Mere hours before our most recent trip, my new Unifi Travel Router arrived.

Neither myself nor my broader household travel all that regularly, but when we do we’re likely to have some combination of multiple phones, multiple iPads, maybe a laptop and maybe a Steam Deck. Hooking up all of these things to the local wifi isn’t an insurmountable burden, but why do it yourself when you could spend a lot of money and have technology do it for you?

I have a Unifi setup at home with a Unifi Dream Machine Pro running the show, so a Unifi Travel Router seemed like a good solution to this most first world of problems.

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It’s time to reclaim the em-dash.

A common refrain is that the use of an em-dash in writing is a clear sign sign that it was written by an AI (or an LLM). This kills me. Up until really very recently, the use of an em-dash in writing was a clear sign that someone knew how to use punctuation (as was the use of a semi-colon).

I have always been a big user of em-dashes, mostly for parenthetical comments, which I tend to do a lot because that’s just how my brain works. Actually the more accurate truth is that I use a lot of en-dashes as em-dashes, because typographically I like how they look better, but I do this by preference, not because I don’t know what is correct.

Inserting an em-dash (shift-option-hyphen) or an en-dash (option-hyphen) on a Mac is both easy and mnemonically-consistent. Doing so on Windows is neither of those things. As such, I’ve always programmed my keyboards to make it easy. Here is how you do it (or how I do it, anyway) on the two major open-source keyboard firmwares: qmk and zmk.

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What’s the most used thing in your house? It’s probably your phone, but that’s not very interesting. Let’s restrict it to things that are actually useful. (It hasn’t escaped me that I’m asking these questions on a blog that has no comment facility – consider them rhetorical, if it helps.)

How do we define “used” here, to be the most of? If it’s in terms of time used, it’s probably going to be your bed. Maybe followed by your TV, depending on your lifestyle. If you’re very efficient (or space constrained), maybe you’ve combined those activities.

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As much as EDC (Everyday Carry) is basically a pastiche of performative masculinity, it remains true that some things are genuinely useful to have on you. One of these things is a pen.

Just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so is it more useful. Despite what the EDC bros might believe, I almost never, going about my normal life, have the need to stab, slash, or otherwise cut things. I do quite frequently need to write things down, however.

In my day job, having a pen somewhere within reach is essential. I have particular pens for this purpose, but sometimes the best pen, like the best camera, is the just the one you have on you at the time.

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I’m a long-time fountain pen nerd. I have a couple of dozen fountain pens from across the price spectrum, and maybe twice as many inks. Sadly, however, I can’t use them at work.

My job requires lots of writing, which would be an ideal way to use my fancy fountain pens, but for reasons too boring to elaborate on, most of my writing is in work-supplied notebooks. These notebooks use crappy paper that can’t hold up to the amounts of ink that even very fine Japanese fountain pen nibs put out. Basically it’s just not practical to use fountain pens for most of my work-related writing.

One could dwell on this tragedy, or one could use this as an excuse to dive deeply into the non-fountain pen world to find some regular pens that are tolerable. I chose the latter.

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The Gang-gang Cockatoo is the fauna emblem of the Australian Capital Territory, which suggests that it’s particularly characteristic of this area, however it’s pretty rare to see them in my backyard.

It was quite a treat when a family of them decided to stop by. I first noticed them due to the hungry calls the juvenile was making¹, and spotted the juvenile being fed by one of the parents in a nearby tree. Then, for whatever reason, the three members of the family decided to hop over to one of the trees in my backyard.

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There are a bunch of reasons you can get into, or stay into, keyboards as a hobby. You can chase the hype train with the latest hot boards, or you can search for the perfect aesthetic combination of board and keycaps. For me, it’s the search for the perfect keyboard to actually type on – finding out what I like and iterating on that until I have something that’s just right for me. In practice, this means buying something that looks good, trying it, finding that there is something not quite right, or not quite for me, and using that knowledge to move on to the next thing.

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Nick’s post on moving to Navidrone inspired me to write briefly about how I solved a similar problem in a somewhat different way.

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Despite my lack of posts, my Year Of Linux on the Desktop project isn’t dead, it’s just mutated a bit. But it’s also taken a somewhat unexpected turn.

One of the ideas I’d explored for a Linux desktop was a small form factor PC, and once I started looking at small form factor PCs I started wondering how practical/expensive it would be to get one I could use for a bit of light gaming.

And once I’d got the idea of a bit of gaming, one thing led to another and a couple of weeks ago I essentially impulse purchased an OLED Steam Deck.

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Welcome to the March list of stuff I’ve found around the Internet and enjoyed reading (maybe not enjoyed, as such, but you know what I mean). The plan is to do occasional similar posts as I stumble across worthy reads, but how many links per post, and how often, are yet to be determined.

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