I have a CoolerMaster CK530 mechanical keyboard, which I love. It might have come with a small printed manual, but if it did, I no longer have it, and I'm failing to find one online. Here's are some things I've gleaned from experimentation. If there's a manual I've overlooked, or if you have corrections, let me know.

The Quickstart guide provides a list of key strokes, but no explanations. I've reproduced the table here, with tweaks for understandability, and added more descriptions below.

Many of these are self-explanatory. For the rest:

Using modes

fn is the "Coolermaster" key, on the bottom row key between right Windows and right Ctrl.

When holding fn, several keys might light up, depending on the current mode:

• ESC/1/2/3/4 - one of these keys flashes white to show which profile (see below) is currently in use.
• If the current mode allows you to select a color to use, then F2/F3/F4 will light up to show the currently selected color's levels of red/green/blue.
• If the current mode allows two colors to be set (foreground & background), then one of F6/F7 will flash white, to show which is currently affected. (See below.)

Pressing fn + F5 cycles through:

Modes marked "reactive" react to key-presses. Mostly this lights up a pattern around the pressed key. In the case of "snake", you can play using the arrow keys.

Foreground & background colors

Many of the modes have a foreground effect that you can change the color of. For example, in the all-one-color mode (officially called "static") you can select the color with which all keys are lit, using fn + F2/F3/F4.

Some of the modes also have a second color, the background, that you can set separately. You can see if a mode offers this by selecting the mode and holding fn. If this mode offers two settable colors, then either F6 or F7 will flash white, to show you which one you are currently setting.

Press fn + F6/F7 to choose foreground or background, then use fn + F2/F3/F4 to set it.

Custom mode

Custom (mode #6 above) lets the user assign a different color to each key.

1. First, cycle through modes using fn + F5 until you reach custom mode. It can be tricky to identify when you've reached it. Use the list of modes above to help.
2. While in custom mode, press fn + F10 to edit key colors.
3. Select a color using fn + F2/F3/F4.
4. Press all the keys you want lit in the selected color. Pressing the same key again turns it unlit.
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 for other color/key combinations.
6. Finally, save to your current profile (see below) by holding fn and pressing your current profile key (whichever of Esc/1/2/3/4 is flashing white.)

Some wrinkles:

I can't manage to set a color for the fn key itself, which always appears unlit in this mode.

The caps lock key is unlit in this mode, unless caps lock is on. Similarly, scroll lock seems to always be unlit for me in this mode, although it is lit in other modes.

When you try to assign a color to whichever one of Esc/1/2/3/4 is lit white, to indicate the active profile, then nothing visible happens, but it is working. You have to save (step 6 above). Then you can see whether you successfully assigned the color, or pressed the key one too many times and left it unlit.

While editing key colors, if you wait, without exit/saving, pressing nothing for a minute or so, then key color editing times out, cancelling all your changes since step 2.

Profiles

There are five "profiles", each of which can be used to save the current state of the keyboard.

The profiles are accessed using fn + 1/2/3/4/Esc. Esc is the "default" profile. Current keyboard settings (e.g. illumination mode and customized colors) can be saved to one of the five profiles, and then loaded back later. Are macros stored in a profile? Don't know.

The current profile is shown when you hold fn, by one of 1/2/3/4/Esc flashing white. While keeping FN pressed:

• Pressing the flashing profile key will save the keyboard state to your current profile.

• Pressing any of the other profile keys will LOAD that profile, losing the current keyboard state.

Hence, to save changes to an arbitrary profile, you need to select that profile before making the changes.

When turning the keyboard on (ie. Plugging the USB cable into a computer), the active profile will be whichever one was last active.

by Chris DeLeon (2018)

Roman Emperor Marcus Auralias' notes, traditionally titled Meditations, are a foundational text for practical Stoicism. They comprise a multitude of observations and recommendations, grouped into sections such as "Keeping thoughts tranquil", and "Cooperation, collaboration and contribution". They offer advice for living a contented life, with less regret, sorrow, anger and fear.

Several translations exist, themselves dated from through the ages. This book combines them, to synthesize a text which doesn't hew as precisely to the original as a straight translation might, but is instead intended to have the most relevance to modern ears.

Confession: It's taken me months to get through it. Partly this is because I've allowed myself to be distracted by more gaudy and immediate books along the way. Partly it's because I found the best way to read this was slowly. Practically every paragraph is worth reflecting upon, to consider how it applies to my own life, and ponder what practical, specific next steps are implied.

