My new keyboard came last week, a Piantor Pro from Beekeeb, a two-person shop in Hong Kong. Quality work.

But the keys are narrower than my fingers (on average), and the deep pinky stagger – offset of the pinky finger’s column of keys – is hard to get used to, after fifty years of conventional typing. To mitigate the problem I made the outer columns repeat their neighbors. I had planned to avoid using them anyway, as practice for maybe someday moving to a board like Ferris without those columns.

Too often after hitting a key on the upper row, I also hit its neighbor below. So I’m considering replacing the nearly flat keycaps with a more traditional style so that my fingers can more easily find the boundaries between them; and if that doesn’t help, replacing the very light switches with stiffer ones for the lower rows.

Anyway. I’ve been fiddling with different algorithms to find an arrangement of the 30 core keys – letters and selected punctuation – that minimizes a crude measure of inconvenience. ( . . more . . )

In anticipation of my next keyboard, I have been doodling layouts of the non-alpha layers, as one does. Today let’s discuss arrow keys. ( . . more . . )

Typing this in a non-qwerty layout on a new ergonomic keyboard. Learning the alphabet anew is of course a challenge, as is getting to know the keys themselves. My pinkies want to rest on the upper row, and the upper thumb keys are hard to reach; I think both these problems could be lessened if the palm rest were higher on the pinkie side.

When I started shopping for a new keyboard, I found quite a rabbit-hole of enthusiasts. The cool kids use home-built boards of only 34 or 36 keys.

I was thinking about the notion of a brain interface that delivers text to a layer after vision: the user “sees” the letters at their most abstract, but not their graphic details. What would that experience be like? Could it include meta-linguistic features analogous to indentation?

And then I thought: what if the first form of “writing” were something like Morse or ASCII?

Sequoyah, though illiterate himself, saw the power of representing sounds on paper, and thus was motivated to design the Cherokee syllabary (borrowing forms from roman type). Imagine a martian Sequoyah who is somehow aware of humans’ use of digital transmission; what would ghlo create?

How much is known about quipu?

Pedaling a bicycle is painful for me, because a crooked hip makes the knee transmit force at an unnatural angle. But perhaps I could mitigate that (if I had any relevant skills) by making the pedals’ axis oblique, connected to the main gear by bevel gears.

I toy with the thought of converting this here website to MediaWiki (which my host supports), as I am more efficient at editing there than at writing raw HTML in vi.

The wiki’s first articles would be:

• Two-dimensional design
  • Hyperbolic tilings
  • Arrangements of the color gamut in the plane
  • Curve-fitting
• Three-dimensional design
  • Ray-tracing
  • Solid printing
• Posthuman speculation
• Political speculation
• Linguistics
  • Diachronics
  • Writing
  • Conlang

I’d continue to report new thoughts here, and then integrate them into appropriate articles. I wonder whether MediaWiki and WordPress play well together. I’m not aware of any personal website that combines blog with wiki, but it seems unlikely that nobody does it.

And now I wonder whether a wiki on my home box would help me keep track of the little files I write as notes on this topic or that, and the PDFs that I download to read someday, and the

keenspace.com, a free hosting service for comic strips, changed its name (not long after it was founded) to comicgenesis.com; but the old name still works, as do comicgen.com and (I just learned) toonspace.com and webcomicspace.com. Well, mostly.

Mostly it doesn’t matter whether you look at foo.comicgenesis.com, foo.keenspace.com or foo.comicgen.com; you get the same content. But sometimes images don’t show unless the address is foo.comicgenesis.com.

What’s going on here? Apparently these domains are not transparent synonyms for each other; but why would they be (flawed) mirrors?