2025-07-04 01:50:12
I’ve read on The Verge today that new Lorde’s album “Virgin” causes troubles with many CD players. I don’t listen to her music, and I last played a CD in my old car many years ago, so maybe I would have skipped the news. Until I read about the reason.
Lorde Virgin CD. Image: Lorde
The issue most players had with the CD was that it was almost completely transparent. They just didn’t understand that it was in, or refused to pull it in, as they didn’t recognize the disk.
I burst up in laughter because I had a similar issue before. When I was driving that car, I mentioned earlier. I replaced the head unit by that time though, so the issue was not with a CD.
We had a vacation in Croatia and were driving on a highway there when we stopped at a toll booth. Croatia had joined the EU but hadn’t yet switched to Euro. They were still using Kuna. Not a problem at all when paying with a credit card with a good conversion rate. And I had one.
I inserted it into the toll payment machine. It pulled it in, and… nothing happened. The barrier didn’t open, and after some delay, the machine asked to insert the card again. The queue behind our car had started to build up already. I had no other choice but to call support.
The support answered pretty quickly. After I explained the situation, they requested the info about the card.
“Uhm, it is a MasterCard” – I answered. I was baffled.
“No, what color?” – the support agent asked for clarification.
What a strange question I thought, but I replied: “Uhm, it has no color. It is transparent.”
My transparent card. Image: N26
“Okay” – I heard back, and soon afterward, something clicked inside the machine, and it ejected the card.
“Please use a different card” – asked the support agent and disconnected. Good that I had another one.
What’s the moral of the story? Transparency is good until it creates troubles.
This is post 33 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-06-05 18:27:17
A few years have gone since I’ve built my first custom mechanical keyboard. It was inevitable that I would want to build another one. Especially given how the market has advanced since then.
The keyboards are now much better than two years ago. It is now common for CNC aluminum keyboards to have tri-mode (Bluetooth, wireless via proprietary dongle, and USB-C) connectivity, which was deemed impossible back then. All modern keyboards come with decent stock stabilizers, better materials and build quality.
And my new keyboard has a pretty unique feature: its case is held together via ball-joint magnetic latches. The daughter-board connected via a magnetic connection as well. This allows quickly opening and re-assembling the keyboard. There is no single screw in there.
But as much cool as this feature is, as rare I will likely need it. As I said, I’m fully satisfied with the factory build and don’t want to change anything.
Except for switches and keycaps, of course.
In fact, it all started with keycaps. I enjoyed MT3 profile keycaps from my previous keyboard and was following its creator Matt3o for a while already. When he announced his new project MTNU, I immediately knew what keycaps I would use for my new build.
The new profile is lower, compared to MT3 these are much closer to “normal” keycaps. Still, it features a round key top that I like so much and homing keys, which are just deeper and don’t have an itchy ridge. And the new font, designed from scratch specifically for these keycaps.
So, as soon as I found the right color scheme, I joined a group buy run by Obolotzky (I can highly recommend, by the way). Then, however, there have been almost 6 long months of waiting, but these are the game rules, and I’ve been prepared for it.
As for switches, I again wanted silent tactile switches. For better or worse, I couldn’t find Boba U4 Silents in stock. So I needed to choose some others, and my choice fell upon Outemu Cream Yellow Pro Silent Tactile switches.
They are a bit lighter and even less loud (I couldn’t imagine it is possible). The tactile bump is exactly as I like. I’m very pleased with the combination of the keycaps and switches I ended up with.
And, yes, the board itself! It is the Womier RD75. It is a new player in the field, but they are already quite popular because they offer high-quality boards for affordable prices.
The keyboard sounds very pleasant out of the box, though I can’t work more than 5 minutes when the keyboard is so loud. It is just too distracting for me.
There were some problems with the keyboard, however.
First, it came with a malfunctioning switch, but they put three spares in the box, so it wasn’t a big issue. And I replaced all switches anyway.
Second, some modifier combinations didn’t work when I switched to Mac mode. This was mitigated by switching back to Windows mode and swaping left Alt and Win keys. Didn’t find any other issues with this setup.
The third issue that bothered me the most was the Caps Lock delay, which macOS considered as long-press. I’m using Caps Lock to switch input methods, so after each switch it toggled Caps Lock, making the keyboard unusable. Luckily, I found a solution here as well. I only needed to disable NKRO, which purpose I anyway didn’t fully understand.