If I had to criticize, it would only be the superficial wrinkle that there's a lot of repetition, such as hundreds of suggestions to not fear death. Apparently the original documents were accumulated over decades of Auralias' life.

Genuinely life changing.

You can get the epub for free from the author's gumroad page.

The problem

This year I was diagnosed with achalasia. It's a rare condition in which nerve damage causes weak and poorly coordinated swallowing in the esophagus, including a reluctance of the lower esophageal sphincter, leading to the stomach, to properly relax at the appropriate moment.

This leads to difficulty swallowing, regurgitation, and a column of liquid sitting in the esophagus, which becomes distended, losing elasticity and tone. The cause of the nerve damage is unknown, and has probably been accumulating for decades. It's reasonable to assume this is mixed up in some way with various ailments of my guts over the years (celiac, eosinophilic esophagitis, chronic hiccups), but causal relationships are unknown.

A solution, of sorts

Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) is a surgical procedure intended to allow the esophagus to drain properly, avoiding further distension. Surgery happens through a tube down the throat, from where they cut into the muscle wall of the oesophagus, then tunnel down to the outside of the lower esophageal sphincter. There, they cut some of the muscle, making the sphincter less tightly clenched, so that food can pass more easily.

For me, my symptoms were a nuisance, but perfectly endurable. The main goal of the procedure was preventative - reduction in future damage to my esophagus. Plus, there's an outside chance that maybe eliminating that standing fluid might improve other matters, such as reducing irritation which maybe causes my hiccups? Long shot, but worth a try.

There's a lot of information given to the patient through the process, but these are the things that were still surprises to me.

Day 0. The procedure.

I've undergone a lot of regular endoscopic inspections or biopsies. At some point, in London's splendid Imperial College Hospital, I discovered the cheat code is to ask to do these unsedated. It's a few minutes of slightly nightmarish discomfort, to watch a burly gentleman hand-over-hand several feet of black rubber garden hose directly into your mouth. But the payoffs are that without any anesthetic, there's no need to fast, the procedure itself is simpler and safer, and best of all, recovery time is much reduced. Given a few minutes to compose yourself, you can cycle or drive yourself home right afterwards, making it a 45 minute appointment, instead of writing off most of the day.

However, going unsedated for the more substantial POEM obviously isn't an option. It requires more than the simple sedation I've experienced before, since apparently there's a phase at the end where they check you're regaining consciousness and are able to breathe for yourself before they remove the apparatus that's been breathing for you while you are paralyzed for the procedure. This is the sort of detail that is kindly elided from the regular patient briefing, which only came up because we were asking questions.

I only remember coming around sometime after that point, and my first thought, unplanned, was to test whether I could perform square and cube roots in my head. Apparently that's my brain's idea of a power-on self test. I could do small integers, like 27 -> 3, but had the presence of mind enough to see that's just relying on remembered sequences. I was able to envision the process to do the calculation for something which isn't a cube, like 28, but I failed to actually execute any iterations of it.

I said hello to a nurse sat beside me, but resisted the urge to chatter at her about my mental state. Somehow, even I could see that from her perspective, that would be like talking to drunk people. So now I'm doing it at you instead.

After a while they rolled me into my own room, and stuck a big pad over my butt. Foreshadowing! I fuzzily thought. I stayed in hospital overnight, for tests the next day. Forever grateful for Suze's visits even though I wasn't the best of company. :-)

My hiccups didn't reappear through the first few hours of my recovery, even though I spent the time propped upright in bed. This is pretty unusual - they usually return within seconds of me sitting up. But when they did return, they were pretty painful. What I call "hiccups" is partly a spasm of the esophagus itself - precisely where I'd just been cut and then clamped and sutered back together. So I asked the nurse to dial up the pain meds, at first with breezy British grit, and then with increasingly wild eyes and white knuckles as they took a while to figure out a few local administrative issues, like where the person with the keys to the drugs locker had gone. Rode out the rest of the day in style.

Day 1. Restart the line

I'd brought a bunch of things for my two day hospital stay, books and media and headphones and my own cozy pajamas to wear while garrulously socializing with staff and adjacent patients. That was all a total waste of time. I was a write off the entire time I was there, not able to muster the bandwidth even to watch TV. I saw a single episode of Schitt's Creek at one point because Suze kindly propped it up in front of me, but I couldn't manage a 2nd. I just dozed, and was wheeled to a barium x-ray, to check I wasn't leaking anywhere untoward.

