Last night, just as I was about to go to bed, Jesse tweeted:| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I've read a number of accounts recently, about how people experienced their early days of the internet, and before that, the early days of personal computing. It was inspiring to read those, and it drove me down memory lane, I remembered a whole lot of stories of my own. Stories that I eventually want to tell my kids - so this is both an attempt at preserving those memories for them, and a way to share my own experiences as well.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Continuing my continuous integration system adventures, in today's episode, I will explore a few ideas I had since.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I recently wrote about my adventures in finding a continuous integration system to replace the Drone that I am running. It did not end on a happy note, and while it did list a couple of requirements and nice to haves, it did not provide a bigger picture, it did not describe how I'd like to work with my CI. I will try to do that today, and see how far I get.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Just shy of four years ago, I set out to find a self-hosted continuous integration solution, and eventually settled on Drone. However, during these past four years, drone transitioned away from being fully open source into an open core model. Everything I self host, I can - and usually do - build from source, with the exception of my continuous integration system, and lets be honest, that's not good.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The scene: A theater. The stage is empty, spotlight aimed at the microphone stand in the middle. The audience hold their breath in quiet anticipation.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Back in May, I wrote The Tragedy of Byr, and since then, as an experiment to test some ideas I had, I turned it into an experimental game. But all along, I have not properly set the stage: I failed to tell the story behind both of them. That is not entirely accurate, as I did toot the story, briefly. But there was never an explanation. Until now.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
2012| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It has been quite a while I wrote about monitoring, and as I've been rebuilding my servers, my setup, and a whole lot of other things, it became relevant again, because I rebuilt my monitoring stack from the ground up, too. I will be talking about that at a later point, today is about designing a dashboard on top of it.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I was reading an interesting and educational blog post, about the writer's home infrastructure status. I was curious about it, because it mentioned syslog-ng, a project I used to be heavily involved with, and a project that's still dear to my heart, even though I'm neither involved, nor am I using it any longer. It always warms my heart when I see people make good use of something I contributed a lot to. Tiny little trickles of joy, you know?| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I wrote the riemann-c-client library in 2013, and has been maintaining it since. The last release was in 2018, and I pretty much considered the library done and finished, not needing neither development, nor much of maintenance either. Yet, I have released a new version today, after more than three years of no releases - because I re-read the documentation, and spotted a case where the code didn't match documentation, and under some (very rare) circumstances, may have resulted in memory corru...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I posted here, even though there were a lot of things happening around me. Alas, some of those led me onto a path that I am now ready to talk about: it's been brewing for a good while now, and I'm excited to announce it today!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I set out to write a year-end retrospective, even ended up with almost a thousand words written, but I got distracted, and never finished. Having sat down to do just that now, I re-read it all, and decided it's best to throw it in the bin. In many ways, 2019 was a terrible year. In some other ways, it was incredible. When I first sat down, I started listing everything that happened, good and bad - but in truth, such a detailed log is not something the great public should read. Yes, yes, that ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A while ago I put up a project page, where I offered a few deals: send me a keyboard to port Kaleidoscope to, or donate to my Liberapay fund, and once there's enough funds there, I'll get a board from the wishlist, and do the porting work. There are some news to share about the project!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
NOTE: This post was written in a state of anger, and its wording is stronger and more aggressive than it should have been. I am leaving it as is, as it was posted, under the given circumstances. Today, I would write it differently. | asylum.madhouse-project.org
I wanted to build a keyboard for a long time, to prepare myself for building two for our Twins when they're old enough, but always struggled with figuring out what I want to build. I mean, I have the perfect keyboard for pretty much all occasions: my daily driver is the Keyboardio Model01, which I use for everything but the few cases highlighted next. For Steno, I use a Splitography. When I need to be extra quiet, I use an Atreus with Silent Reds. For gaming, I have a Shortcut prototype, and ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Your Account Is Scheduled for Permanent Deletion | asylum.madhouse-project.org
