It took a few tries and some support to successfully log into my tilde.club account this week: It had been long enough that my old ssh key had expired due to some server changes; then I was locked out by IP due to failed logins; then I had somehow mis-recorded the password for my new key; and finally couldn’t log in due to failed logins using that key!

Thanks to deepend’s patience I appear to be all set up once again. Back to enjoying old time web pages once again.

Iris modifications continue! I found myself needing to reach too often for common combinations with my original thumb cluster of:

space | cmd | fn/mo(1)

I swapped around a bit to make for fn+ combos easier with

space | fn/mo(1) | cmd

The mental stretch of adjusting to new modifier locations is lots lower than that of reaching for awkward chords, so this already feels like a nice improvement.

I experimented with moving the space key to the middle of the cluster, but that made it a little too easy to make errors looking for alpha keys on that bottom row. So far, several common keys I use via that fn/mod key are already feeling much better!

Got nginx running on my MacBook today, as part of building some working-with-APIs-infrastructure for a small tutorial I want to write on working with oauth in Shiny. Good step!

Yesterday’s “on this day” links from my now page surfaced an old post I wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the first Microsoft home page. It’s a shame that Microsoft’s own pages marking that milestone are no longer available on their own servers. But they’re on the internet archive!

• Welcome to Microsoft’s World Wide Web Server
• readme.html – the barely disguised note describing the creation of that page, written up at that 20th anniversary.

I’m happy to find that calibre worked overnight as I hoped: after a few days of tinkering with setting it up on my little Ubuntu NUC, it’s pulling a couple of news and reading sources into daily digests and sending them to my kindle via email. I wish that kindle were more flexible with ad hoc reading (and it’s one reason I’m thinking about a kobo), but this is a nice, effective step toward how I would like it to work.

I’m really taken by this line in Paul Ford’s newest essay at Wired:

What I’m going to work on, for the rest of my career in the tech industry, hand to God (OK, I’m an atheist and easily distracted, so caveat lector), is making nice little tutorials and tools—better sticks for kinder monkeys.

“better sticks for kinder monkeys” is such an admirable, and needed, call to center empathy and humanity in what we make.

This was a nice surprise. I’ve been using craft for a couple of months and received an invite to a few free months of their pro plan after using the beta web app.

I’m officially on vacation, but there’s so much that I want to “bring back” to work with me from this week’s rstudio::conf. Looking forward to one more day with this community of folks doing and learning things.

I used the RStudio tool profvis this weekend to find speed improvement opportunities in Armorer. I suspected that I could rewrite a big operation that calculates the maximum of many columns across several thousand rows. Holy smokes: Using matrixStats::rowMaxs cuts processing time by an amazing amount!

On @FlagrantError’s pointer, I tried out Rectangle as an alternative to Amethyst. It’s not (currently) a true tiling window manager, but holy smokes it’s fantastic! I’m trying the Rectangle Pro features with the free ten-day trial and it’s a 100% certain purchase for me. It’s absolutely packed with smart mechanics for managing windows with keyboard shortcuts and/or a modifier + mouse combination. Repeated activations of a shortcut can cycle through multiple configurations. And there’s a brilliant feature to activate the “mouse throw” of a window using multitouch activation on a trackpad. I’m totally hooked on it.