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 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?

Here, have a couple of Python scripts. Each creates an image file, 2^12 pixels square, each pixel of a different color.

colorshuffle.py puts the coordinates of each pixel in Gray code, assigns each bit to one of the color channels, and converts each channel back from Gray code to choose a color. The assignment is chosen at random from 141926400 possibilities.

colorfold.py is my attempt to re-create and extend this: it folds the square eight times to make a cube fitting the color space. The interesting part was maintaining continuity through multiple folds. This one has only 107520 possible outcomes; again they’re chosen at random. I don’t like the result nearly as much as the other, but you might!

You’ll need Python Imaging Library.

On my machine each takes less than two minutes, so with a simple shell script you can whip up hundreds overnight.

( . . more . . )

I’ve noticed some changes in jumping from MacOS 10.6.x to 10.9:

The keystroke Command Option Eject no longer puts the computer to sleep.

On the Dock, the active app indicator is much less visible. (later improved)

Scroll bars no longer have arrow buttons, so I can’t click to scroll slowly.

When I charge my telephone on USB, it’s no longer recognized as a volume. (I’ve since got an Android phone, with a tolerable interface.)