Lately, I've been porting Kaleidoscope to keyboards that happened to land on my desk for one reason or the other. Keyboards such as the ErgoDox EZ, the Atreus, Splitography, and most recently, KBD4x. In almost every case, I ran into weird issues I couldn't immediately explain, where the symptoms weren't search-engine friendly. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with the ported code, either, because the same code worked on another board. Figuring out what went wrong and where was an incredi...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Almost a week ago, on a snowy night of January 3, I hung up my Debian Developer hat, and sent my retirement letter in. This has been a long time coming, and I contemplated doing this many times over the past year or two, but never got the courage and the willpower to retire. It wasn't easy. Debian has been part of my life for the past two decades, and I've been a developer for about eighteen years. I considered - and to some extent, still do - Debian my second family. There have been times wh...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I wrote a progress report, yet, there's so much to share! Many, many things happened in the 18 months since the last update, some good, some bad. This report will not be a completely accurate and through account of those months, but rather a summary. Lets start with the most glaring fact: Chrysalis is still not ready for a beta. But it is closer than ever was before.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A few of my readers might perhaps know that I'm working on a graphical configurator of sorts for the Keyboardio Model01, called Chrysalis. It is built on top of Electron. Even though it is a niche project, one that doesn't even have a usable alpha yet, I got called out for building on Electron a few times in the not too distant past. I've also seen pretty much every Electron-based project receive disproportionate amounts of hate, for the single reason of being built with it. The usual argumen...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Just saw a video of a giant trackball, and I started to wonder if it would make sense for me to build one. Clicking would be a problem, but 99% of the time when I'm trackballing around, I have my other hand on the keyboard, and could click there. Most things handle two mice doing coordinated gymnastics...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Yesterday was an inspiring day. I came across a write-up about the Ultimate Writer, an e-ink computer/digital typewriter, in a beautiful wooden case. This sent me down a deep rabbit hole for a whole lot of reasons, some of them even being practical! You see, my weakness is stuff made out of wood. My other weakness is keyboards. My third, a distraction-free environment. This amazing build combines all of those, it was bound to suck me in.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A few days ago I wrote a post about finding a suitable CI/CD system, which got posted on lobste.rs, where a number of questions were raised. Turns out I did not adequately explain why some of my requirements are there, and what usecases they serve. I'll try to correct that, and do so in this post.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have been happily using Travis for years, it worked quite well for the projects I had on GitHub. But ever since I started moving to my own, self-hosted Gitea, I had this nagging feeling that I should find a different continous integration solution. One that I can host myself, because I'd like to be less and less dependent on other services, and self-host what I can. It feels safer that way, and also gives me a lot more control.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
In the last installment of cleaning up, I described how removing some infrequently used features from the site resulted in an even smaller size, especially when combined with minification. I have not stopped working on making this site nicer since. There have been a few things that annoyed me long enough that I sat down a few days ago, and fixed them. Turns out doing so was much easier than I thought.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have used plenty of Emacs themes in the past, but in the end - like many others - I ended up creating my own. What I have now is very different than what I used even a year ago, let alone even before. It differs not just in colors, tone, or being light or dark - it differs fundamentally, in its goals. This theme is not for everybody, and I'm not going to try and convince You, my dear reader, that it is good for anyone but me. What I want to do today is explore the path I took, and how I end...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The other day, I made the mistake of getting involved in a kind of flamewar, that revolved around GitHub versus an email-driven workflow. As can be safely inferred, I do not subscribe to the email-driven workflow idea. There seem to be fundamental disagreements, and I think it's worth a shot to show my side of things.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I wrote about what's happening with Kaleidoscope, and I've been putting off writing this post for so long, that I can't ignore it anymore. I've been putting it off because a lot of things happened, and many more are under development. It's a huge amount of work, even to summarize. Fortunately, there's a lot of good stories to tell.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Last time I wrote about the reasons why I redesigned the looks of this site, the ways I cut down on size. I described how I went from 290kb initial download through 14 requests to 8.4kb through three requests. Since then, I made a few minor changes that made the site even smaller.