I find in order to learn anything new I need to attempt to do something with it. For reasons I can’t easily articulate I decided that I should get into emacs (the file editor, not the discontinued education-focused Apple all-in-one) and figured that using emacs to write this blog would be a good project.

Emacs is famed for its modularity, and of course there was an emacs package specifically for managing Hugo blogs.

Visiting the GitHub page for the package I saw there was an Issue attached to the package that was along the lines of “I have forked this package to use ChatGPT to write blog posts and it’s awesome and you should check it out”.

It is fair to say that this left me flummoxed.

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The Boardsource Unicorne is a fancier version of the Corne keyboard, a small 3x6 column staggered split keyboard.

Here are the quick details:

• Boardsource Unicorne MX Keyboard;
• Matcha Latte linear switches (60g, with long pole POM stems, PC top housing and Nylon bottom housing);
• KAM SuperUser keycaps with the 40s ortho terminal kit;
• No stabs, because it doesn’t have any keys big enough.

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With the recent descent into AI madness of the Wordpress folks there have been a few people on Mastodon looking for other hosting options, so I figured I’d do a quick “here is how I set up my blog” post.

The short version is that it’s a static site generated with Hugo, hosted on the file sharing space provided by Fastmail to its email customers. This is pretty easy and doesn’t cost me anything more than I was already paying for my email, but might be missing some of the features other people need.

Edit: This page has been updated to reflect my updated posting system using rclone and GitLab CI.

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I’m pretty happy with my current desk setup at home as far as ergonomics go. I have a small house and there is a small part of that small house where a small computer desk lives.

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Build details:

• Command 65 by Play Keyboard
• Ice Kachang Tactile Switches
• TX Stabilisers (PCB mount)
• Hammerworks CRP C64 Round 2 keycaps

This is the first in my series of posts about my keyboard collection; not because it’s my favourite, or because it’s the most expensive or the best, but because it’s really easy to photograph.

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Possibly the best new feature Apple has added to its iPhone for a long time is StandBy Mode, where if you put your phone horizontally on a charger (it works best with a MagSafe/Qi, but as long as the phone is charging and horizontal it will work), it shows a special horizontal display. There are various things it will display, but the only one I ever use shows the time in big numbers, like an old clock radio. And that’s exactly how I use it -– as a bedside clock.

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A traditional first (and often only) blog post is “here is how I set up my blog”. You could call this a negative first blog post, because I haven’t actually set one up yet, but this will be posted to it when I have.

On Mastodon recently someone said they had opinions they wanted to write but didn’t want the whole rigamarole of a blog, and I joking suggesting finding a Unix shell and writing a .plan file. For those who aren’t ancient, Unix machines traditionally came with a command called ‘finger’, and if you ran finger on a username one of the things it would do it print out the .plan file in their user directory. It was sort of a very early proto-Twitter.

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