Random Bits
-Random bits-
Condo Rebuild:
We have two quotes for rebuilding the kitchen cabinetry. $12,800 CAD from one, and $13,383 CAD from another. These sums of money kind of boggle me, and I'm really glad insurance is covering all this rebuild stuff. I'm not sure when the work will actually start, and we are still waiting on another quote. We've also picked out flooring and the tile for around the fireplace. We're waiting for them to get back to us about shower stuff.
Annoyance Stuff:
I don't know how I got subscribed to Quora digest emails, but every time I open one up, I end up seeing transphobic bullshit. Every. Single. Time. And yet, I keep clicking them because the question highlighted in the email sounds interesting.
I have finally unsubscribed entirely from them.
Keyboard Stuff:
While trying to figure out an unrelated issue, I finally found a menu in AUKey's software for setting colors of individual keys. I can't create any moving patterns, but it's something at least. The white in the middle is a bit pinkish because the keys themselves are pink and the light picks up the color, but my keyboard has trans colors now!
The thing I was trying to figure out is actually pretty funny. I realized that this keyboard has a "fn" key. It had been there this whole time, obviously, but I'd somehow never noticed it. I was familiar with the need and use for such a key on laptops, but why was there one on a full size keyboard?
It turns out that fn key presses are handled in the keyboard BIOS before they ever get to the OS, so it is not remappable. It does two things: I can change, in very limited ways, the backlighting by pressing fn+arrow keys. I can also access various secondary functions for the F keys that were arbitrarily decided on by the manufacturer and which can't be changed.
The mappings for fn+F5 through F7 are the stupidest shit. They map to X, C, and V for cut, copy, and paste. Why on earth would you press fn+F5, which requires two hands or weird contortions to press, when you can just press ctrl+x instead? These are 99% useless keymappings. I say 99% because I'm sure there are weird use cases where this makes sense, but c'mon. You could have put much more useful things there, or at least offered some way to remap them!
I think that switching the Windows volume auto-adjust helped with the F13 issue I was having, with F13 getting "stuck" on sometimes, but I also realized that I have a menu key down by the ctrl, alt, and fn keys that I had similarly just written out of mind somehow. (I'm so used to using either a Model M or a Kinesis that somehow the existence of the menu and fn keys literally did not even register in my brain! I had no idea they were there until yesterday!) The menu key is remappable, so now I can use it instead of volume up for F13 and a bunch of things are doable without having to move my hand up to the volume up button so big win there!