MeghanIsMe

I have a lot to journal about. But first I'm going to whine about my tweaks to my interface with the computer.

Maybe this is a technological get-off-my-lawn rant?

I've been spending more time helping Miriam or doing my own stuff at the computer lately, and the more I do that the more I want to tweak the computer to function the way I want it to.

The biggest problem I'm having right now is that AHK scripts I've set to execute with a key combination of a letter or number plus F13 are sometimes triggering without pushing F13. I thought maybe the F13 is getting 'stuck' on somehow, but no keyboard status monitor program I can find will show me the status of F13. I'll be typing along and suddenly a string just pops ittoex t ctohloer : blue it just did it again.

I'm going to leave it there as an example of how *ridiculously annoying* it's becoming. The recorded macro to change text color (using what happened above there for instance: that's supposed to trigger on F13+n) within Google Sheets just intertwines itself with what I'm trying to write and I have to delete it all and retype.

It could be a problem with my AHK code, or with the key remapper that I used to make volume up into F13, or with the way Windows deals with an F13 press, or with my actual keyboard hardware and I can't figure out how to troubleshoot.

Speaking of actual keyboard hardware, my nice pink mechanical keyboard is being flaky with its shift and space keys lately too. It was supposed to be a new open box item and it's been great up until now, but suddenly shift and space occasionally don't work and that's almost as annoying as the random macros in terms of having to go back and delete things.

I type quickly. I would guess around 60-70wpm when my brain and fingers are cooperating and depending on content. Having to fix all these random bits of mess just kills that, and it's so frustrating!

I'm pretty sure the shift and space problems are physical hardware problems because if I remove and reseat the keys on the switches, it gets better for a while. Maybe AUKey switches aren't as high-quality as my perusal of reviews led me to believe? I could order new ones and replace the ones that may be bad, I guess. The soldering shouldn't be too bad. I just don't have a good workspace because I'm *still* living in a temporary apartment 6 months after the fire.

I *really* miss my Enterpad and my Kinesis.

That Kinesis keyboard was a champion. I'd had it since a manager at a job I had when I was still with my ex bought it for me to combat RSI pain, probably 11 or 12 years ago now. It was showing its age, but it was still working just fine. A new one is up to almost $500 CAD now (thanks inflation!), so it needs to wait for insurance.

Speaking of RSI pain, my left wrist/hand/arm pain is has been significantly increased lately as I find myself at my computer for longer periods recently. I know that a lot of it comes from extension of my left pinky to press modifier keys (shift, ctrl) and tab frequently. The Kinesis moves a lot of those keys under your thumbs (though not tab) and it's a godsend. It makes a real difference in terms of pain.

I just...I really want my computer to do what I want, and look the way I want, and I've become more irritable about it as I get older I guess. I at least have it looking mostly the way I want, between dark mode in Windows, a dark mode browser plugin, and registry tweaks to change the color of inactive windows, for instance, because apparently stuff like that is too important and complicated to trust to average users? There's also Open Shell, making the Start Menu behave much more like windows 7 or 8 than Windows 10, which was driving me crazy. No, I don't *ever* want web search integrated with searches on my local machine. Ever.

And sometimes I think about all the things that I love my desktop *so much* for, when it's behaving, and I think about people who use a phone as their primary "computer," and it just boggles my mind. How do you *live* like that? I don't even feel like I can work as effectively as I'd like at a laptop, let alone a phone.

One of the things Miriam is working on is an interface for doing complex searches on a mobile platform, and I'm like, why is that even a thing? Why would you willingly torture yourself that way?

I love elegant technical solutions that exploit existing properties of systems in ways that were not planned by the system designers. I'm thinking about this because I'm playing an LP on a turntable with stroboscopic timing marks intended to work with AC mains frequency to allow you to precisely set the speed to 33 1/3 RPMs based on the number of dots around the platter and the frequency at which the lamp flashes.

(Maybe clocks that keep time using mains AC frequency probably predate this kind of stroboscopic turntable timing method? So you could argue that it's just an extension of using mains frequency for timing some arbitrary process rather than a whole-cloth invention.)

That kind of clever trickery just makes me really happy.

(No, I'm totally not avoiding doing my school work by drifting along with various tangents that pop up in my brain. Why do you ask?)

The person I'm seeing for electrolysis had an extra TV that stopped working. I was telling her about how I love fixing electronics and she offered to give it to me! I thought it would be nice to have an LCD TV as well as a plasma because the plasma does have some issues with burn in playing certain video games.

After I got it home I looked at it and realized it's also a plasma. It *did* seem rather heavy when I picked it up...

When plugged in, it makes sounds that I think are a relay engaging, and then disengaging. Just keeps doing that repeatedly. My completely uninformed guess is it's probably a power supply issue, and thus likely bad capacitors somewhere.

Now that masks are required in Saskatchewan indoors again, I'm feeling much better about thrifting.

