Figure 1: A rainbow over Betty’s Bay, captured by GOU#1.
Well hello there everyone, and welcome to this, the 200th edition of the Weekly Head Voices.
While I am super happy that we’ve reached this number of episodes, I don’t have anything special planned, besides being festively two weeks late.
Being that late also means that this post looks back at the three weeks from Monday June 29 to Sunday July 19 of the year 2020, also known as Cray-cray 20.
My attempt at dipping my toes carefully into the world of mechanical keyboards
You might remember that back in May I wrote the following after having tried out a cheap non-ergonomic (i.e. straight) keyboard:
One could perhaps get used to the mushiness, or preferably just invest in a more expensive (mechanical) keyboard, but that ulnar deviation is a total deal breaker.
My dreams of joining the clickety-clackety cliques of the mechanical keyboard digerati had been shattered, fortunately quite cheaply.
Instead, I shall be redoubling my Sculpt stockpiling efforts.
Well about that…
The clickety-clackety cliques continued calling, and so I decided to apply an additional but small amount of money on a very much entry-level mechanical keyboard in order to determine if my mechanical keyboard dreams were to remain just that.
The cheap but still quite respectable (well, if you’re ok with rainbow lighting) T-Dagger Corvette arrived this past Wednesday around lunch time, along with its extremely clicky and hotswappable (!!) Outemu blue switches.
(Each and every key has its own removable, mechanical switch, in this case Outemu blues, which are tactile and clicky. Each colour of each brand has its own characteristics, so you can fine-tune how you would like to type, and how you would like it to sound while you type.)
I’ve only spent a few days working with it, but my word, what a bunch of fun typing has become!
The extreme tactility of the keys, together with the calmly confident click that each press causes (this dream can of course only really take place during the current WFH phase we are going through), has really put the titillation back into typing.
This is so much fun that I’ll probably keep at it for a while.
Also, compared to one of my previous Sculpt keyboards where the failure of a single key meant that I had to replace the whole keyboard, it’s great that with this far cheaper mechanical keyboard I am able to pull and replace, quite trivially, the mechanical switch in question.
The only problem now is that I have this strange new craving to acquire more mechanical keyboards and keyboard paraphernalia…
Keyboard addendum
The keyboard officially supports “full key non-conflict”, which sounds like some sort of key roll-over.
As a non-gamer, this will probably never affect me, although I have experimented with it by mashing down on as many keys simultaneously as possible, and then seeing them all still appear on the screen.
I do fantasise that sometimes I type that fast, and that then this rollover will really help!
(I just did a quick experiment: 8 fingers mashing down at the same time on the dvorak home row gave me “ansoeuht”. Keys in order from left to right are “aoeuhtns”. Neat.)
Not unimportantly, my GOUs are fascinated by the pretty water droplet mode of the RGB backlighting, which I can fortunately disable when working.
To my surprise, the backlighting in one of its static not-too-bright modes is really quite useful when the sun starts setting at the end of a work day.
Lazar Focus update
Since I last mentioned my shipping little side-project Lazar Focus, the windows distraction blocker that helps you focus like a boss (I’m still working on the marketing over here, sorry), another big feature update shipped, namely fully automatic time-tracking.
The number of sales is currently somewhat more than one, but still fewer than ten.
Although I use LF almost every day, it’s brilliant when someone else who generally does not even know me, decides to buy a copy for themselves.
If you’re into relaxing (some might say sleep-inducing) screencasts, I have two new ones on offer.
The first is 4 minutes, and shows how to get started with Lazar Focus and its automatic activity logging:
The second got a bit out of hand.
It’s 12 minutes of me, in my evening voice, taking you through the minute details of a work day as tracked by Lazar Focus:
If you’re on twitter, and you’d like to keep an eye on Lazar Focus, you could consider following @LazarFocused! (tweet frequency is currently about once to twice per week)
Camper philosohpy
Picture this:
Driving along Clarence drive three weeks ago, with the usual awe-inspiring views over the bay, we saw a couple sitting beside the road next to their camper, bathed in the golden, nay divine, late-afternoon sun.
They were clearly having a ridiculously good time.
On the back of their camper, the following important message stood lettered:
We are extremely pleased to be here.
Folks, I really wish each and every one of you moments like that, moments so good that you can be extremely pleased to be exactly where you are.