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Jesse

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Google I/O 2013 & Google Glass

[crossposted from Google+] [tl;dr $300 Android wearable computer with a HUD. Has been shipping for quite some time] Growing up and hanging out near Cambridge, MA, I was always fascinated by the "mediaborgs" - the folks around the Media Lab who were building and using wearable computers. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could get myself a rig. At the time, the $1000+ for a heads-up display was more than I could pull off. I played around with sticking the tiniest laptop I could find (and even a bit of PC104 kit) in a... Continue reading

Posted 7 days ago at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Mark 2 Keyboard

It's been quite a while since I've written about my keyboard hacking project. Since I wrote up the Mark 1 keyboard, I've made 5 more keyboards. I've learned a bunch about soldering, I've learned how to operate a laser cutter and I've learned a bit about 3D printing. I've also learned a bit about ergonomics and keyboard design. I'm going to take this chronologically, even though that means I'm going to tell you about stuff that I later discovered was...not so right. So, bear with me through some clunky keyboard prototypes. It gets better. This post documents work from January,... Continue reading

Posted Apr 27, 2013 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Pinky typing and middle-row reaching are the bane of my typing. My ideal keyboard would rely on partial chording to drastically reduce the number of keys (something like http://i.imgur.com/fhOHko8.gif). Thats vaguely reminiscent of Engelbarts chrording keyboard from the 1968 demo and the Bat by Infogrip

Commented Jan 25, 2013 on Pinkies and your brain. at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Interesting story of the shift key. Do you have a reference to it and the touch typing paper? Unfortunately, its buried in a list of 300 papers Ive been working through :/ Pinky typing and middle-row reaching are the bane of my typing. My ideal keyboard would rely on partial chording to drastically reduce the number of keys (something like http://i.imgur.com/fhOHko8.gif).

Commented Jan 25, 2013 on Pinkies and your brain. at Massively Parallel Procrastination

The return-space-escape-backspace configuration is very elegant. Generally the whole layout looks quite natural. Thanks! A ton of comments I could make come down to OS background and personal taste. While I love having arrows available to both hands Id personally want IJKL arrow keys, for example, which better match what Im used to. Whatever I make will be fully reprogrammable, so that wont be an issue. But more subtly Id be concerned about chording to access the arrow keys because I tend to do a lot of multi-chorded arrow strokes already (control-shift-right-right-right) and adding another modifier strikes me as a lot of buttons to juggle at once. Yep. With the current design, that works becuase its easy to put one finger on blueshift+shift. One could also create a set of keys that are control-shift arrows Im working on refining the layout of the thumb keys, too. Why not move Tab down to the G? Wouldnt that be an easier location to reach? In the latest redesign, I actually moved tab and return to thumb keys. Do you find that you still use shift on the opposite hand as what youre shifting, as you need to for a more typical keyboard? I do, mostly at least.

Commented Jan 25, 2013 on Pinkies and your brain. at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Pinkies and your brain.

Your pinkies are not exactly your most...adept fingers. I don't mean to imply that I'd be happy to lose mine, but I'm also not exactly happy that the standard QWERTY keyboard sticks keys like Shift, Return, Delete, Tab and Escape out of the way where you need to stretch your pinkies to whack them. If you're an emacs user and have remapped Caps Lock to Control, things don't exactly get easier for your poor left pinkie. As I've been starting to research keyboard design, I came across a tidbit about the placement of the Shift keys -- The earliest Remington... Continue reading

Posted Jan 8, 2013 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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A pound of Sculpey

I'm starting to play around with what my first fully-homebrew keyboard design might look like. This is my first pass at the left half of a keyboard: Continue reading

Posted Jan 3, 2013 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Sure

Commented Dec 28, 2012 on 3G Web Browsing on the Kindle Paperwhite at Massively Parallel Procrastination

@Dan - Yeah, I dont know what to recommend to you. Personally, Im a big fan of the brown stemmed cherry switches. Best, Jesse

Commented Dec 10, 2012 on Building a Keyboard: Part 1 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

What city are you near, Dan? There may be a retailer or something you could try. I dont feel like clicking a single switch is a great way to get a sense of what typing on something feels like. What keyboards have you enjoyed typing on?

Commented Dec 10, 2012 on Building a Keyboard: Part 1 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Yes

Commented Dec 10, 2012 on 3G Web Browsing on the Kindle Paperwhite at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Building a Keyboard: Part 2

An explanation of what I'm trying to do by writing this up When I started in on this project, I was a complete electronics newbie. I had no memory of holding a soldering iron. (Though as soon as that rosin core got hot, I recognized the smell. I'm pretty sure I must have soldered as a kid or in a past life or something.) I made...a number of mistakes as I built my first keyboard, but in the end I have a fully working keyboard. I'm attempting to recount, from memory, everything I did. Especially everything I did wrong. If... Continue reading

Posted Dec 9, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Building a Keyboard: Part 1

In early 2012, I ran across a fascinating project on the keyboard forums at geekhack.org. The ErgoDox is a project by some gifted hobbyists to build a split ergonomic keyboard inspired by the Key64 Project. The Key64, in turn, counts the µTron, TypeMatrix, Maltron and Kinesis keyboards among its influences. The right place to read up on the ErgoDox is probably this thread on deskthority.net, since ergodox.org is still fairly spartan. As soon as I saw it, I signed up to buy an ErgoDox kit when the folks designing it were ready to start the group-buy process. Being somewhat mechanically... Continue reading

