Notes on Building WCH BLE CH592 EVT Exam with Bare Makefile
Here are some notes from tinkering with the WeAct Studio BLE Core Board. It’s Not Used in Many Designs My interest in the board comes from my interest in custom mechanical keyboard designs.
– The best part of ‘free and open source’ is the “gratis” part.
But the “libre” part is neat, too: it’s much easier to realize [...]
Die Another Day not as Bad as I Remembered
Still slowly re-watching through the James Bond movies. Just finished “Die Another Day”, Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond movie. My wife likes him as Bond as he’s the most handsome James Bond. I was surprised that the movie wasn’t as bad as I had remembered it.
Perhaps partly that’s because upon rewatching the other Brosnan movies, I realise they’re not [...]
Experience Designing a Keyboard PCB
I designed a keyboard PCB, which I’m calling “CH552-48”. (It uses the CH552 MCU, and it has 48 keys). This was I have designed other keyboard PCBs, but I’m particularly pleased with this one.
The keyboard PCBs I’ve designed fall into two kinds: those that use a development board (and are relatively easy to solder by hand), and those [...]
Experience with the Tweag Configuration Language as an End User
I recently had the chance at writing some keyboard firmware with semickolon’s fak. (e.g. keyboard definition, keymap definition). Fak uses tweag’s Nickel for declarative definitions of keyboards and keymaps. – Nickel is sophisticated type-safe configuration language. I’d first heard of Tweag in discussions around the Nix package manager, and how people found the Nix expression language’s lack of types to [...]
Experience Report on Updating Keyboard Firmware Written in Rust
Here are some notes on the experiences I had updating some keyboard firmware I had written in the Rust programming language. Context: My Dive into the Mechanical Keyboard Rabbit Hole This was for keyboard firmware I’d written in Rust. In mid-2020, I took my first steps into the mechanical keyboard hobby when I bought the BM40 keyboard. I thought it [...]
John Wick 4 is Good Fun
I finally got around to watching John Wick 4. I hadn’t loved John Wick 3.
In JW3, Wick takes a lot of physical punishment and manages to keep fighting against all his enemies. What ruins the movie for me is scenes like where his enemies beat him, but they then don’t kill him; and so Wick is then able [...]
So I Just Finished Tomb Raider 2
Well. I’d played it years ago. And I would’ve cheated when I played it last. I had fun playing it again now. I loved the adventure aspects of the game.
It’s satisfying to have enough of a grasp of how the level is designed so as to make your way through it! The designs of the levels themselves are [...]
Classic Lara Croft is Back, Huh
A remaster of the first three Tomb Raider games has been announced. Remastered Games This continues a trend of classic games receiving touch ups and being sold as new. For gamers, this has the advantage of making these remastered games easy to play on modern systems. Without such remasters, you’d either have to play the game on a console with [...]
Using NixOS on an OpenStack Public Cloud
Here are some notes on using NixOS in an OpenStack public cloud. Recall, NixOS is an operating system which makes use of the Nix package manager to manage its system configuration.
That NixOS allows declarative configuration of a system lends itself to building cloud VM images. OpenStack is a standard cloud computing platform. It offers services broadly similar to [...]
Two Kinds of Small Keyboards
In an earlier post, “Opinion on Small Keyboards and Big Spacebars”, I discussed the design flaws of traditional keyboards. – Mainly, traditional keyboards have big spacebars. Our thumbs are stronger than our pinky fingers, so it would be better to be able to use the thumbs more than the pinky fingers. A large spacebar results in the opposite: our thumbs [...]