To my complete surprise, I discovered today that Durgod released an update to their keyboard configuration: Durgod Zeus Engine. The interface looks a lot better, and it is a little easier to use. They didn’t change the keyboard hardware driver to support function layers, which is unfortunately. I really want that. (Honestly, what I want is the ObinsKit software that powers the Anne Pro 2 to apply work on it.)

I set up a new RGB color scheme and remapped my CapsLock to Control, saved them to the keyboard’s local profile, and (out of habit) configured the Zeus Engine to not start every time I log on. I plugged my keyboard into my USB hub and will keep my fingers crossed that it will work reliably now.

Napier Lopez reports in The Next Web:

Apple only just released its new iMacs featuring the acclaimed M1 ARM-based processor, but according to a report from Nikkei, the company plans to launch M2 as soon as July.

I don’t know anything in particular about Apple’s plans, but it seems crazy to me to expect a faster chip at this time. What I would expect is more I/O, driven by more cores and supported by more RAM. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Apple can overvolt the M1 to get more speed out of it, and will call it by another name.

I am very conservative about cities re-opening too soon, considering the pandemic has not ended. But NYC reopening on July 1 almost seems reasonable to me. Time will tell.

🎵 I’m going to lean into my New Jersey-ness today and listen to a ton of Bruce Springsteen. First album up: The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. This is one of Springsteen’s records that I never think to listen to, but, of course, it’s great. It was made back when Springsteen still wrote songs with a torrent of stream-of-consciousness-style lyrics like a verbose street poet.

I did really well at my presentation today. Practicing over and over definitely paid off. The talk I ended up with was almost completely different than the one I started with, even though my slideshow stayed the same.

Per Tom Warren In The Verge:

Microsoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years.

I am unusually attached to Calibri so I am not looking forward to this change. Then again, at work I often have to publish using Arial Narrow, which I think is objectively awful in terms of aesthetics and legibility, so it probably won’t affect me too much.

I’m rehearsing for an online presentation to my entire company later this morning. I feel good about this one.

🎵 I think it is cool that Counting Crows is releasing a new album next month. It has been seven years since their last one, and I honestly thought they had given up writing new material.

I’ve been coding a lot over the past week. I’m coding right now. I’m taking the core of my iOS and macOS apps and putting into a cross-platform Swift package. It’s been a fun excursion from doing UI work, but it has a purpose. I am dismayed, however, at how buggy Xcode 12.4 is. I can’t create a new file and rename it in the sidebar without trying to rename another file first. Also, automatic protocol compliance only sometimes works. Does anybody at Apple actually use Xcode, because little bugs like these should not be in there anymore.

Laughably, for no good reason, seeing a bunch of bad takes on new Apple products last week sapped my will to share, well, anything on my blog for many days. 😅 I’m trying to get back to normal now.

Yesterday I decided to re-play a game I loved a few years ago called [The Sequence]. It is a puzzle game where you, essentially, build a machine with various component parts to move a ball (well, the game calls it a “binary cell”) from one part of the screen to another. It sounds simple, and it starts out fairly simple, but it becomes very challenging as you progress. It’s the sort of game a programmer, or anyone who enjoyed Human Resource Machine would enjoy.

I am delighted that I discovered a video game that is new to the Nintendo Switch, but not at all new to the world, called Fez. This is the game’s official blurb:

Gomez is a 2D creature living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is revealed to him, Gomez is sent out on a journey that will take him to the very end of time and space. Use your ability to navigate 3D structures from 4 distinct classic 2D perspectives.

It is a 2D puzzle platformer where your character can rotate the environment left or right 90 degrees at a time, but you always interact with the environment in two dimensions. Some of the puzzles are quite challenging, but I think that the most hidden secrets that you can get from solving the hardest puzzles are all optional to completing the game. It’s a charming game, and easily my favorite Switch game of this year so far.

I am unsettled today by yet another mass shooting in my country. It seems like not a day goes by without a New York Times news alert about it. (I plan to turn those alerts off after I finish writing this.) This time, a gunman killed seven people, then himself. This detail about the story jumped out at me: “The shooting likely lasted one or two minutes.”

I think the news media covers mass shootings like they are exciting, like some kind of action movie where bad outcomes only happen to the extras, and the rest of us get to watch. But “one or two minutes” isn’t an action movie. It isn’t something exciting. It’s actually, really, really stupid. That such a thing is even possible, outside a war, is embarrassing and shameful to all of us. I wish it were more widely considered to be.

Stephen Warwick reports in iMore:

Kuo says that next year Apple will drop the 5.4-inch model and run with two 6.1-inch models instead, one Pro, one regular.

This rumor is a prime reason I upgraded to the iPhone 12 mini early this year. I absolutely love the size and weight of it. It fits better in my hands and in my pockets than my iPhone 7 Plus ever did. However, the 12 mini’s small screen size makes it less compelling to read on, edit photos on, or watch videos on. These are all things I do pretty much every day without complaint, but if it were going to be my only portable device I would have bought one with a bigger screen.

I have no desire to go back to a larger phone, because the phone, for me, is one tool among many, rather than the center of my computing universe. It doesn’t have to be compelling, just useful. It doesn’t have to be used constantly, just when it makes the most sense to.