At some point during this day, my digestive tract started up again. It became apparent that it had just been on strike, inactive, since the surgery. I felt it ripple distressingly back into action, along with some impressive gurgles. The big pad they'd stuck on me the day before turned out not to be vital in this instance, but I can very much understand how it often might be.

The nurse introduced me to a plastic device for measuring and exercising my ability to inhale deeply, on which I could occasionally surpass the initial expectation of 1,000 points.

My ambitions for the day were to get out of bed and take a 2 minute walk, and later in the day to tolerate my first drinks, some water and fruit juices, sufficiently to get approved to go home. Leaving hospital with some prescription, gluten free, clear liquid pain killers proved to be an impossible administrative nightmare. Nobody's fault, the system is broken. The concept of "insurance" for healthcare is inherently dysfunctional.

Day 2. Home again

At home for five days of a clear liquid diet. This means water, strained fruit juices & drinks without suspensions (i.e. no particles floating in it to make it opaque), tea or coffee without milk, clear broths. Also, slightly bizarrely, jello, since it may be eaten while solid, but at room (or body) temperature, it's a liquid. I demurred on Suze's threat to make jello shots.

Ambitions for today were to rise from the sofa for a shower, and a walk or two around the inside of the house. Scoring 1,500 points on the breathe-o-meter. Importantly, I now have it together enough to be able to watch some dumb TV.

Day 3. Outdoors.

Ambitions today were to take a walk or two around our yard. Scoring 2,000 points on the breathe-o-meter! Yay, progress. Able to concentrate enough to read.

Day 4.

Ambitions today were to take a couple of walks around the block. Scoring 3,500 points on the breathe-o-meter. I have no idea what my baseline was.

Day 5.

First full day and night without any pain killers. Ambitions for today were to take it easy and not mow the lawn (check!). Might have to get someone in to do it for us. I'd be writhing in guilt if Suze had to go out and manhandle our temperamental mower around. 4,500 on the breathe-o-meter.

Day 6.

Back to work - from home, at a desk.

Over lunch I visit the hospital for an x-ray and more tests. I was hoping to graduate to a soft food diet today, but surgeon says that, although he's happy with my progress, out of an abundance of caution he's going to keep me on clear liquids until day 9. Then a soft food diet for six weeks. C'est la vie. Back home to more apple juice. At least I'm still under instructions to take it easy, so retain my excuse for not mowing the lawn...

by Jason Shiga (2016)

I'm just discovering the works of Jason Shiga, creator of mathematically-inspired nonlinear comic-books, e.g. stories drawn on complex origami structures, that can be folded in various ways to represent either branching story-lines, or else to manage state such as 'inventory'. Construction of these more elaborate paper constructions doesn't scale, (ie. I'm not likely to ever own one) but you can try some of his other creations on the web.

This is Demon, a regular linear web-comic.

The storyline is 'math-inspired' too, in the same way that the movie Primer is - intense, absolute, ruthless, narrative exploration of logical implications, while continually, dizzyingly, escalating to the next level.

Another fabulously enjoyable science fiction adventure from qntm. Like their other novels, it does a tremendous job of exploring the implications and consequences of big science fiction concepts.

In this case, it's a story of human superheroes, whose powers derive from beings-beyond-comprehension, from the high-dimensional multiverse, the Structure, within which our paltry three-plus-one space-time is naught but an embedded decal. Their struggles rewrite the fundamental physics of our universe, to fashion it into an inescapable trap, denying humanity access to advanced sciences, and to communion with the higher levels of the Structure. Loved it.

For those like me with an epub fetish, you can buy Fine Structure in many formats, including Amazon links, EPUBs, or free-to-read online, at the author's site.

by qntm, 2021.

It took me a few pages to shift gears to match the provocatively casual style, but once I did, it quickly became an engrossing and endearing read. The book collects a series of tiny but grand adventures, each riffing on one of the titular Ed's fabulous new inventions or discoveries. Together these form an arc which burns through combinations of high-concept SF ideas at an unseemly rate.