I found a 2002-made IBM 9494 monitor at the thrift store yesterday. When I picked it up and found that it was far heavier than I expected, I was intrigued. Often that indicates higher quality components. It was only $5 CAD! Other, lower quality, monitors were more expensive. I set it up this morning and the image quality and contrast ratio are significantly better than my nearly new Samsung unit. It's smaller, but at 18.1" and a 4:3, non-widescreen aspect ratio, it's plenty usable.

We humans in industrial societies rarely get to go foraging for tasty food and useful supplies in the wilderness these days, but finding good deals at thrift stores is a great runner up!

I spent Christmas Day with my partner, family, and family friends in Kenosha. I've been feeling a bit isolated in general, and that's made the fact that we (Danae and I) don't really do anything for Christmas feel more like a disconnection from something familiar. (She doesn't celebrate Christmas because she is Jewish, and me because who would I do something with or for?)

There was lots of tasty food, socializing, and board games. I wore one of my new tops with bell sleeves. In the evening, Danae and I watched the second two Die Hard movies with my dad before driving home. It was a good day and I am grateful to have such good people in my life.

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Last week, I turned up a Sony 300-disc carousel CD changer at one of the slightly grungier thrift stores in northern Chicago. Testing with a random CD, I found that the disc was bumping into something as it spun on the carousel, but it was too dark to see what. The door wasn't clear enough to let light from my phone through while operating. Thinking about it, I got a bright white screen up on my phone, then set it on the carousel with a loaded disc and started it up. By the phonelight, I could see the disc I'd loaded was bumping into another disc stuck where it shouldn't be. I thought I could see a few more in various places too.

I ended up pulling about 15 discs out of the changer. I think someone probably tried to move it when it was loaded and stuff fell all over. With all the discs out, it seemed to work just fine, so I bought it as a replacement for my 100-disc changer. The bigger one even has a keyboard port to plug in a standard PS/2 keyboard and enter disc titles. As I carried it to the front of the store, though, it was making a noise like stuff was still stuck in it, sliding around. I thought I'd taken everything out so I was worried that something had broken. But I figured I'd check it over again at home.

I drove to where I was going to pick Danae up and tried to text her, but I couldn't find my phone. You probably see where this is going. After getting really anxious about having possibly lost my phone out of my coat pocket while I was lying down on the thrift store floor in front of the CD changer, I remembered how I'd managed to see inside of it. I went to the back of the car and opened the machine's door and there was my phone.

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We thought we were out of the woods with the bed bugs after the last treatment, but a few days ago Danae found more bites. The news was difficult to take, but we will deal with it and have people out for another round. I really hate these things.

During my last day of work at the archives yesterday, the two staff members I work with, along with one of the new student workers, had a mini going away party for me. There was a very pretty tray of cake and cinnamon rolls, and people got together on an Amazon gift card for me to help me acquire more of my Summer reading materials. They gave me a really sweet card too. Working at the archives has really been the best job of my life, for so many reasons: the people, the wonderful materials I got to work with, the interesting research I did; I'm going to miss it a lot. I felt more emotional than I expected to as I was walking out the door for the last time. But I'll be back at least once over the summer for a Poky Little Puppy photoshoot, so I'll definitely see people again. And now that I'm no longer a student, I'm going to keep up with a number of Parkside people on Facebook. It's nice living in the future, with so many more ways to keep in touch.

Anna also arranged for me to meet Vince. He'd become kind of a legend in my mind; the guy who has a cave down in the sub-basement where he fixes everything from our microwave at the archives to the reel-to-reel deck I donated to the library, to laboratory equipment for the science departments. It was a real treat to meet him in person and get a tour of his lab. He has an amazing array of electronics down there, most of which I didn't recognize at all. I did pick out a Commodore Vic-20 plus tape drive, a laserdisc player, and a jacob's ladder out of the background though. Vince also talked about some of the equipment he's working on, like a cell counter, an electron beam generator, and bunches of other stuff. One of the most memorable things to me were a couple of Altair 8800s tucked in a corner. Two of them! And as Vince was happy to point out, not even the Smithsonian has a working one of those. The ones at Parkside are surplus from the biology department; they actually used them about four decades ago.

Vince grew up, like me, wanting to take everything apart and learn how it works. My parents never let me disassemble a TV though. Vince got that experience, complete with having the flyback transformer discharge into his body and send him flying across the room. Maybe it's better that I missed out on that? Anyway, I kind of wanted to be him when I grew up, when I was little, and it was awesome to get to talk with him. I think I'm going to see if he wants a few things of mine that I'm going to get rid of. A benchtop 13.8 volt power supply, a pretty old analog multimeter, things like that. I'm also going to see if I could commission him to repair my IMB Model Ms that have issues. Maybe I could trade him a keyboard in return for some repair work on my other ones?

I think someone needs to do some oral history interviewing with him; he must have wonderful stories.