder team - please tell your colleagues about this knot!
It's also just so simple to learn.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Laces-100s-Ways-Pimp-Kicks/dp/1402752... - it even comes laced with a set of special laces on the front to learn with, that uses the 2 colors his diagrams use.
So I have a simple alternative to tying my shoes that you can teach and learn easily. Knots are all about the number of turns or wraps, so when tying your shoes instead of crossing the laces over once, do it twice. When you wrap around the loop, do that twice too. You may have to try it to understand, but it is easy and readily understandable to anyone who can already tie their shoes. The best part is the way you tighten it down and untie are are exactly the same as you have always done. It almost never comes untied, but still releases easily.
For some reason I have a pair of sneakers that they will always untie way many more times than any other shoes that I ever had, no matter how hard you make the regular knot. No more!
I'm curious about the physics involved to cause such an obvious and singular failure.
I've been using this knot for years; I want to say since college (at least 10 years now). It's stupid fast to do once you learn it and it doesn't slip off ever.
Highly HIGHLY recommend learning it.
This was kind of like learning Vim. I struggled with how to computer for two weeks and lost the desire to learn literally anything else after mastering it. (I still prefer Vim with my plugins over VSCode!)
One other thing I've been doing lately is also to use bar lacing instead of cross lacing. A small change that makes shoes much more comfortable.
If anyone's playing with this you may find that after you tie the loops together they're sitting funny; you basically have to swap the sides the loops sit on!
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknottech.htm#observat...
It’s both functional and a great party trick.
Added benefit: adults are impressed when they see my kids tie their laces.
https://youtu.be/8DBhTXM_Br4?t=1711 (Veritasium)
Funny thing is, if you don't know how to tie it, you probably just notice how it looks when it's done (almost exactly like the granny bowtie) so you (understandably) assume it's just a different method to arrive at the same result, like how bunny-ears and rabbit-goes-around-the-tree do. Of course it's not the same result at all.
Secure knot 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155457
General Shoelace Site
4 Months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848231
Years later I found out that my new knot was not new and that I had simply re-invented an existing knot, which appears elsewhere under two different names:
“Double Slip Knot” (#1219) in “The Ashley Book of Knots” by Clifford Ashley;
“Seaman's Shoelace Knot” (or “Seemännische Schuhbandschleife”), which appears in the German book “Knoten, Spleißen, Takeln” by Erich Sondheim.Besides, I'm pretty sure Ian has done a lot more to spread the knowledge of this particular knot than anyone else in history.