The trouble with knobs

UPDATE, the next day: The firmware update indeed showed no progress when I checked in the morning, so I unplugged the keyboard, plugged it back in and it appears to operate exactly as before--with one exception. Apparently Windows (or me, unwittingly) had changed the default for sound to one of my monitors, instead of the headphones. I corrected this and the knob is now adjusting system volume as before.

In other words, all the time I spent on this last night could have been managed in a few seconds. Technology is grand.

Sometime in the last few days I noticed the knob on my Keychron Q1 keyboard was no longer working. It normally lets me adjust system volume up or down, which is kind of handy. I can program it to do other things, too, but this was always good enough for me.

I was puzzled as to why the knob suddenly stopped working. It seemed to be OS-independent, but the rest of the keyboard worked fine. In fact, when I adjusted the knob, Windows would still report the volume control working–except it really wasn’t working, it was just showing as if it worked, while doing nothing.

I decided to check the keyboard mapping software to see if something was amiss and it said I could not program the knob because my firmware was too old. This didn’t really explain why it had worked fine before, but whatever. I decided to update the firmware.

The firmware process consistently failed at the same point. I did some internet sleuthing and finally came across a video from Matt Birchler–yes, the guy in my dream who I talked about squircles with–and watched his three-year-old video, which revealed a DFU reset button under the keyboard. This finally allowed the flashing process to start.

It has not finished. It has probably been 25 minutes since it started. It looks like this:

As you might guess, I am afraid to do anything to interrupt, but I also suspect it will look like this if I leave it overnight. But I’m going to do that, anyway.

For now, I have plugged my old CTRL keyboard back in, with its much firmer Halo keys, which I still find easier to type on, though they don’t have that silky smooth feel of the Keychron’s. It also has no knob. But this also means it has no knob that can fail and lead me down a rabbit hole that might lead to me bricking a rather expensive keyboard.

We’ll find out more tomorrow!

Sickfest ’24, Day 7: Mostly just annoying

I am now at the stage where the remaining symptoms–occasional coughs spurred by a tickle in the throat–and the like are mostly just annoyances, so I’m going to say I am now officially recovering.

I did opt out of running today. I don’t think my lungs are quite ready yet, but soon™.

Instead of a sad bunny, I present a nonplussed cat:

Circle beats the squircle: A Birchtree dream

Last night I had a dream featuring Matt Birchler. I have never met Matt. He is a celebrity of sorts in the Apple tech scene, who has a YouTube channel (A Better Computer), a blog (Birchtree), a podcast (Comfort Zone) and probably half a dozen other projects. He writes articles for various tech sites. He also has an unrelated full-time job in UI/UX.

He is a busy guy.

I came across him via his blog and follow him on Mastodon, where much of the former Mac community from Twitter has migrated to.

One of his passions is UX and design (which works out well for him, because it’s also his job). In the dream, we are hanging out in a living room (?) somewhere and discussing design, as one does. Specifically, we are nodding in agreement over how circles provide more space for information over squircles (the rounded-off square icons you see everywhere on Apple devices these days). This is, of course, nonsense. Literally the opposite is true, but in the dream we were right, and the world was wrong.

Then I suggested we play something on “Game Center” on an Apple TV nearby and the dream ended, or at least my recollection of it did.

I’m not a big squircle fan, so I think the dream was just trying to accommodate that. Thanks, subconscious!

WoW: BEST VALUE (except for value immediately below it)

This is a promotion for World of Warcraft I saw in the battle.net launcher tonight. I assume a lack of proofreading here, or my concept of BEST VALUE is different from Blizzard’s.

Fake edit: I checked and both the 6 and 12-month deals save you 13%, so the 6-month deal is just secret best value.

I am not resubscribing to WoW, BTW. But I still have all of my magical memories.

Sickfest ’24, Day 6: Semi-recovered

My watch claims I didn’t get enough REM sleep last night, but I still feel it was the best night of rest since getting sick. I didn’t really cough or sneeze at all.