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Ran across the Unimouse today, a tentable mouse. Not a trackball, but the tenting solution looks interesting, could use it as an inspiration.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a bit over two years since the last visual update of this space. In that time, a lot changed, and I felt it was time to refresh how it looks. So over the past month or so, I've been planning and experimenting with ideas, to see which one sticks, which one feels right. The result is this cleaned up, pretty minimalist site.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The M570 arrived yesterday, and I was able to spend a few hours casually testing it, trying to get used to the thumb-operated ball. It's not going too well. While I like the form, and the feel of controlling the ball with my thumb, my precision plummeted, and I keep wanting to click with my thumb. Both on my Orbit, and on my keyboards, I "click" with my thumb a lot. Not being able to do that on the M570 feels awkward.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
In my first post about trackballs, I wrote that I wish to use the ball to scroll, while holding a button. Today, Lenz Grimmer on the #keyboardio IRC channel pointed me to the right direction, his short HOWTO on how do accomplish this under linux, with any trackball or mouse.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Thanks to a colleague who noticed it, I bought myself a Logitech M570 for about half price, so I can experiment with thumb-controlled trackballs. At this price, it was worth it for the sake of experimenting, I believe.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I came across a video this morning, that showed how to build a simple MIDI controller. It has buttons, knobs, and a lot of things my trackball will have too. It is also a whole lot easier to build, so I might build something like it first, to practice and experiment.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
All my keyboards at home have silent, non-clicky switches, except one prototype which has Kailh Greens. This is good, because I do not like noisy keyboards, and have no use for the click (I'm listening to music anyway). Yet, our twins love the sound of the switches. However, I need to return the prototype, and will not have any clicky boards at home then. This led me down a thought process that started with building a clicky keyboard, and ended up with asking myself this: what if I made the t...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Which led me to try operating my Orbit with my thumb. It was a huge disappointment. Movement speed was abysmal. You see, when using fingers, I usually use three: index, middle, and ring. If I want to move the cursor far away, I'll just roll all three over the ball. Nice and easy. But with a thumb-operated ball, I can't do that, I only have one thumb per hand (and frankly, I don't mind that). So if I go down this route, I will need to build it so that it can spin more freely, to allow me to cr...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Buttons! With a gripping setup, arcade-style buttons are out, which makes me sad, as they looked awesome. Perhaps I can find a good place for them anyway? But I digress. For the real buttons, I'm now considering Kailh Low Profile Browns, with suitable caps. I do want to use a mechanical switch for the mouse buttons, at least the left & right one. If I end up with a hand-base bar or something similar, that may end up being non-mechanical.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I've been thinking about LEDs. I definitely do not want a LED under the ball, but perhaps they could be useful under the buttons? And while there, what about underglow? Between the two, I think underglow would make the more sense, and it would be the least disturbing too.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Started experimenting with the idea of a thumb-operated trackball, in a more serious manner. As in, I took my Kensington Orbit, tilted it, and tried how it feels to roll the ball with my thumb. It wasn't terribly bad. This opens up the possibility of more experiments, and more designs.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Today this thread happened to come my way, and it gave me so many ideas to ponder about!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Patreon recently announced that they will restructure their fees, but they are doing so in such a way that hurts me, and hurts my patrons. For a $1 contribution, they'd charge $1.35, and each contribution would be charged individually, instead of one bulk charge at the start of the month. This makes small contributions very expensive, especially when one does many small contributions.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the past couple of days, I've been pondering about how I would mount the ball, and this may very well end up being the hardest part. I do not have a 3D printer, nor do I have easy access to one, so prototyping will be a bit hard.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