Some time from now, I think the smartphone, as a thing I carry around all the time, and as the default “Internet communication device,” is going to disappear and be replaced by something else: smart glasses maybe, or some kind of earpiece (when I am really old and need hearing aides).

Last night, I published my first NuGet package: TodoTxt.Library. It is a code library meant to help develop todo.txt applications in .NET.

I wrote the code back in 2015, open-sourced it on GitHub, but otherwise left it alone because I had moved on to more macOS and iOS development by that time. This week, I upgraded the code base work on .NET 5, so that it is cross platform (rather than Windows-only, as was my original version), and figured out how to package it and upload it to NuGet, where it may have a shot at actually being used.

I filed my taxes and now I can spend my after-work time on more productive things again.

Tom Warren’s article on The Verge caught my eye:

Microsoft is refreshing its Surface lineup with the Surface Laptop 4 today, which now offers the choice between AMD or Intel processors across both the 13.5- and 15-inch models. Both sizes will ship with Intel’s latest 11th Gen processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors. Microsoft is shipping its Surface Laptop 4 on April 15th in the US, Canada, and Japan, starting at $999 for the AMD model and $1,299 for the Intel version — a $300 price gap between the pair.

If I was more of a Windows guy I would probably buy only Microsoft-brand laptops at this point. They don’t always have the best specs, but I like their designs a lot.

I spend most of my computing time using Windows for work. I try to forget that I have a Lenovo laptop by putting it behind a giant monitor and using an external keyboard and trackball to operate it. Lenovo laptops are good, I guess, as long as I don’t have to touch them. I don’t like their keyboards (both in terms of layout and feel) or the pointing devices (the trackpad is too small, and I’m done with using the trackpoint/eraserhead thing). The Surface Laptops keyboards and trackpads have always seemed a lot more sensible to me in how they are designed.

I’m assuming that somebody’s job, every day, is to wake up in the morning and ask Siri “When is the next Apple Event?” I’m glad I didn’t try to change careers back in 2009 or 2011 (when I thought of it) and get into tech journalism.

I spent some time tonight working on my tax filing, and some time learning how to create and publish NuGet packages. I want to package up one of my .NET libraries soon. I think it will be a fun, short project—unlike filing my taxes!

I never would have predicted that in 2021 I would be using a text-mode file manager from the 1990s, a command-line based to-do list program, and, at least sometimes (by choice!), the Vim text editor.

Tonight I published a huge update to the website for my first iOS app: SwiftoDo. What was once a one page site with a very outdated template is now a Hugo-based site full of information. There is a lot more that I could add, it is now so much better than my old site I had to publish it.

I have been up way too late for the past three nights, because I am working on a website. I bet a lot of micro-bloggers can relate. 😀

Last year when I was looking for something soothing to watch on YouTube, I came across James Hoffmann’s many videos about coffee, coffee machines, coffee products, and so on. I have watched a ton of them, mostly because I like his voice and demeanor. His latest video is about the AeroPress, which I have used for many, many years. I actually learned something new from it: People use the funnel, which is meant to help put your coffee grounds into the press without making a mess, to brew coffee into cups with mouths too small for the bottom of the AeroPress. I have to try that! He also states in the video that the AeroPress is easy to make good coffee from, but is difficult to master. I actually put very little effort into my AeroPress use—far less than I used to when I first starting using it. I have found that my AeroPress brewing technique, no matter how sloppy or lazy, doesn’t seem to affect my coffee all that much. It prefer not stressing about it anymore.

The Linux kernel is gaining Apple M1 support. I have been wondering if, years from now, I can move my M1 Mac Mini to a home app-server role, running Linux, when it gets too old for Xcode and stops getting macOS updates. I have a Celeron based PC doing that for me now, but it runs hot and can be noisy, too. If a machine can run Linux, it extends its lifespan considerably for me.

Yesterday I turned off the tap layer on my Anne Pro 2 keyboard which is basically only for using Fn, Fn2. right-Ctrl, and right Swift keys as arrow keys. (The keyboard does not have dedicated arrow keys.)

I did this because I think the tap layer causes me a lot of problems, like the cursor moving up a line when I just meant to press the Shift key for its normal function. I also think it may be contributing to double keypresses somehow, but it could also be that I am still not used to the Khial Box White switches, which have a different actuation point than the Cherry MX Blues I usually type on.

Now, I am trying to get used to typing Fn + WASD for arrow keys. It’s not too bad, but it makes some keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio Code, like “expand selection” (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Right Arrow, which is nowFn+D) almost impossible to pull off. I even started looking into switching to Vim or a Vim-mode plugin for Visual Studio Code, so I didn’t have to use arrow keys at all. I gave up Vim pretty quickly, though. I know enough Vim to exit it (ha!) and edit config files, and that’s more than enough usage for me right now.

All in all, my typing has been more accurate since turning off the tap layer, but I have also had to think about how to use the arrow keys each time I use Fn+WASD, especially if there are other modifier keys involved. I have found myself using the mouse a lot more for text selection and navigation than I am used to, which is reminding me of how I used a Macintosh at school when I was a kid.