Daily Archives: 2021-01-26

Article note: A regular reminder that you get what you incentivize, and the entire incentive structure of academia has aligned to encourage bullshit.

Article note: I can't encourage people who spend a lot of time at a computer (...which is everyone these days) to be mindful, try things, and customize their computing environment enough. I have a rather large (...and kind of expensive) collection of input devices I've bought or built over the years, and while I don't regularly use many of them, I've learned things about how to interact with computers and use my hands from every single one, and do use a couple essentially every day. I _personally_ don't generally like modal (layered) keyboards for the same reasons I don't like modality in software (hidden state = cognitive load), and I don't love alternative layouts on standard keyboards for the same reasons I don't do super-botique software environments (you'll have to deal with qwerty and WIMP enough to keep it in your fingers anyway)... but I know people who are so settled in that I don't think another human being could operate their computers without extended instructions because they've built something that is so much an extension of themselves. ...but I do really like my split keyboards (lately an UltraErgo Wireless and trackball (usually an Logitech M570) for not constantly re-contorting my wrists. Likewise, I have a VESA-arm mounted to the hutch of my desk to get a monitor positioned exactly where I want it without giving up any desk space.

Article note: I love the idea of the "pocket workstation," and I've never been as happy with a mobile device as I was with my n810 which was sort of the missing link between the UMPC and Smartphone (ran Linux with some mobile affordances, slider keyboard that was comfortable for thumb typing), and I want to have that again... but every time I look I don't think these mini laptops quite make it in to the niche. I have my little 12" carryin' around laptop that has a decent keyboard for touch-typing and an OS that does what I ask of it, but I need to have a bag to carry and a surface or seat to use, and my smartphone that fits in a pocket and I can use on the go, but whose human I/O and coercive environment make me rage most of the time I try to do anything nontrivial on it. These mini-laptops are a little to big to pocket comfortably, and a little too small to operate comfortably. ... The Gibsonian cyberdeck of the Sprawl books had HMDs and gloves or straight up neural interfaces because it was obvious by the mid 90s that the problem was the human interface. I want to see some innovation on that front. HMDs that are comfortable for text. Software that works with e-ink displays (even just wide-spread support for pgup/pgdn events to paginate and scroll without a bunch of unnecessary refreshes, lookin' at you Android). Key-gloves or Chorders you can use clipped to a pants pocket or wrapped around the back/edges of a handheld device. These aren't new ideas, just once that need to be refined into something serviceable. Get away from the fondleslab appliance that uses half of its expensive, power-hungry touchscreen to present an awkward gimped keyboard that only works as well as its prediction estimates and re-flows your content as it pops in and out paradigm.

Article note: This (and every article like it) reads to me as basically "Wayland presents a really bad abstraction for the problem(s) it is supposed to solve." I wish it weren't, because X is a fucking mess, but replacing an accreted mess with a wrong-by-design mess is not improving the situation.