This is not how it all started. It all started with a picture, and then some brain dumping. I put the idea aside after writing a blog post about it. But last night, when I was casually browsing around, half asleep, I failed a saving throw as we say it. Having failed it, I had no other choice, but to pursue the idea further, and that's how the first sketch was born:| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have changed jobs recently, for a whole lot of reasons I'm not going to ramble about publicly, except one of them: I wanted to spend more time hacking on keyboard firmware, Kaleidoscope in particular. I had a huge backlog - still do, but less so -, and many, many things that needed to be done, as soon as possible. Not to mention I enjoy working on it, so I made arrangements in order to be able to do so.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the past year and a little more, I have been consciously building a better working environment at home. I bought an adjustable standing/sitting desk, because I find standing more comfortable, it allows me to walk around easily (which I do often, while thinking), and being adjustable, if I get tired, or if I'm playing games, I just lower it and sit.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Twitter has been an increasingly frustrating experience lately, doing everything they can to alienate me. Today, they succeeded, and I will not be posting on there anymore. I will neither tweet, retweet, nor favourite, my account has been put into a read-only mode. I'm still keeping it, because there are people there whom I follow, and who have not left the birdsite yet. But I will not be interacting with it in any other way. By the end of the year, I plan to leave Twitter behind completely, ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
On the 20th of August, shortly after posting the previous post on this blog, we went to the hospital for a routine check up. As we were expecting any day now, we went with everything packed, and how good we did so! As usual, I was waiting outside while my wife went in, but five minutes later, she walks out, and says the most beautiful words I ever heard until that day: "We are staying". The next half an hour was spent notifying family, and a few hours later - shortly after half past eleven - ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have worked with embedded hardware before, a long, long time ago, near the turn of the century. But it was a brief exposure to this world, and even back then, I was using hardware much more powerful than what the keyboards I work with today have, the Atmega32u4. My prior experience did not prove all that useful in my recent work. There were lots of assumptions I made that were flat out wrong, lots of surprising things I had to discover. Some of these things are obvious in hindsight, some I ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Writing this post is completely unplanned, there was no development I planned to write about today, but this morning, I sat down to attempt implementing a request made on GitHub, to explore how hard it would be. It was meant to be a quick experiment, with only some data and talking points as a result. It ended up becoming something a lot more than that, and of the whole ordeal the biggest take away for me is that we managed to cut the length of a scan cycle in half again. We are down from abo...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It has been a while I wrote about keyboards - or anything at all, really -, so it is high time I do that, because there has been a lot of progress made on various fronts. We will touch a number of topics today, ranging from Kaleidoscope to QMK related ones. As a teaser, we will talk about hid-io, feedback from the Keyboardio PVT run so far, and Emacs.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The past few weeks were quite a challenge, but we are slowly settling down at our new place (where I now have a proper desk, with enough space for all the gadgets, whee!), and Chrysalis has been moving forward nicely too, with some major changes all around the place. While you can see some of those changes in the video below (just compare it to the previous one!), a lot of the changes were made under the hood, and can't be seen. I'll be going into more details, but first, lets see how things ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The past month has been eventful in many ways: we've seen the Twins three times on ultra sound, made huge progress towards moving to a bigger apartment, and last but not least, tremendous progress was made on Chrysalis. It even has useful features now, so much so, that an alpha release was tagged too. You can see a demo video just below, and try the pre-built binaries yourself, no Kaleidoscope-powered hardware required, either!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
As promised last time, I will be sharing Kaleidoscope-related developments more often, and as it happens, there are interesting news to share today!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
In the span of two weeks, we made a few big leaps forward with the Kaleidoscope firmware, and it is now possible to remap keys on the keyboard without using any software on the host. We can just do it on-the-fly using nothing else than the keyboard. While this is pretty awesome, it's not the most convenient thing, and has its share of limitations. Yet, it has its uses. Among others, it is one of the best examples to show how all the small pieces fit together, and can be used to build somethin...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
You know that feeling when everything seems to fall into place? When you finally reach the top of the hill, and look around? When everything you worked towards bears fruit? When you lay back, and prepare to rest, to enjoy the hard work put into your creation?| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Last time I talked about firmware stuff, I mentioned that there's a new package coming my way. Well, it arrived, and that set the course for the next week or two at least. And things unfolded rapidly. We've implemented some very important pieces of the puzzle, solved problems we have not noticed before, and I created plugins I was commissioned to write. All in all, the past two weeks were eventful, and easily the busiest and almost the most productive part of my firmware work so far.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A recent conversation on twitter, and the mention of the Das 5Q reminded me how different people are. A lot of people seem to be on the opinion that per-keyboard LEDs are so very useful for notifications, which is something I very strongly disagree with. Back when the 5Q was announced (and I'm not going to link to it, because it is easily one of the silliest ideas I've seen in recent years), I was baffled by their focus on using the LEDs for notifications from the host.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