Posted Dec 8, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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I've been typing since 2rd grade or so, when my parents bought an Apple ][e. I started taking notes on a laptop in 8th grade. I tried to take a keyboarding class in 9th grade, since I'd never learned to type properly. Unfortunately, I typed well enough that I actually got kicked out of class. These days, I spend a lot of my time writing software. When I'm not doing that, I spend my time making trouble on the Internet. To say that I spend much of my time at a keyboard would be somewhat of an understatement. For many,... Continue reading

Posted Dec 8, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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For the past couple of months, I've been tinkering with Yet Another Todo App. Currently called "Today", it's designed to emulate a behavior that turns me from productivity-Clark Kent to productivity-Superman. On days when I'm productive, I start out my morning by writing out a list of everything I need to do. Sometimes, I've done that on paper. Sometimes, I've done that in a text file. The precise medium doesn't really matter. There are two things that do matter: Before I get sidetracked by life, I start my day by writing out a list. At the end of the day,... Continue reading

Posted Oct 17, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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3G Web Browsing on the Kindle Paperwhite

Last night, I was playing around with my new 3G Kindle Paperwhite. (I earn a few bucks if you buy from Amazon after clicking links to Amazon in this blog post) (It is, in fact, the nicest kindle I have ever owned. The new screen is gorgeous. The touch screen is responsive. Large parts of the UI are just HTML5 apps, which means that the system is quite flexible. Sometimes more flexible than intended. When the Kindle Touch first got pwned, it was through the music player app, which didn't escape JavaScript in ID3 tags.) One of the things that... Continue reading

Posted Oct 5, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Heya Travis, Long time no chat! Indeed, it was actually the ergonomic setup at Utopia that triggered my RSI for the first time :)

Commented Aug 21, 2012 on Computing Environment - Late Summer 2012 Edition at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Project: Rei Toei

I've been messing around with a few new projects. Over the past couple months, I've become increasingly fascinated by the state of the art in what one might call "conversational UI". I'm mostly an Android person -- I've been vaguely jealous of Apple's Siri since I first got to play with her on Dan Kogai's iPhone 4S at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo last year. There are a dozen+ Siri competitors for Android. They have various levels of platform integration, but none of them are Really Excellent. And they're all proprietaryish products put out by companies trying to make a buck. I... Continue reading

Posted Aug 9, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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@Ricky - Right now, I'm carrying a Galaxy Note (T-Mobile), an iPhone 4S (ATT + flat rate prepaid data) and a Nexus 7. The flirtation with iOS is mostly to see how the other side llves ;)

Commented Jul 28, 2012 on Computing Environment - Late Summer 2012 Edition at Massively Parallel Procrastination

Computing Environment - Late Summer 2012 Edition

Blog Post. Take 2! I wrote a reasonably eloquent bit about my current ~computing environment. And then TypePad managed to not save me from a mistaken keystroke and ate it. (Yes, I get to claim it was eloquent. If you can recover the content and disprove me, I will be thrilled.) So now, here I am in a nice 80x25 with a trusty vim executable autosaving every keystroke and backing up what I write...without really giving me any say at all. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was attempting to document the contents of my portable "office" (Late Summer... Continue reading

Posted Jul 28, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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In which our hero travels from Tokyo to Boston in a single bound

Last week, I was in Taipei for OSDC.tw. As usual the conference was well put together and had lots of tasty food. After the conference, Audrey, Luke and I spent a few days working on new features for Checkmarkable, my startup Prime Radiant's product. I also met one of the guys behind Vortex keyboards and scored myself a sexy new KBT Pure 60% keyboard, but more on that another day. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. Specifically, I spend a lot of time on Oneworld airplanes. Typically, I visit Taiwan once or twice a year. Nobody flies directly... Continue reading

Posted Apr 24, 2012 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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WaffleTodos - An app for the Kindle Touch

I had a nice long plane flight to mess around with the Kindle Touch today. Its an interesting beast. Much of its user interface is built in HTML5. (The browser "application" itself is just some JavaScript, HTML and CSS wrapped around the platform's built-in WebKit rendering engine running full-screen in X11. Yesterday, Yifan Lu (http://yifan.lu) released a tool to allow Kindle Touch owners to gain root access to their devices. This tool took advantage of the fact that the MP3 player app on the Kindle Touch renders the titles of .mp3 files as HTML. I spent a bit of time... Continue reading

Posted Dec 12, 2011 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Come hack Perl for Best Practical! (We're hiring)

About us We're Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, MA. We build software and sell support, training, consulting, and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker), is the premiere open source issue tracking system. We've been around since the fall of 2001 and are entirely self-funded. We're currently hard at work on our next new product. Things just keep getting busier. About the job We're looking for a Perl Hacker to help us enhance and refine our products, and help us be excellent to our customers. You'll be responsible for everything from implementing new features... Continue reading

Posted Jun 14, 2011 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Wow. It's been rather a long time since I've...

Wow. It's been rather a long time since I've posted anything. Terribly sorry about that folks. Things are...kind of busy. Between RT 4.0, Perl 5.14.0, K-9 Mail 3.8 and Kaiten Mail 1.1, I've been a bit busy on the software side of things. More on all of that later. For now, Continue reading

Posted Jun 14, 2011 at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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Sudhir - We've been working to improve things, but could certainly use help. Would you be willing to help make it better?

Commented Feb 3, 2011 on K-9 Mail 3.600 for Android at Massively Parallel Procrastination

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