Last year, I blogged about the Binepad BNK8, a macropad by Binepad. This week, I received the larger brother, the Binepad BNK9. It sports 9 buttons and a larger knob1.
Since the firmware is customizable, I started exploring it through VIA. I could create new layers, control the light effects, etc. But, once I started adding layers, I had a dilemma:
Either keep a key pressed to activate a layer. That, however, required some finger gymnastic, especially if I wanted to use the knob while keeping a key pressed. Or
Be left wondering in which layer I was as there is no visual clue.
I then started looking around and soon it turned out I had to write a qmk firmware by hand.
The getting started guide is straightforward. On macOS, just fire up a terminal and type:
brew install qmk/qmk/qmk
qmk setup # take note of where the qmk_firware is cloned. It will be your $QMK_FIRMWARE_HOMEqmk compile -kb binepad/bnk9 -km default
qmk config user.keyboard=binepad/bnk9
Afterwards, I created a copy of the keymap into $QMK_FIRMWARE_HOME/keyboards/binepad/bnk9/keymaps/gglanzani, where $QMK_FIRMWARE_HOME is whatever folder qmk_firmware was cloned into.
After some trials and errors, I ended up with a keymap.c, config.h, and rules.mk that work the way I want. I’ve uploaded them to Github and you’re free to use them.
To compile the custom firmware type in a terminal:
cd $QMK_FIRMWARE_HOME
qmk compile -kb binepad/bnk9 -km gglanzani # use your own if you don't use my repo!
This will create a binepad_bnk9_gglanzani.uf2 file in your $QMK_FIRMWARE_HOME folder.
But how do you get it on your macropad? To do so, disconnect the USB cable, press the knob, and then connect the cable. That will mount an RPI-RP2 volume on your computer. One you copy the uf2 file into it, the volume will unmount and your macropad will be ready to use!
If you look into my repository, there should be enough comments to understand what’s going on an adapt it to your needs!
For those curious about the quality: the product finish of the knob and the buttons is nice, while the USB-C port feels finnicky at times ↩︎
Note that when you have an ordered list, the trick will put the same number (e.g., 1.) on each line. That’s not a problem though because they will still be rendered properly with ascending numbers.
Reading Simon Willison‘s excellent blog on “Things we learned about LLMs in 2024”, made me realize why we’re not seeing much economic benefit1 from #llms yet.
Simon writes:
Most users are thrown in at the deep end. The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out.
What should we work on, then?
As it was always the case with AI, work on the pains and the gains of the end users and think about a UI and UX they can use and be more productive with!
Don’t expect them to change how they work simply because you turned on a feature on your Office or GitHub subscription!
Quoting the Economist’s world in brief from a week ago or so: Artificial intelligence has already made many people—particularly shareholders in Al firms or chipmakers—very rich. But so far it has had little impact on the global economy. ↩︎
Recently, the major browsers introduced the capability to go to a webpage highlighting and scrolling to a particular piece of text. Once you see it in action, it really is neat.
The way I engage with it is simple: on a page, I copy some text, and then, in another application (it doesn’t work in Safari—although with some tweaks it might) I type ;frag and the URL including the #:~text=something appears instead.
The script works as follows:
Line 2 expands the clipboard and URI encodes it (for example, replacing spaces with %20).
Line 3 grabs an object that lets you manipulate the Safari application. This Javascript system built into the system is one of those big details in macOS that sets it apart from the competition, in my opinion.
Line 4 gets the URL of the active tab, and appends first #:~:text= and then the encoded text.
A thoughtful, as often, article by the Economist on how the usual defenders of free speech (the liberals) are not defending it, leaving the task to the (far) right.
The killer quote:
Our long-standing position is clear: only with the freedom to be wrong can societies advance slowly towards what is right. What has changed is that today the loudest objections to the crackdown on free speech come from right-wingers such as Elon Musk, X’s boss, while many self-described liberals applaud what they see as a blow against Trump-supporting billionaires. As speech becomes a culture-war battleground, those who disagree with the politics of Mr Musk and his allies have become relaxed about the onslaught.
Up to today, I’ve been bothered by having local https websites served by Caddy, whose certificates were not trusted by macOS. Today, I rectified it.
For macOS (and Safari) to trust what Caddy deploys locally, I had to:
Find the root certificate (if you’re using the Docker image, they’re in /data/caddy/pki/authorities/local/root.crt).
Copy its content into, say, caddy.pem (it’s just a name that the Keychain Access understands and that won’t clutter it with a non-informative name as root.crt)
Double-click caddy.pem to open it in the Keychain Access.app
Double-click the certificate name, open up the Trust “tab”, and click on “Always Trust”.
Then, all the local websites Caddy is serving will be trusted automatically.
Insightful linked post from John Gruber on why the AI pin flopped. This bit stood out to me as particularly insightful:
It is the kiss of death for any endeavor, creative or technical, to have a culture where brutally honest internal criticism is not welcome, especially when it goes up the chain. In fact it needs to be the expectation, if you’re pursuing excellence.
After setting it up to run on a non-Gmail email host, however, I noticed the logs were complaining that isbg couldn’t find Gmail-specific folders. That meant that, somehow, my configuration was telling isbg that I was on a gmail host, even though the line"isGmail": "no" was in my config.
After some looking around, I saw the offending piece of code in docker_isbg (newlines added for clarity):
if( confLoader.tableHasKey( config, "isGmail" )
and config.isGmail )
then gmailOption =" --gmail"else gmailOption =""end
The code checks whether config (which is a dictionary-like object resulting from the parsing of the above JSON) has a isGmail key, and whether it is set to anything: it can be yes, no or any other string and it will pass the --gmail option to isbg.
To fix it, I opened a PR that changes the above lines to
if( confLoader.tableHasKey( config, "isGmail" )
and config.isGmail =="yes" )
then gmailOption =" --gmail"else gmailOption =""end
While the project seems to be mostly abandoned so I don’t expect a prompt merge, there’s another easy fix: changing the "isGmail": "no", line to "isGmail": false in the configuration file as in that case the config.isGmail code will evaluate to false.
For more than 10 years, I’ve been a happy client of Tweak (how long will that link work?). One of the many features it offered was a fixed IP address.
Now that I’m forced to switch to Odido, I will lose this affordance, which serves me greatly whenever I need to connect to my VPN at home. In fact, my phone and laptop are configured to just connect to a subdomain of lanzani.nl, which pointed to my home address, and that address never changed.
I then started looking for ways to update my IP address automatically. Luckily, there seems to be a service that’s been designed for this, ddclient that I’ve set up in my home server as follows:
First of all, as my DNS is managed by Porkbun, I have to enable API access to change DNS parameters programatically;
Configuring it is as easy as writing in ~/code/ddclient the following