This morning I am feeling mediocre. I am slightly stuffed up, but I can take a deep breath without coughing. Yay. I may be ready to run tomorrow, a regular run day. We’ll see.

I do have a possible new complication–a sore spot in my abdomen that is subsiding as I type this, but was notable in that I could poke it, and it did not like being poked. I’ve had this before, and it’s been a bladder infection, which would be about right for just getting over being sick to have a new ailment heroically leap in and take over.

But as I said, it seems to be subsiding for now. I will monitor.

Hopefully the last sad bunny, at least for now:

That whole WordPress drama, again

An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:

  • I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
  • I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
  • To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
  • I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
  • When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.

I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.

An important blogging tip

Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.

An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.

That tip is:

Never remote-link to images

I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.

Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.

But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.

See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.

Blog smart, fellow writers!

Sickfest ’24, Day 5: The recovery begins

Last night, my sleep score was so-so, but I didn’t have any coughing or sneezing fits. Progress! When I got up this morning, I had a mini coughing fit (<CF), so opted to take at least one more dose of cough medicine/ I generally don’t feel bad, though perhaps a tad worn from all the previous coughing, sneezing and all that.

It is Thanksgiving today and the forecast is kind of lousy, so I think I’ll just have a mellow day and urge my body to mend as I play video games, have a nice bubble bath and eat chicken, my favourite turkey substitute.

One (?) more sad bunny:

Sickfest ’24, Day 4: Coughapalooza

Yesterday was a whole lot of sneezing, and the tip of my nose is now sore. I bought a box of tissue and I’m pretty sure I went through half of it. There was increased coughing and by evening, it felt like I was “drying up” and shifting more to a cough.

I woke up around 4 a.m., had a coughing fit for around 15 minutes, then stopped, which allowed me to sleep for about three more hours. The coughing started again, seemed more stubborn, so I just got up to type this. I am now coughing intermittently, but will probably go to the store this morning to buy some kind of cough remedy, because I am already sore and tired from all the coughing, and it is not yet 9 a.m.

Once I am fully recovered, I am never going outside again. I’ll rig up some VR system and experience the world in a germ-free environment, as nature should have intended.

Today’s sad bunny is below.

Sickfest ’24 Day 3: In the chest, not bursting

Yesterday was all about the runny nose and sneezing. Last night was much the same, which made for a less than satisfying sleep.

Today, a new development: Coughing! Not much, but more significantly, when I cough, I can feel the congestion in my chest loosen. This is actually good, because it means the virus/bug/hellspawn/alien is moving through my system relatively quickly.

Also, I feel better sitting up and standing than when I’m laying down, so I guess I’ll rest while in the chair and not the bed.

In all, I’d rather be feeling healthy.

Here is today’s sad bunny:

Sickfest ’24, Day 2: Hello runny nose

It’s somewhat ironic that I hardly got sick during the pandemic, but seem to be on a once-per-year pace since then (which admittedly is still less than what I experienced before).

Yesterday, my throat was sore and that was both annoying and exhausting. Today the throat feels better, but the bug has moved into my nose, which alternates between runny and sneezy. It’s also in my chest already, so there’s some coughing for good measure. This seems to be faster than usual, so I’m hoping I’m feeling back to normal relatively soon.

In the meantime, another sad bunny:

Sickfest ’24, Day 1: It begins

Yep, I did indeed have that funny feeling in my throat manifest into a full-on sore throat, and expect it to spread to my sinuses and chest in due time, because it’s never just a sore throat.

I have no idea where I might have caught the virus, because I am pretty anti-people. Maybe I touched something virus-laden, then touched an eyeball or shoved all five fingers into my mouth. Anyway, bleah.

This also means I’ll have to wait to recover to get a flu shot, which scores irony points, if nothing else.

Here is a sad-looking bunny, which I am: