Niclas started writing, writing about, among other things, how we used to write in the comment section of our friend Martin's site. That old site has been gone for a long time now, but as a response, Martin suddenly made the entire comment archive available.
The first post is from May 1st, 2001, the last one from May 20th, 2007. Nine megabytes of nostalgia, as Martin put it. Most of it more or less completely meaningless to almost everyone, but to about five people, it's as if someone had rediscovered our entire chat message history from six years. There are a lot of short, silly messages, of course. But also rather regular outbreaks of longer ones. (Yes, often written by Niclas.) So, it is almost like our combined micro- and macroblogging history of six years?
Six years, and not a single ad or attempt to switch to an algorithmic timeline.
Niclas ran a very small regular expression and figured out that I was the most frequent poster overall. I wonder how my posts spread over time, since I started writing more or less regularly on my own site a few years into the age of Klotterplanket. On the other hand, that was always a different thing, the texts for the ages (cough). Klotterplanket was where we talked, with the occasional other person dropping by, probably bouncing off of the compact atmosphere of random thoughts, references, and in-jokes.
Martin: was there a particular reason the history ended where it did? I have no clear memory of how or why that particular era of martingunnarsson.com ended. Perhaps it was a move to a different hosting provider? Perhaps space ran out?
In any case, it was great fun while it lasted, and surprisingly fun to scroll through the archive and read random bits here and there.
I guess Klotterplanket was more or less what I did instead of having a serious BBS, IRC, or message board phase.
Keyboard meta
Feeling the urge of the mechanical again, I sat down to write this on my Mac mini with my Corne keyboard rather than sticking with my Air as usual. I did have to hunt around a little bit to remember where I put the [ and ] characters, but on the whole it comes back very quickly. It is still very, very nice to both have my hands further apart, and to need to move my hands so little to hit every single key and combination. And I do not look down for reference.
I still like it a lot. But I think I am over the feel of these quiet switches. They feel a little too heavy, and a little uncertain, almost as if they were not quite as smooth as intended.
Yes, I could probably dive in and start exploring lube and things, but I think the simple fact is that I just bought switches with a tad more force required than I really wanted.
I wonder if I already have some others in store which would suit me better?
Of course, I need to try out the planck as well and see how that feels after this long a break. I am fully prepared to fall in love all over again.
One small annoyance with this board is that I need to unplug and replug it into the USB hub to get it going any time I reconnect to a computer. I think this is a power draw issue, and I have started wondering if there is anything I can do about it. I think I will try disabling the OLED screens and perhaps generally just shrink my outrageous firmware. After all, I grafted so much stuff onto my base layout that I had to fight for quite some time to actually be able to fit the firmware into the storage available on the board. The things one will do to get really nice animations and other stuff one can then proceed to never so much as glance at.
Text app meta
I dismissed yet another registration popup from Sublime text and suddenly remembered reading in the latest newsletter from the Ergodox EZ people about a small and free Mac text editor called Coteditor. Free, open source, available through the Mac app store, and a very nice icon to boot. So that is what I am looking at right now, and I really like what I see. Nice colour scheme, font choices, syntax highlighting right out of the box. And, quite unlike Visual studio code, it is a Mac-assed Mac app, and so my shortcuts for linking text of course worked right out of the box.
I do hope there is some way I can give the project money if I keep liking it this much.