A coworker gave a lunch and learn about mechanical keyboards. I should have known it would be an entrance to a black hole… it all started 25 years ago with my beloved Zeos Keyboard with Alps keygates – which I consequently wrecked after spilling a beer into it 🍺 Then onto my HHKB Lite2 which I still have but need a host of adapters to connect its PS/2 connector.

Now I’m entering the modern mechanical era with a Keychron K6 – a 65% keyboard that closely resembles my HHKB layout. It has Gateron Blue (light and clicky) switches that remind me of my famed Zeos board. Here’s the original layout:

My first issue is I have a bit of OCD when it comes to pairing. I expect insert/del, home/end, and page up/down to be at least near each other, if not next to each other. So I changed the keycaps in the far right row, around the corner to the FN1/2 keys. I used low(ish) profile DSA keys on this edge to mimic the lower arrow keys from the HHKB. Also I got custom colored beige/blue FN1/FN2 keys to quickly remind me that FN1 is for the gold functions and FN2 is for blue.

Now I needed to change what the swapped keys did when I pressed them…

Continue reading

In my other XPS 13 DE Settings post, I linked to an article about mouse lag that helped my Microsoft 3600 mouse behave better.

Last week I noticed it started acting up again πŸ˜” so I revisited the problem. My previous settings had apparently been wiped out with my upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. But in my search I found some other settings that might help.

Continue reading

Configuring E911 support with Skyetel is simple on their side, as it should be. But because it’s an emergency service, I wanted to do a separate post to underscore the importance on making sure it works.

I mostly followed this support article from Skyetel: https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041179233-E911 except I went in reverse order…

Continue reading

My network topology at home is pretty simple, it looks like this:

After my recent router hardware and OpenWrt 19.07 firmware upgrades, I noticed my access point connected to my cable modem looked like this on the Status Overview page:

Pro-tip: Notice I’m using the cloudflare DNS servers rather than the ISP-provided ones. The Comcast DNS servers have gone down on me before and their performance is generally lacking.

Continue reading

I wrote earlier about how I had to do some configuration of my DNS to get dnsmasq and resolved to work well together. With it working well I’m able to use dnsmasq, resolved, and network manager together to do local development while also detecting network changes nicely.

Recently I noticed I would occasionally get the dreaded question-mark network icon: “?” I did some digging around and it was related to Ubuntu’s Network Connectivity check. Several posts out there simply say to disable the check by going to Settings -> Privacy and turning Connectivity Checking to “Off.”

But by disabling connectivity checking, I don’t get the automatic prompt to connect through a captive portal (like at my local library). I wanted to actually fix the problem, so I needed to understand what the problem was.

Continue reading