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2026-09-23

Week 298: Drawing blood at Lidl

My frustration with typing on my keyboard reached a tipping point, and I decided to buy a new one.

I’ve had a couple of specific annoyances with my most recent keyboard (the one I found in a charity shop for £5.50). First, it overloads the keys in the bottom right to work as cursor keys when you tap them, but modifiers when you hold them. However, it isn’t fast enough to keep up with the speed at which I use one hand to tap Shift-; to get : or Shift-/ to get ?. Instead, it would interpret this as Up, followed by the unmodified key. I ended up with a lot of questions that finished abruptly and with a / inserted in the middle of the line above.

Second, the red (linear) switches don’t provide enough tactile feedback for me to avoid accidental presses. This might be a me problem, but it is very much a problem for me.

I’ve been using small-footprint keyboards for twenty years, but I still struggle with remembering the incantations for useful things like Home or Page Down, so I decided to get a slightly bigger one where I’d have more dedicated keys.

I went for a Keychron C1 Pro “tenkeyless” 80% layout, with brown (quiet, tactile) switches. It’s not particularly fancy, but it is reprogrammable and it’s even possible to swap the switches without soldering, although I have no such plans at present. The brown switches are good for feedback, while not being so loud that they’ll annoy everyone around me.

So far, I am feeling slightly calmer.

In the package was one of those fluffy promotional toys that used to be available at every museum gift shop when I was a child. I haven’t seen one in years.

Apparently, it’s called a weepul.

Whilst transferring items from the plastic basket to the checkout at Lidl, I scraped my hand. The edge of the moulding was sharper than I realised, sharp enough to leave me bleeding and trying not to get blood all over my shopping and clothes.

I should have kept my (fingerless) cycling gloves on.

We watched The Man with the Plan in the same building it was filmed in. It explores the Beveridge Report and what actually happened to its recommendations; it’s both inspiring and frustrating when compared against the destructive strip-mining of the public realm that has been economic orthodoxy for the past four and a half decades.

It’s been ages since I made kimchi. This time, I used red cabbage and loosely followed Maangchi’s recipe without the squid and fish sauce. I didn’t have any rice flour for the porridge, so I used fine polenta instead. It seemed to work well, but I haven’t tasted any since it’s been fermenting.

A couple of dogs whose humans work in Peckham Levels turned one year old, and had a party in the bar on Friday. They were very excitable, until they ate their special canine birthday cake, after which they all had to lie down to digest. The cake, made of banana and peanut butter, smelled amazing.

The inaugural Southbank Centre Lecture on Sunday was given by Ash Sarkar on The Future of Relationships. She was funny, thought-provoking, and insightful. I came away thinking (even more than I already did) that we all need to use our phones a lot less, and do things in person a lot more.

Links:

• Iceberger: “Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.”
• You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It. “Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at ‘your data is shared with 996 partners.’”
• Opus databending drumkit: “Make glitchy beats with randomly generated Opus protocol packets.”
• We Must Create the Shit Machine. “Could the Shit Machine END WORLD HUNGER? It’s NOT IMPOSSIBLE in the most LITERAL SENSE, which is all the justification we need to invest an AMOUNT OF MONEY that would OTHERWISE BY ITSELF END ACTUAL WORLD HUNGER.”
• Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek. A long, detailed, fascinating exploration of the non-Indo-European substrate below Greek.
• Everybody’s Lost Their Minds. “You know there are two ways for AI to achieve superhuman intelligence, right? One (theoretical) way is the mystical “recursive self-improvement” by AI. The other one is the path we’re very clearly on: The agentic brain worms have been spreading, and it looks increasingly like everybody’s lost their goddamn minds already. AI is the tool that dulls its users; it incrementally replaces understanding with a new dependency and addiction as you actively de-skill yourself.”