Kinesis Foot Switches for Macs

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

I’ve occasionally pondered whether there might be a benefit to getting some foot pedals / foot switches for my Kinesis keyboard. Since reading the Pragmatic Programmers’ TextMate book, however, I’ve realized that many of my editor’s handiest functions are meta key-based (that is, key combinations which involve Command, Option and Ctrl). And, while I’m entirely pleased with my Kinesis, its layout does make it slightly less convenient to hit some of the meta keys (as compared with a regular “rectangular” keyboard).

So, I decided to look into the feasibility of getting foot switches and came across this post on Ask MetaFilter which specifically asks about foot switches for Macs. Unfortunately, I learned that, while Kinesis offers USB-based foot switches, OS X has a limitation whereby input from one USB device can't modify the input from another USB device. Put another way, meta-keys can’t be assigned to Kinesis’ USB foot switches if you’re using a Mac (d'oh!)

After some additional searching, however, I found a couple posts about a fellow that used Kinesis foot switches on his Mac. (Wha?) Well, as it turns out, USB foot switches still don’t work on Macs (for meta keys), but Kinesis also offers a version of their foot switches which connect directly to a port on back of their keyboards (bypassing the OS entirely):

I have two Kinesis single-action foot switches. If you use a Mac, you have to buy one of the foot switches that plug directly into the Kinesis keyboard and not the USB foot switches. Apple won’t let one USB device modify the input of a separate USB keyboard or mouse. I have one foot switch acting as Ctrl and the other acting as Alt/Meta. I’ve heard different stories from different people — people tend to either love or hate foot switches. I find that they are really convenient when I'm doing “heads down” work in Emacs. They took a bit of getting used to initially, but when I use them, they offload an awful lot of the effort of working in Emacs to my feet. […]

I was pleased to learn that the meta key thing could work out after all. And, after mulling it over a bit, I’ve decided to give it a shot — I’ve ordered two of Kinesis’ single-action foot switches. Once they arrive, though, I’ll still have to decide which key to map to which foot. At the moment, I’m leaning toward assigning Ctrl to my left foot and Option to my right foot (since that would mirror the left-to-right arrangement of the default Mac keyboard).

Update 2007-05-03: I ended up assigning Option to my left foot and Ctrl to my right foot. — as Allan Odgaard mentioned in his screencast on Text Transformations (in HTML), “Ctrl-Shift are the modifiers we always use for Bundle items”. Since Bundles are the primary key-consuming resource in TextMate and, arguably, its most useful feature, I figured I’d bind the Bundle-related modifier (Ctrl) to the stronger of my two feet. (I’m right-handed, so I guess that makes me right-footed too?)

Some Notes on Virginia Tech

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As you’ve no doubt heard, there was a tragic shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday. However, I also went to Virginia Tech which makes this is a little bit weird for me. During some semesters I’d walk by Ambler-Johnston Hall every day. And it doesn’t help when I find myself realizing where news photos were taken before I read their captions.

If I may ask a favor, I’d rather not talk about this with other people right now (in case it were to come up in conversation). I think I just need to deal with this on my own time.

“You Have Not Read The Entire Internet”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

My chum Adam recently posted this Tweet [*] which nicely encapsulates my RSS scenario (in addition to his, apparently):

At some point, having an unread count on your RSS reader becomes as useful as an app that says “You have not read the entire internet”.

[*] For those who aren’t aware, “tweets” describe messages on Twitter, “a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘updates’” to their friends.

Indeed, while I don’t think of myself as a pack rat (as I actually find it rather fun to throw things away that I no longer need), I’m starting to realize that I may have tendencies toward information pack-ratting. Fortunately, this is typically harmless; for example, with hard disk storage as cheap as it is these days, there’s little disadvantage to keeping old photos those I’ve taken.

On the other hand, it can be overwhelming to have thousands of unread items in one’s RSS reader. And, now that my taxes are out of the way, this may be a good opportunity to get a handle on that. I’ve only been able to find one article addressing this so far (not that there aren’t more, but I just haven’t found them). Kathy Sierra has an informative entry about The myth of “keeping up”. Much of it is written with an eye toward paper-based media (magazines and the like) but most of the advice is just as applicable toward RSS-based subscriptions as well.

Probably the most significant of her suggestions is to “Unsubscribe to as many things as possible”. If I were being glib, I might be tempted to write that off as being “easier said than done” ;). Kidding aside, while that may be difficult, I think that it may also be the most fruitful of her suggestions. Then again, with the number of feeds to which I subscribe, I feel like I almost need a meta suggestion (or even a rule of thumb) about triaging my feeds to figure out which to delete and which to keep. Meta-suggestion or not, I think I feel reinvigorated toward trimming my feeds.

Carlos Mencia Steals Jokes

Ashley Bischoff31 Comments

I’ve never been much a fan of Carlos Mencia’s comedy, but stealing jokes from other comics just isn’t cool. And, of all people, wouldn’t stealing from Cosby only make it all the more obvious?

What I do find amusing, however, is that his real name is Ned Mencia (and, no, that’s not a joke). (Via: Digg)

Photos from SXSW 2007

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Aaron Gustafson makes an effort to listen as he plays with Lego bricks

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.