Sunday, January 12, 2020

Return of the Wiki

A while ago I migrated from a traditional hosting service to GitHub. One thing I lost in the process was access to a mediawiki installation for a personal Wiki. I like Wikis, and I've missed it ever since.

That is, until I finally looked a little closer at GitHub and saw that they support Wikis! DOH! So now I'm experimenting with it and so far I like it (still very early days). Each Wiki is stored in its own git repo and can be cloned and worked on off-line.

One problem is that they haven't integrated the Wiki repos with the general GitHub software very well, so the GitHub Desktop GUI application can't deal with it. The doc says it does, but the doc lies. You have to use command-line git.

But that's not a big problem. One of the reasons I like Wikis is a low-barrier to updating. And having to edit files, write them out, and then do the git commands to update is *not* low-barrier. So my usage will be almost exclusively via the web.

But it's nice to know that if my Wiki grows large, I can run sed scripts on the files to make global changes if I want.

Anyway, THANKS GitHub!

Matias keyboard FAIL

Like many Mac owners, I don't like the chiclet keyboards. I like an old-fashioned mechanical keyboard. So I finally got one: a very clicky Matias keyboard. And while I would have preferred a smaller keyboard (I don't need the keypad), I was very happy with it. For about a month.

Then the spacebar started "bouncing". I.e. maybe 1 time in 20 I get two spaces instead of one. I experimented quite a bit, and it's not the autorepeat, and it's not *me* that's bouncing. I can slowly press the key, and bam - two spaces. Or I can type my normal (pretty fast) speed and get periodic bounces. (Sometimes I can go an hour without a bounce, but then they come back.)

So I contacted Matias support, and after leading me through a series of unsuccessful steps, they sent me a new one. It arrived with NO BOUNCE! Happy-happy.

For about a month. Now the bounces are back.

I know baseball says 3 strikes are an "out", but I'm only giving them 2. The Matias is going in the trash as soon as my new Keychron K2 (with blue switches) gets here.

Wish me luck!

Update: It's been over 3 months now, and I am VERY happy with Keychron K2!

My only complaint is that the blue tooth times out even if I use an external power supply. Timing out blue tooth is a good thing when running on battery, but is unnecessary when it has external power. (NOTE: there is a  simple solution: don't use blue tooth. The same cable I'm connecting to an external power supply can simply be plugged into my laptop, at which point it's a wired keyboard. But I have some reasons for not wanting to do that. Oh well, I'm still very happy with the K2.)

Update 2: It's been over 7 months now, and the Keycron K2 is still going strong! It's a pleasure to use.