So I had the Keyboardio Model 01 prototype for over a month now, and a lot has happened since the last progress report, ranging from having a colleague re-solder some of the problematic parts of the keyboard, through fixing a lot of bugs in the plugins, to Unleashing the Horde.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
A day before Christmas, I received a package, in which was a prototype of the Keyboardio Model 01, for the purpose of testing, and fixing the plugins I'm developing for its firmware. And to work on the firmware too, as a side-effect.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
This past week I have been waiting for a package. Not just any random package, mind you: this one came from the US, and was special in a number of ways. The eagerness to have it in my hands was huge, so huge that I started to plot its route on a map, trying to estimate where it will land next, when, and where it will go after. This was a reasonable success, but once the package arrived to Hungary, the excitement increased by a tenfold.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I have been playing with an UHK prototype lately, obviously not on any of the hardware bits, but on the firmware. It's an interesting thing, poking around in the brain of a keyboard, especially when its the third, very different kind of brain.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the first time, I will be talking about the keyboard.io only. No ADORE or ErgoDox news to report this time, and I'm typing this on Dvorak too (a tad tired and short on time to write on ADORE). And gosh, there is so much to talk about! Remember the last time? So much has changed. Nothing is quite the same, really. The old multi-key library is now laying dormant and abandoned, but a new one arose, and was claiming attention. It started as a full-blown firmware, but I was quickly persuaded t...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The layout I use, and the one I'm aiming for are rather unconventional in a few respects. One of these is that I make heavy use of various multi-purpose keys: one-shot modifiers, tap-dance-, and leader keys. I have read, and continue reading a lot of keyboard and layout-related material. Blog posts, researches, theorycrafting about the most efficient layout, and a lot more. And reading most, I often feel frustrated, because almost all of them are written with the same old keyboard design and ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Just like last time, the focus of this post is keyboard.io and ADORE. There are plenty of news to report on both sides! A lot of progress has been made on the arduino front, to make it possible to have the behaviour I desire on the Model 01 - only the Leader key is missing, and I have a good idea about its implementation, too. On the other front, ADORE has seen a huge update again, aimed at reducing pinky use, and balancing the hands out. We'll see after this post how that worked in practice.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Today I will write more about layouts and the keyboard.io than the ErgoDox, though most of the testing has been made on it. This time, I took a big step: having procrastinated on it for a very long time, I rearranged the number row, along with the symbols. To make the transition easier - for some values of easy - I started to use the same number/symbol layout on my base layer too. What can I say? It's painful. I have used the same layout ever since I first laid my hands on a keyboard in the e...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
As with the last blog post, I'm writing this on ADORE, to collect another heatmap worth of data. It is still awfully slow, but the changes I made since the last time feel better so far. Nevertheless, this post will be as much about other things, as about ADORE. This marks the day I start tagging these posts with the new Ergonomics tag.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It has been a while that I have been contacted by a recruiter, and the last few ones were fairly decent conversations, where they made an effort to research me first, and even if they did not get everything right, they still listened, and we had a productive talk. But four days ago, I had another recruiter reach out to me, from a company I know oh so well: one I ranted about before: Google. Apparently, their recruiters still do carpet-bombing style outreach. My first thought was "what took th...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I'm writing this on ADORE, to collect enough data for a new, ADORE-based heatmap, and to practice the layout. Most likely, this post will take the longest time to write. Nevertheless, I will persevere, for science!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Since the last update not much has happened with the layout. There were some minor changes, but nothing spectacular. Instead, I've been doing a lot of research, or at least, trying to. The focus is now on the ADORE layer, and I'm collecting data, analyzing the layout, and similar things. For example, here is an updated heatmap of my current, Dvorak layout:| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It's been a while I posted an update about my ErgoDox journey, and there's a lot to talk about, now that I'm back from vacation. Today, we have two main topics: trackballs and heatmaps. The two are not connected, it just happens that I write about both at the same time.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
