Ordoviz

In case you somehow missed it, Pale Court is a Hollow Knight mod that adds several well-made boss fights. It released a month ago, but the Linux and macOS versions had problems. This was fixed with the new 1.0.1.0 release.

Demonstrating how easy it is to get hacked

Announcement: https://mastodon.art/@eishiya/108151431771594810

I have aphantasia but managed to follow the moves in the video and notice the pin.

Aphantasia is the inability to create mental images in one's mind. You can check for yourself if you have aphantasia by imaging a ball on a table.

Do you have aphantasia? Can you play blind chess?

I use RSS feeds and mpv to watch YouTube without visiting youtube.com. This post shows how you can configure mpv to use yt-dlp instead of the abandoned youtube-dl.

https://kakoune.org/

You only need high-school knowledge to follow his lectures!

I use a German keyboard but switched to the QWERTY layout to input programming symbols more easily. I still want to be able to type German umlauts, though. My keyboard also has a alt gr key that I want to put to use. So I created the file ~/.xkb/symbols/us-custom with the following contents:

default partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "basic" {
	// Umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and €
	include "us(de_se_fi)"

	name[Group1] = "US layout plus some Unicode symbols using altgr combinations";
	// <AC06> means: middle row, 6th key on the board from the left

	// Unicode arrows (←, ↓, ↑, →)
	key <AC06> { [ h, H, U2190 ] };
	key <AC07> { [ j, J, U2193 ] };
	key <AC08> { [ k, K, U2191 ] };
	key <AC09> { [ l, L, U2192 ] };

	// Typographic punctuation
	key <AE11> { [      minus, underscore,   endash,       emdash ] };
	key <AB09> { [     period,    greater, ellipsis               ] };
	key <AB10> { [      slash,   question, division, questiondown ] };
	key <AE08> { [          8,   asterisk,        8,     multiply ] };
	key <AC11> { [ apostrophe,   quotedbl, rightsinglequotemark   ] };

	// Quotes
	key <AB02> { [ x, X,       guillemotright,            0x100203a ] };
	key <AB03> { [ c, C,        guillemotleft,            0x1002039 ] };
	key <AB04> { [ v, V,   doublelowquotemark,   singlelowquotemark ] };
	key <AB05> { [ b, B,  leftdoublequotemark,  leftsinglequotemark ] };
	key <AB06> { [ n, N, rightdoublequotemark, rightsinglequotemark ] };
};

In line 4 I included the de_se_fi section of /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us. This has the same effect as putting the following into my custom layout:

include "us(basic)"
include "eurosign(e)"

key <AC01> {[ a,          A,          adiaeresis, Adiaeresis ]};
key <AD09> {[ o,          O,          odiaeresis, Odiaeresis ]};
key <AC02> {[ s,          S,          ssharp,     U1E9E      ]};
key <AD07> {[ u,          U,          udiaeresis, Udiaeresis ]};
key <AD10> {[ p,          P,          aring,      Aring      ]};

include "level3(ralt_switch)"

Including level3(ralt_switch) allows me to access the third layer by holding down the right alt key. This is how you access the other layers:

• 1: hold down nothing
• 2: hold Shift
• 4: hold Shift+alt

With the key keyword you can remap a key. In the angle brackets you specify the position of the key on the keyboard. The second letter specifies the row:

• B: bottom row
• C: middle row
• D: top row
• E: number row

The next two digits specify the position on the row starting with 01 from the left.

The next bit of syntax is self-explanatory:

{[ layer1, layer2, layer3, layer4 ]};

You can leave out layer4 to map it to nothing.

You then should be able to select your custom layout. If you use Sway, add the following to the config file.

input * xkb_layout "us-custom"

Alternatively, export the environment variable XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=us-custom.

See also: XKB on ArchWiki

This video addresses:

• Are tiny keyboards useful?
• What about special characters in languages other than English?
• How do you access numbers and function keys on a 40% keyboard?
• Comparison of sound intensity of different switches