The fourth and final issue was that in the default layout, there is a “handy” shortcut to factory reset the keyboard. Right near a shortcut that shows battery status and turns lighting on and off. Needless to say, I pressed it accidentally after I applied all above customizations and needed to reapply them.
The biggest disappointment so far is that although the keyboard is configurable with VIA and runs on QMK, it doesn’t support flashing custom QMK firmware, as the source code they provided doesn’t compile. I hope that they will eventually fix this and supply the source code as they are obliged under the terms of GPL.
So here is Victor’s Mk2:
Can’t wait to build the next one.
PS. This blog post was typed in its entirety on this keyboard, of course.
This is post 32 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-05-29 17:09:14
Another year has flown by, and I again had the pleasure of attending the KotlinConf in Copenhagen. It is the conference I now look forward to every year. And it was my third time in a row!
KotlinConf 2025 Keynote
This time, my team had a major goal ahead of it: we were on to release Compose Multiplatform iOS target as stable. And folks did a great job to do that. Somewhat unexpectedly for me, the release itself did not excite people much. Seemingly many already considered our iOS support as good enough for their use cases as we’ve already seen many apps using it in production.
Instead, we’ve got a lot of questions on how to convince their iOS subteams to adopt Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform. That’s great, as it proves that the technology is mature enough, and nobody who actually tried it has any doubts that adopting it is the right decision.
I volunteered to help with the KotlinConf app this year and enjoyed using Compose Multiplatform in a real-world project. JetBrains’ engineering culture relies a lot on dogfooding, and this was a perfect way to try the framework first hand.
KotlinConf App 2025 edition
The app received a lot of positive feedback during the conference and helped us to improve the framework during its development.
It was also my first time delivering a workshop at the conference. I wouldn’t do it myself, but when colleagues I respect asked me to, I could not refuse.
It went pretty well overall, but as always, we already have ideas how to improve it next time.
Both the workshop and KotlinConf wouldn’t be possible without Márton, once again kudos to him! Kotlin and JetBrains are very lucky to have him on our side.
For the first time in the conference history, the next year’s location was revealed at the closing panel, and it is going to be Munich 🥨, my hometown.
See you next year in Bavaria!
This is post 31 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-01-07 23:27:22
Little over a year ago, many people (including me) compiled their lists of default apps. It’s time to review and see what’s changed since then.
No big changes here, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t found any great apps this year. For example, a new terminal emulator Ghostty or many apps I recommended in my monthly reading lists last year.
Take a look at my /uses page for a full list of apps I use often.
This is post 29 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-01-07 02:55:19
I recently changed my terminal app to Ghostty and have been surprised by its performance, simpleness, and cleanliness.
I’ve been using iTerm2 for many years, but it became bloated over years, while I haven’t needed just a handful of those features. I also tried many different terminal emulator apps before, from Kitty to Warp, from Wezterm to Hyper, and, of course, the built-in macOS terminal. I liked none of them: they don’t feel native, full of bells and whistles I rarely use, or just plain ugly and boring.
Somehow Ghostty is the opposite of all that: it looks simple and blends into macOS seamlessly, it is fast and supports everything I need, and at the same time doesn’t have any annoying features.
Here is my config if you’re interested:
# Merges titlebar with contents
macos-titlebar-style = native
macos-titlebar-style = transparent
# Old school terminal size
window-width = 80
window-height = 25
# Add some nice looking padding
window-padding-x = 8
window-padding-y = 0,2
# Don't hang around
quit-after-last-window-closed = true
# Fixes issues with Ctrl-R
term = xterm-256color
# The theme I liked the most from the `ghostty +list-themes`
theme = MaterialDarker
Nothing special here, and I could have easily lived with default options.
However, there is one more thing I’d like to mention.
Ever since I switched from Ubuntu to macOS many years ago I missed Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut to open a Terminal from anywhere.
Finally, I’ve found a solution!
It is the Shortcuts app with this absurdly simple Shortcut. You can import it from iCloud.
Shortcut to start Ghostty with a globally available keyboard combination
Note the Run with: input of the Info → Details panel. There you can set any keyboard combination to launch this automation. The only limitation is that you need to choose some unique keystroke, because hotkeys of the currently running app have precedence. I chose to use all three modifiers, just to be sure.
P.S. When I was writing this post, I learned about critical vulnerabilities in both iTerm2 and Ghostty. Whatever terminal emulator you use, stay updated!
This is post 28 of #100DaysToOffload
