TRST_Blog

Oh boy. I knew this was going to be a hard one, but wow, was I off by an order of magnitude.

First off, the Keyboardio Atreus is an itty-bitty little boi. I’m coming from a 70-ish percent keyboard which uses a split and staggered layout (aka the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard). The Atreus feels a quarter of the size… which feels unbelievable but it’s true.

When I first moved from a “normal” keyboard to that, I had to suffer through a number of bad habits I had built up over the years, the worst offender being how I typed “b” with the wrong hand. Having been through that cycle once, I figured the only struggle I would have was to learn the new layout and function layers. Before I can even explore those issues, I am being murdered by the “c” key (“funvtion” anyone?) and the “z” key. Apparently I have been typing each with the wrong finger.

The Atreus layout is going to take a good long while to get used to for every day situations. Typing this “first impression” post has been okay but certainly a trial. (For anyone wondering, I opened the box, plugged in the keyboard and started pounding out my initial feelings right away; I will update as I get more use out of it.) Typing all of the letters, except the ones I have already mentioned are fairly natural feeling and surprisingly the space button aligns exactly with how I type. Less so with the default layout’s “backspace” (so many c’s 😢), “shift” and “super” keys. My left hand is going nuts trying to figure out the proper sequence. So far, the pattern feels to be a wild swing-and-a-miss with my left pinky trying to hit the “shift” and when I realize that’s not right I wildly stab around with my thumbs. Annoyingly, in Gnome (my current desktop environment on Linux) hitting the “super” key causes the search to take over the entire screen, so for anyone watching over my shoulder would be treated to quite the disco show… a show which is making me a little motion sick if I’m honest 🤢

I am going to stick with the default layout for the time being, to try and get a sense for how it was meant to be used before customizing. Thankfully, Keyboardio include a little laminated card with the default keymapping, which I am going to keep taped to my monitor. Looking at it now, I shrivel in horror looking at the placement of the brackets on the first function layer. The first coding sessions are going to be horrible until I figure this all out.

Quick update: typing numbers is painful… typing out the date 8 numbers and two hyphens took at least 45 seconds 🤣

I wrote a few questions I had before ordering the Keyboardio Atreus in a post and I hope to answer those in the next few weeks/days. If you, dear reader, have questions please feel free to send them my way.

I figured out my direction for the new year!

This year will be the, "Year of the Field Day." On its face, not terribly snappy; I tried looking for synonyms, nothing I found managed to convey the right feeling. So it’s sticking around.

Field Day (n.): a time of extraordinary pleasure or opportunity

This theme is born out of last year’s theme of clarity. Now that I have a better handle on some aspects of my life and a clear(ish) direction into the future, it is time to enjoy myself. I want to rebalance my life a little bit, focus on a few hobbies and enjoy the fruits of fortune that have fallen into my life.

In no certain order, I'd like to spend more time:

• Blogging and investing more time here into my “homestead”
• Trying a new content medium, like podcasting, streaming, or video
• Contribute to more open-source projects (ideally at least one on-going collaboration, rather than the few drive-bys I’ve made this year)
• Building little apps and side businesses based on interest, not monetary value (I’m really interested in helping create community first businesses or sustainable relationships between creator and community. If you see yourself in any of those words, reach out! I’d love to chat.)
• Taking more photos and exploring the world of photography
• Getting stronger and bouldering more often (COVID permitting)

I’ll be fleshing these out in more detail as I embark on each piece, but for now it feels better to get this out into the world.

Stay tuned 😉

Don't make a resolution for the year to come; you will either accomplish it or feel guilt ridden if your life takes a turn. Instead try setting a yearly theme. (A concept I've adopted after listening to the Cortex podcast with Myke Hurley and CGP Grey.)

A yearly theme works simply: it's a loose idea to gather up all of your successes across the year. Want to explore a new hobby, try new foods and line yourself up for a promotion this year? Fly under the banner of "Year of Exploration," the "Year of Adventure," or whatever you'd like. The theme only needs to be relevant to you.

A yearly theme is at once, lattitude to explore what you’re focused in on—without being directly tied to one and only one outcome—and, crucially, an opportunity to forgive yourself. It’s easy enough to jump from I missed this resolution, to I’m not worthy. If you’re anything like me, the lizard part of your brain has spent years looking for evidence to prove it’s conclusion… not the other way around. Do note the yearly theme doesn’t write off failures and learning opportunities to “only focus on positives.” Each theme is just an idea, they don’t dictate anything at all, you’re the one who gives it all structure and meaning. All we know is through the years of human experience, resolutions don’t work, don’t stick and don’t make you feel any better… though your experience may differ.

