Atreus 2

Jesse Vincent announced a collaboration between Keyboard.io and technomancy to mass-produce a new version of the Atreus keyboard. Phil posted in the Atreus ML describing differences with the original kit:

• 2 extra switches (backtick and backslash will no longer need fn)
• injection-molded case with smaller dimensions
• detachable USB cable
• default firmware is Kaleidoscope (QMK will still work)
• cherry-MX-compatible switches in sockets (removable without soldering)
• optional labels on keycaps

Atreus firmware + Ragel logic

Atreus firmware + Ragel logic

Excellent content on the Atreus mailing list. An user shows how he used Ragel state machine compiler to implement the logic of his Atreus' controller. Impressive and very interesting.

Wacom tablet

Quite surprisingly, the rotation property is a property of the stylus and the eraser, not of the pad.

$ xsetwacom --set "Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen stylus" Rotate half
$ xsetwacom --set "Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen eraser" Rotate half

Yay! New laptop

Now some work to make it work like I want (it comes with Windows 10 installed but I want a GNU/Linux system on it. So far I've only tried a live distro to check hardware support. As I expected, it's going to need some work to make the wifi chipset work properly).

TMK firmware

Trying the tmk firmare on the Atreus. The feature list is very interesting, but it's not clear to me if it's all appliable to the specific hardware I'm using.

First Atreus mod idea

I'd like to attach a wire to the board's pins that pilot the LEDs, thus being able to see when I'm on a certain layer.

Anachronistic computing

Yay! The laptop I recently bought for a ridiculously low price is eventually working like I want.

First its characteristics:

It is a IBM Thinkpad X32. A good news is it sports one of the best keyboards one can find on a laptop (and I was lucky enough to find the GB layout). I found it at an electronic fair I recently visited, and grabbed it without much thinking from the pile (literally) where it layed together with some of its twins.

I think it's remarkable that such an old piece of hardware can be a perfectly usable machine (at least for the way I'm used to work). All it takes is some attention to the software one chooses to install:

• Linux, obvious choice to revive old hardware (in this case, I had to recur to a non-PAE kernel due to the particular CPU architecture)
• i3, a lightweight tiling window manager
• Emacs 24.3, where I'm going to spend much of my time (w3m is a decent surrogate of a proper graphical browser for reading documentation)
• I'm even running Hakyll locally to prepare this post

Kindle first impressions

I just unboxed my Kindle. I played with it for a few hours only, but I'm satisfied with the choice so far.

First of all, to the zealots that may happen to read this article and feel compelled to whine on "scent of paper" and other oddities: I'm not planning the disposal of all my "real" books, neither I'm considering buying only digital contents from now on.

I decided to buy an ebook reader because I wanted to see on my own what can be done with this technology, which I consider immature and yet to be completely exploited.  I think I am an early adopter, even if Amazon Kindle and its competitors hit the market several years ago.

Also, I think having an ebook reader is nowadays the most practical solution to the eternal problem "What books should I bring with me during the journey?". Being able to answer "All!" is a wild dream that comes true (but I understand this can be a problem as well).

Anyway, here a few impressions from a very very beginner.

• The device itself looks beautiful. It's not heavy and it seems prolongated use will not be tiring. On the other hand, I have the impression it's not particularly sturdy. Again, this is something I can say only in a few months (or in a few hundreds kilometers).
• I think the slogan "it's like paper" is inaccurate.  Whatever appears on the screen seems printed, but it does not recall paper to me.  Besides that, fonts are very  crisp and readable, so Kindle hits on the spot for what is supposed to be its  main use.
• I am positively surprised by the refresh delay. Maybe because  I expected it to be even worse, I think it's bearable, at least for the kind  of books you read cover to cover in a sequential fashion. In other words, good for novels, articles and stuff like that; maybe not practical for manuals, documentation… in general, things you want to study, or browse randomly.
• I suspect I will eventually feel hampered by the position of buttons on the device. Anyway, this can't be but a speculation.
• I'm currently at my parents' place, and there are problems with the Internet connection, so I couldn't try its wifi capabilities yet. A pity: one of the things I was more eager to try was Kindle's use in conjunction with Instapaper.
• Ah, the screensavers are wonderful!