It’s a quiet and bitter cold first morning of the year for me. I took the dog outside in the zero degrees F dark, and then she went right back to her warm bed. I’m ready for my second cup of coffee while the first tiny bit of dawn is starting to differentiate the one-black sky from the mountain. All in all, it’s much like any early morning this winter, albeit far colder after this week’s snowstorms have moved on. A lot of things in the past week have made it hard to feel reflective on the close out of the past year and start of the next. Here’s hoping for resolution of those uncertainties and a chance at some calm, some restoration, and maybe also some joy in 2022.
All right, inspired by y’all, I got myself one of those omg.lol pages. But I don’t know what to do with it, so am taking suggestions!
It’s not actually out yet, so this new Big Thief album is my favorite thing from 2022 so far.
I started playing Hades yesterday and … this game is great! I know it was on a bunch of best-of lists last year, so I’m un-fashionably late to appreciate this one. It has great mechanics, deep storytelling, feuding gods and family drama. I love it.
Today’s last.fm data time produced this plot of my top 20 tracks for each year since 2005. I’m going to write a (much?) longer post about this, because it has my brain really spinning on storytelling with data; for now, enough to say I’m excited and having a good time!
Continuing to tinker with last.fm data, I’ve built a tool to pull my per-track history, and I can do a bunch of fun things with that detail. This plot shows how much I listened to artists in their first year in my data set, compared with all listening in the same year.
Keyboard Week!
What a great hobby week. A few days ago I built a keyboard with my kiddo, and yesterday I got started on a build for myself. We built the KBD67Lite from kbdfans. While I’ve had a couple of mechanical keyboards, these were the first that I’ve built up from parts – fortunately, the kbdlite comes as a nice kit which made for a gentle introduction to lubricating stabilizers. (Which, by the way, makes a tremendous difference.)
Kiddo picked out keycaps that make this lovely gradient, and they feel really nice.
I went with gray keycaps on a white case. So far this board is a real pleasure to type on. Now that I have a good point of comparison with my Q1 board I can start to get a feel for how qualitatively different switches and keys can feel. By comparison, the Q1 is indeed a little pingy, for example, so I’m even more curious to see how some modifications to its components could feel.
After the build, I did some work in QMK to program a couple of MacOS specific layers for the KBD67Lite. Unlike the Q1, it doesn’t have a hardware mode switch, so I have to make a virtual one that lets me toggle Mac and Windows layers with a key combination. Fortunately I was familiar with working in QMK from all the screwing around I did with the vim mode I built, so it didn’t take too long to figure this out – and I’m happily typing away!