I’m realigning the site, making it easier to hack on, etc. My original goal was to use my holiday time off to do a full scrub and change the theme, mainly to open up the types of content I could post here. As with all good intentions, I’m starting smaller than my ambitions would like.

This site has jumped off Grav (a “flat file” CMS built in PHP) and onto Eleventy (a node-based static site generator). Grav is awesome, but I don’t work with it that often and because I’m not super familiar with all of the pieces, I find myself forgetting how things were put together and otherwise discouraged from working on the site. (Again, mostly past me’s fault for not documenting better.) I originally swapped over from a static site generator to Grav I could have access to a server rendered administration interface on mobile. But honestly, I stopped using it after I found a way to jerry-rig an automation script on my phone to post directly from a markdown editor via iOS’ Shortcuts. A hacker to the end, I guess.

Eleventy, if you’re into a bit of development and happen to be a JS oriented person, is a boat load of fun. It’s easy to hack on, the maintainer is a real force for positivity in the web world and at the end of the day it pukes out HTML, CSS and as much JS as you’re into (which could be none).

I also ran into some strange permissions issues that I could never permanently fix. This is what ultimately prompted the entire move to Netlify, which as it turns out was my real motivation, not a redesign or replatforming. Now, each change pushed to the site’s repository triggers a rebuild and pushes all of the assets to Netlify’s infrastructure/CDN. That keeps the site rendering quickly and reduces the amount of server management for me. Win-win as far as I’m concerned.

There’ll be more to come on the design and development front, but I just wanted to make note that the site is a changin’.

I've been typing a lot and my left pinky has been getting cranky. An ironic case of "Emacs Pinky," (aka "Hitting Control so much your pinky hurts") since I am an avowed Vimmer.^[1] As a person who lacks all constraint, I bought a new keyboard instead of adjusting my habits.

It's called the Keyboardio Atreus, which is an update to the Atreus by technomancy. It's a 40% keyboard so that means it's missing almost every one of your favourite keys and there's no key stagger so all the keys are arranged in columns that mirror your fingers. Supposedly, this is all for ergonomics, in truth it means my not-that-great touch typing speed is about collapse.

Looking online, there isn't much for information about the Keyboardio version, nor the previous one. The mechanical keyboard world isn't very wide but it is horrifically deep. I expected to find something to help get a sense for how it operates. Alas, beyond a few Reddit posts, the Kickstarter launch ad and a few super short videos, there's nothing out there to satisfy my burning questions.

I bought it anyway. I think it's a pretty handsome boi, but overall probably not the smartest decision I've made with my money.

All I wished I someone could have told me is:

• How's the typing experience?
• What was it like relearning to type on this doo-dad?
• What are those middle buttons like? Are they reachable by your thumbs
  • Is it at all ergonomic?
  • Do you use it for work? Is this your only keyboard? (Less interested in people with 50 million keyboards who switch frequently, though that is pretty cool.)
• How did you find customizing the layout and function layers?
  • Did you get into crazy modifiers?
  • How did you layout your keyboard? And Why?

Not anyone else's problem except mine, but things I learned which I could care less about:

• This is what typing sounds like using my XYZ mechanical switch

The only thing I should actually want to know the answer to:

• Will my partner (with whom I adore and share an office with) murder me for having ordered this?

I take for granted how awesome the hive-mind of the Internet is: I want to know something, I search, I find the information, I read it and move on. I've learned to simply forget that the Internet wasn't handed down to humanity, but was built by other meat-jackets like me. So I am going to turn my frustration above and try to do something productive with it: contribute back to the large, shared corpus of knowledge.

I imagine that's how most information ended up online, i.e., someone out there got so wound-up while doing a task, buying a thing, or whatever, that they vowed never to let it happen again and thus committed that knowledge to a Tumblr somewhere. A story as old as time. And a real shame that I haven't been doing more of it.

I pledge to solemnly blog about my goofy keyboard, to take a few pictures and who knows maybe make a video will be involved (or a stream? what do the cool kids do these days?), all for no other reason than I wish it had existed before I spent my time and money on this itty-bitty boi keyboard.