TRST_Blog

If my Smart Keyboard doesn't stop being a jerk,^[1] I’ll have to get better at typing on glass. The benefits of using the on-screen keyboard are pretty amazing, I mean, who needs a mouse if your cursor moves with a two finger tap? I like the idea, yet when I use the software keyboard I run into a set of problems:

1. I’ve memorised a lot of key commands (i.e., punctuation) and system-wide shortcuts, none of which are useable without a hardware keyboard;
2. There are missing software keys (i.e., Esc) that are available on the hardware keyboard; and finally,
3. I keep missing the backspace key, so tonnes of \'s in my written drafts.

The first should be fixed going forward. I realise kids are not learning to type like we did, believe me, I KNOW and that's fine, leave most of the keyboard alone. Consider adding a modifier key to the standard keyboard. Or, why not include a mac-like keyboard as an additional, non-default keyboard layout? A feature tucked-away for dorks like me.

Wouldn't it be grand to peck out punctuation without having to switch to an alternative layer and long press on to get the ellipse or opening single inverted comma, for example. I think being able to access copy/paste without removing my hands from the keyboard would also be a game changer.

As for the second point, oh-my-days does using a terminal emulator suck without an escape key. Again, I’m in the minority but I can’t even work around it with a quick mash of CTRL + \[ to replicate the Esc key because of my first issue 😫

That last point is probably just laziness on my part, something I should train myself to stop doing. Yet, no matter how impractical (and unlikely), I desperately wish I could reshape key layout or swap them entirely, I'm looking at you Caps Lock.

It would be so luxurious to set the Delete key to be twice the height, or have the left half of my space key to map to another function or key. Take a look at a bunch of funky enthusiast keyboards for an idea of what that could look like. Actually, I wonder if Apple releasing a feature like that would quiet down the growing discord about recent Apple software: everyone who’d normally speak up would be so busy fiddling that there’d be no time left.

Apple will probably never do any of what I asked. I don’t—entirely 😋—begrudge them for that either. I should probably learn to love the bom… er, software keyboard. Though I do hold a tiny hope, a birthday candle sized wish that whoever is on the professional workflow team advising iOS development (LOL) has the same issue pounding out back slashes or accidentally triggering the third app pane (what is the floating one called again?) like I do.

I watched this documentary on a recommendation from Scott Tolinski (his ‘sick pick’) on Netflix. It was originally released in 2015, so I’ve arrived a bit late to the party. Here's the original trailer:

I made the mistake of watching it just before bed. Do not repeat that mistake—way too intense.

Meru’s visuals were equal parts awe-inspiring and harrowing. Its the story of three of the world’s best climbers and their attempts to ascend Meru Peak. (Apparently, Everest is a cake-walk in comparison to this mountain: never ascended, that is until Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk managed in 2011.) It is incredible to see how driven Anker, Chin and Ozturk are to do the impossible.

I have a decent control over my fear of high places, I know its never right to say that I am completely unafraid of something. The footage in this film reinforced that fact so thoroughly. There were no camera crews accompanying these climbers, so whatever you see is what they filmed themselves, hanging precariously 20,000 feet in thin, frigid Himalayan air. To be honest, given the what happens on each attempt, I’m surprised there was any footage at all.

I have deeper meta-thoughts about the genre of brutal, pursuit-of-greatness documentaries, but I'll save those for a little later. Let me know of what you think if you give this one a go.

I’ve been using my iOS devices nearly exclusively, since the iPad Pro 12.9" debuted. Honestly, I’ve been really happy and don’t really have any plans to switch. I developed websites on the iPad, I administer servers, perform any administrative tasks for my day job on the iPad and nearly everything else on my mobile devices.

I do keep a Mac Mini running at home as a backup server, which I have no plans to change. Once a week I’ll make sure all my software is up-to-date, or I might use the desktop to quickly look something up if my iPad is still in my bag. Other than that, I rarely use the Mac.

Lately, I have been wondering what my next setup might look like. I plan on doing more design/development work in the future and testing in multiple browsers/viewports is a necessity. I could have multiple devices and screens littered across my desk, or I could get another *nix box and a nice wide screen to fill with the various windows I need. The former is a bananas solution to a simple problem and the latter, well makes a lot of sense for someone who grew up around traditional PCs. So another Mac then?

Not necessarily.

I wonder, if I’m comfortable working on command line tools, in editors like Vim (NVim) and using SSH (or Mosh) to tunnel into servers, do I need something as heavy duty or expensive as a full blown desktop PC? I wonder if a cheap single board computer, like the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, running Linux might be enough to run a single browser window with Browserstack loaded. Not exactly what I first imagined, but not far off what I actually need to get that work done.

My 90’s computer era conditioned brain is like, “Yo, just use a computer.” But on the other hand, compute power seems to be limitless and the same appears to be true of connectivity these days (in certain parts of the world, with certain levels of access and privilege, etc.). A lot has changed since the megahertz wars.

It used to be true that if I wanted to run multiple VMs I’d need a powerful base system: multiple cores, heaps of RAM and a power hungry graphics card as well. Actually it still is true, if I want to do all that in my office that is. Today, it’s possible to leverage modern infrastructure to get these intensive tasks done on someone else’s iron.

I am drawing a lot of inspiration from the cloud and “serverless” models of distributed computing. At home, I could have a small legion of computing devices that are, on their own, less capable than one Intel powered laptop, but massively more flexible and cheap. Connected to a service like Browserstack, a $35 computer could give me access to multiple VMs in real time.

I think that's it, honestly. I’ll order a Raspberry Pi and see whether I can make it work. If not, I’m only out a bit of change and I’ll buy that shiny Mac I really don’t need but desperately want 😬