Building a Custom Split Mechanical Keyboard

Backstory My first mechanical keyboard was a black tenkeyless (TKL) Leopold Otaku with Cherry MX Browns (looks like this) that I was given in college by a friend. It was certainly an improvement over the low quality membrane keyboards I was using at the time (either on my laptop or otherwise). I used it for years, and was quite happy with it. Eventually, though, I started hearing stories about other programmers getting carpal tunnel from typing all day, so I started looking into more ergonomic solutions for my desk.

Setting Up a Blog With Hugo, Obsidian, and Cloudflare

Here’s how I set up this blog (modified quick start instructions): https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/ Install hugo (extended) from here: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing/ Create a new site (step 2) git init Make an empty repo on github git remote add origin ... whatever, follow the instructions from github on uploading an existing repo Add the loveit theme: https://github.com/dillonzq/LoveIt (submodule add) follow step 4 (add some content), which will create a new folder content/posts/<filename>.md Open up the entire git folder as an obsidian vault, and then start editing the file you have under content/posts TODO: More obsidian setup start the hugo server (quickstart step 5) flesh out your content to something interesting, and then push it to your github repo start following the cloudflare instructoins on deploying a hugo site https://developers.

Developer Setup for Windows 11

Here’s how I set up my most recent fresh Windows install on my Thinkpad, for use as a development machine. In BIOS Enable virtualization Disable fingerprint reader Switch fn / ctrl, and enable primary function for fn keys (so pressing F2 yields F2) During Windows 11 Pro Install Follow the partitioning guide from [[drive-partitioning-for-dual-booting]] Follow the username guide from [[installing-windows-with-custom-user-folder-name]] Disable all location settings Basic configuration Wifi driver won’t work, so connect via ethernet Go to Windows update and apply all updates.

Installing Windows With Custom User Folder Name

For some mysterious reason, whenever I walked through the normal Windows install, and set up my account (via my Microsoft email), my user folder would be created as C:\Users\vasua. I didn’t recall ever explicitly setting that as my username during the installation procedure. It turns out that Windows automatically generates a 5 character username for you based on the name you have assigned in your Microsoft email address. I didn’t like the idea of a computer deciding where my files would be located, so I tried to figure out how to change my username.

Drive Partitioning for Dual Booting Windows And Linux

The conventional advice when setting up a single drive for dual booting Windows and Linux is to first install Windows (possibly telling Windows to only use a portion of your drive during the installation procedure), and then afterwards installing your Linux distro of choice on the remaining space (potentially requiring shrinking the Windows partition). There are two potential problems with this approach: Your EFI partition might end up being too small to actually be able to install a linux distro (or multiple) The recovery partition being right after the Windows partition makes it annoying to resize the Windows partition (as you have to move the recovery partition first) To work around both of these problems, you can tell Windows to use a slightly different partition setup during the installation.