In the past, I usually updated every week, but this last one took longer, almost two weeks. Not because things finally settled down, no. It's never over. Lots of things are happening on the keyboard front, a good amount of experimenting was and is being made. The changes this time are less radical, perhaps, at least as far as the base layer is concerned. Other layers... well, they did see some bigger updates.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Although just six days ago it seemed I am done doing major changes to my layout for a while, and the base layer will not be touched, I was wrong. It's never done. There is always something to tweak, to make things even more comfortable, and fit for my hands and usage patterns. Nevertheless, while there were a number of updates to the keyboard, the path I started on with the ErgoDox continues, and I'm at a stage where it's no more just a keyboard. It's something bigger: as I started paying mor...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
In the past week and a bit, my layout did not change much at all, neither behaviour, nor key location. It appears I reached a state where I feel sufficiently comfortable. Therefore I will be talking less about the keyboard now, or how I am taming it, and instead focus on something I am experimenting with: creating my own alphanumeric layout.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Ever found yourself in need of entering binary codes rapidly? Ever wanted to use all ten fingers to do so? Ever felt your SuperCoder 2000 too limiting, by only having three buttons? We heard you! With this layout for the ErgoDox EZ, you will be able to tap in binary at an unparalleled speed and accuracy! Efficiency never seen before!| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the past week, I have only applied tiny tweaks and bugfixes to my ErgoDox layout, it appears that I have finally arrived to the part of the journey where the core remains the same. Because the changes - apart from a new, experimental layer - are all very small, this time, I will not only talk about the ErgoDox, but also compare it to my previous keyboard, the TypeMatrix 2030.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
It has been over a month of receiving the ErgoDox EZ, and it has been my daily driver at work for most of that time, after the first weekend, which I spent with it at home. In this time, I learned a lot about my typing habits, my preferences, and about the keyboard too. In this summary you read now, I will try to not only describe how I use the keyboard, but the whys too, the process that led to the setup I have right now.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Another week almost gone, and there are a lot of progress to report on the ErgoDox front. I tweaked my layout further, but there are less changes this time, and most of them under the hood: not how the keys are laid out, but how they behave. Mind you, there were still some minor changes here and there.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I am now using the ErgoDox EZ as my main keyboard at work, and am loving it. Sometimes, when really frustrated, I still switch back to my TypeMatrix, but that is happening less and less. As of day 22, I am consistenlty reaching 40+ WPM, with 95%+ accuracy. But I make a lot of mistakes, so it is time I slowed down, and work on accuracy for a while instead.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Been using the ErgoDox for almost a week now, and it is starting to get better! I rarely have to consult the printed layout anymore, but I make plenty of errors still, mostly because I am trying to pay attention to type with all ten fingers. The layout itself (pictured below) feels close to final, although only the base and the Hungarian layers are tested well - the rest, I have not used all that much yet.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
So I have been playing with the ErgoDox some more, and things are getting better! I have put together a visual aid now, which is a great help. Touch typing is still slow, because I never properly learnt it before. Modifiers are also awkward to use, I may have to relocate them closer to the thumbs - or at least, move SHIFT closer, as that is what I use most often.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Today my ErgoDox EZ arrived, I flashed a Dvorak firmware a couple of times, and am typing this on the new keyboard. It's slow and painful, but the possibilities are going to be worth it in the end.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
