Bring an extra finger, she said.

Well pain me green and call me a pickle, this is one of the funniest shit I’ve seen with tech (apart from the 500 mile email): my laptop sometimes “forgets” that 1 finger mode (to simply move the cursor) exists, and I need an extra finger for everything: 2 fingers to move the cursor, 3 fingers to scroll, 4 fingers to middle click, etc.

Well, as it turns out, it’s an issue with my filthy greasy fingers (I have a lot of coconut oil on them lately, as i’m trying to rehydrate my skin after 10 days in the 23% humidity aridity of Budapest): 1 greasy finger does not conduct enough, so Wayland does not register it as “touch”. 2 fingers however are OK — for 1 finger’s worth of “touch”. 3 fingers conduct enough for 2 fingers, and so on. Suspend an unsuspend solves the issue by the way (so does apparently anything else that resets the touchpad subsystem/driver of Wayland, like switching out to / back from a tty), so there’s a bug-like element to this, but still, how funny is this. (And yes, I’m thinking if I clean my touchpad it’ll resolve the issue for a long time.)

I’m having some new year’s day fun with my NC Deck process.

As part of using Nextcloud as our family unCloud, I’m using Deck as as personal Kanban-adjacent system. It stretches in 2 main areas (on 2 different boards): apartment related things (shared across the family and including everything from small maintenance through getting stuff from Praxis/Gamma (hardware store chains in NL) to larger (and expensive) projects like the long overdue replacement of our air filtering/circulation system; and personal stuff, for tracking things I need to plan around my life, be it something in the home IT stack, or my bike(s), or planning a holiday.

Each of these have their small benefits. Continue reading I’m having some new year’s day fun with my NC Deck process.

The Beacons of Minas Tiener: fun home automation project for your chemotherapy pleasure.

It’s no secret that (to use one the infamous term) I’m double tapping lymphatic cancer these days. More details here, but what’s relevant for this blog is that high dose steroid treatment (which is a part of the chemo, and unfortunately didn’t make me look like The Rock) comes with funny side effects like insomnia, and in my case, a hyperactive, albeit rhapsodic, brain on the “good days”. So I dusted off a couple of old and neglected nerd side projects (like unclouding my RSS), and picked up some new ones, like this one, The Tinerebox. Continue reading The Beacons of Minas Tiener: fun home automation project for your chemotherapy pleasure.