Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

!quiteRant

Since I'm working for 3 years as a parttime software engineer, I started to feel my tendon sheath more and more, sometimes it was hurting so I decided to have a look around on ergonomic keyboards, because in the office we only have these flat, thin wireless keyboards which are the fucking opposite of ergonomic.
They feel like when Eddie Scissorhands has to cut hair of a pile of rocks.
So after some reviews I decided to buy a Kinesis Advantage2 (made in the USA of Americas) eventhough it is quite expensive (379 Kanuckistan Kopeks).

I must say this keyboard is fucking well engineered. You can remap every key in a few keypresses and it is stored on the keyboard itself, no software required... awesome!
The disadvantage for me is, being pretty tall I have very wide shoulders so the 2 keyboard pits are a bit too close together in my oppinion.
The other thing is, you really have to get used to it... I am slowly advancing in speed and it feels great. No pain anymore and I don't have to move my hands at all.

So what are your experiences with keyboards and does your workplace have a good setup for staying healthy?

Want maximum efficiency in python?

def say(text):
print(text)

You save 2 keypresses everytime you print

A customer once wanted buttons that would close the mask in an interface where the only way to close the mask was to click a default "OK" button. 🤔

So in the end we implemented a script on the customer's buttons that would send a calculated number of multiple keypresses of tab, tab, tab and finally enter on the default button. 🤑

It is still running in production and I will never ever touch it again! 😁

Finally, fucking finally I fixed a damn bug that seems to be freaking popular on asus machines. This damn bug captures the fn keys needed to regulate the screen brightness.

All tools that display your keypresses didn't find them at all and I had a pretty tough time find the source of problem.

You can create as many arch memes as you want but you cannot deny that the they are truly MVPs imo.

Today I also:
* Fixed and refactored a bit of code
* added shortcuts for volume and keyboard backlight control
* Installed lots of fonts
* Got Steam to run
* Found out the meaning behind the Arch linux
* Felt disgusting using windows 10. Learned that 10 stands for the number of minuts before I must vomit 🤢
* Learned a bunch of linux stuff

But most importantly
*installed sl

I if ever meet the Apple devs responsible for iOS accessibility keyboard control I‘ll go to jail for a long time. Keypresses for tab, shift+tab and arrow keys do not even reach the browser, the OS catches them and moves focus to whatever it sees fit to be the next focusable item. Tabindex and roles are also just recommendations and no surefire way of controlling focusability.
Whatever those people take I hope it‘s laced with fent.