For the past fifteen years, I have been tweaking my ~/.emacs continously, most recently by switching to Spacemacs. With that switch done, I started to migrate a few more things to Emacs, an Atom/RSS reader being one that's been in the queue for years - ever since Google Reader shut down. Since March 2013, I have been a Feedly user, but I wanted to migrate to something better for a long time. I wanted to use Free Software, for one.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Last Friday, I compiled a list of keyboards I'm interested in, and received a lot of incredible feedback, thank you all! This allowed me to shorten the list considerably, two basically two pieces. I'm reasonably sure by now which one I want to buy (both), but will spend this week calming down to avoid impulse-buying. My attention was also brought to a few keyboards originally not on my list, and I'll take this opportunity to present my thoughts on those too.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Even though I spend more time staring at the screen than typing, there are times when I - after lots and lots of prior brain work - sit down and start typing, a lot. A couple of years ago, I started to feel pain in my wrists, and there were multiple occasions when I had to completely stop writing for longer periods of time. These were situations I obviously did not want repeated, so I started to look for remedies. First, I bought a new keyboard, a TypeMatrix 2300, which while not ergonomic, w...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Having spent almost a year fine-tuning my latest ~/.emacs.d, an innocent question from a colleague triggered a long chain of events, that led to dropping my entire Emacs config, and migrating to Spacemacs instead. It has a whole lot of interesting features, but for me, the most important one was the mnemonic key bindings: this is something I wanted to do for a long time, but never managed to force myself to sit down and do it. Now I don't have to, Spacemacs does it for me.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Strange as it may be, it turns out I never wrote about dh-exec yet, even though it is close to being four years old. Gosh, time flies so fast when you're having fun! Since its first introduction, there's been a reasonable uptake in dh-exec use: as of this writing, 129 packages build-depend on dh-exec. One might think this would be a cause for celebration, that the package is put to great use. But it's not.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
At the end of last year, I got a bit more serious about monitoring my own systems, and the effort was well worth it. Yet, there were some parts of the system I had no metrics or information about: for example, there are services running on my systems that get restarted from time to time, which is ok, but I'd still like to know when and how often that happens, so I can judge whether that matches my expectations. Then, while there, services can also crash - and that, too, happens from time to t...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I used to look up to and admire Robert C. Martin, his Clean Coder series taught me a lot, and I enjoyed some of his blog posts, too. But lately, some of the things I read from him made me uneasy, and not in a good way. When I read his latest piece, I felt genuinely sorry for him, and those who follow his advice. "Make the Magic go away" is already a terrible title, and the rest doesn't make it any better, either.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Somebody somewhere had some job doing something for some amount of some kind of compensation. Sometimes this somebody took some route to some house where some others lived too, along with some other things (who may or may not have lived). Of course, some houses change over some time, and some people choose some other route to some different house after some time, perhaps even to some other people than the some they lived with before. Sometimes.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Ever since I redid my monitoring setup, two issues were coming up over and over again: I needed a browser to have a reasonable overview of my systems, and I needed ruby to run riemann-dash. Granted, it is easy to query Riemann from the command-line, and I can even put up a screen or tmux session with watch commands running in its many windows, but that's horribly ugly. I wanted a dashboard, one that I can look at, and see trends right away. A few months ago, I came accross blessed-contrib, an...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
The other day, I wrote a controversial piece about why grepping logs is terrible, the reactions were interesting. I've got some great feedback (thanks!), and there were a lot of hostility too. I've been called incompetent, lazy, stupid and a systemd-fanboy and various other things. By people who didn't read past the second paragraph, no less. But this is something I expected.| asylum.madhouse-project.org
To this day, I am surprised at the number of people who complain about the Journal's binary storage format. Having spent years working as a system administrator, and after years of working with and on syslog-ng - in the capacity of maintainer of the Open Source Edition for more than a year -, I am increasingly puzzled about all the hostility towards non-text storage formats. I am even more puzzled about the arguments against it. Maybe I'm living in a different world, but there are very, very ...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Apology| asylum.madhouse-project.org
I've been using distributed version control systems for a good while, started with TLA back in 2001, when it was still a bunch of shell scripts and was simply called "Arch". I jumped the Git bandwagon quite early too, sometime around May 2005, I believe, though it was only something to test and play with on the side: I didn't migrate my projects over yet. There are many reasons why I preferred these over the systems I used in the past (RCS and CVS; never considered Subversion an option), most...| asylum.madhouse-project.org
Recently, I have been taking a new look at my Emacs setup, as I do every once in a while. Between ~/.emacs.d hacking sessions, I research new or interesting packages, and once enough has been bookmarked, I sit down and see how they can improve my environment and workflow. One of the major themes with the most recent update is getting rid of distractions. You see, my entire work environment is tuned to stay out of my way, and my editor is no different, either. But distraction is not just somet...| asylum.madhouse-project.org