It reminded me of what I've fondly said about 200AD (the galaxy's greatest comic), that somehow the superficiality of the medium allows writers to experiment more wildly with form and content, throwing up a torrent of creativity which, while sometimes uneven, generates moments of sheer brilliance. I thought being a comic was an essential part of that formula. But Ed proves me wrong by achieving the same velocity of verve and vigor, rendered in prose. A delight.

The Epilogue reminds me gleefully of this Stack Overflow World-building answer I gave a few months ago.

For those like me with an epub fetish, you can buy Ed in many formats, including Amazon links, EPUBs, or free-to-read online, at the author's site.

I bought all four of qntm's books when I discovered the fantastic There is no Antimemetics Division. I didn't really expect to like all of them, sight unseen, but was delighted to support an emerging author who had contributed to the genius of SCP. But then the books that arrived turned out to be bloody brilliant.

This one tells a tale in which magic was discovered to be real in the 1970s, becoming a new, arcane branch of physics. From there, it piles on the twists and raises the stakes at an enthralling and dizzying rate, demanding the reader to keep up through many exciting layered reveals and escalating changes of perspective. Absolutely smashing.

Like Antimemetics, it scores points with me for including some female heroes, who surmount challenges through some striking strengths of character & expertise, rather than simply being the best at applied violence.

For those like me with an epub fetish, you can buy Ra in many formats, including Amazon links, EPUBs, or free-to-read online, at the author's site.

For my own calibration, approximate current energy use for a single transaction in various cryptocurrencies, compared with using Visa:

Sources

• I got most crypto energy use from this roundup.
• For Visa, I used the figures from this breakdown, and this one, which agrees.
• For Bitcoin, I took a rounded figure roughly between those quoted on the above two sources (710kWh and 1,123kWh). A single figure precision is probably most appropriate anyhow. Update: The digiconomist article above is updated as the Bitcoin energy use increases over time with proof difficulty, and it's now at almost double the figure I quoted above, at 1,800 kWh/txn.
• For Chia, I did my own hacky calculation. Chia Power estimates 6MW in total is used by the Chia network, at current size of 4EiB. Meanwhile, Chia Explorer shows a hard-to-read graph which I'm eyeballing to get a rough average of 3,000 transactions per hour. 6 Megawatts divided by 3k per hour gives an energy use per transaction of 2kW.
• For Nano, I'm using commonly-cited figures in Reddit posts (yuk), but the math seems to hold up as far as I can see.
• For equivalent household energy uses, I used this and this.

Notable standout here is NANO, which actually has an order of magnitude lower energy use than Visa. There are other low-energy use cryptocurrencies in this bracket, such as IOTA and HBAR. They face some criticism from Bitcoin maximalists that reducing energy use undermines the value proposition, or reduces security. But to my layman's ears, these arguments don't hold water. Certainly communities like NANO seem much more open to honest discussion of NANO's shortfalls than most crypto communities, which is a healthy sign, and it makes me inclined to trust their counter-assertions that NANO's security is really OK.

Something's not quite right here though. The Chia whitepaper estimates 10,000 times better energy efficiency than Bitcoin, by my figures above only show 1,000.

They probably know how to calculate this better than I do. So perhaps my figure for Chia is high? I understand the value per transaction will come down as Chia starts handling more transactions, which seems reasonable. Perhaps the white paper refers to that future hypothetical efficiency?

On the other hand, many of the other cryptocurrencies listed above will become more efficient in the future too (e.g. Bitcoin is in the process of deploying its lightning network, which will reduce per transaction energy use.) So I think it's fair to leave the above figures as they are, as a snapshot of current reality.

For the sort of weirdos who still host their own music files, but aren't preciously audiophile about it. Aaaaand also I'm wording this with the assumption you're a Linux, command-line and Python nerd.

Sometimes it's a video which is explicitly Creative Commons. Other times, it's a friend's otherwise unpublished non-commercial thing. Or maybe it's a massive commercial product from a famously litigious corporate behemoth, but you've already bought the soundtrack and you just really really wish you had a version which had the exact same sound effects or dialog or arrangement that you or your child has grown to love from obsessive movie re-watches.

I've got ya.

One-off setup:

Install ffmpeg, a venerable open-source command-line video/audio conversion tool.

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Next, install pipx, a tool to install commmand-line tools that are distributed as Python packages:

python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Finally, use pipx to install the youtube-dl, an oft-sued but never vanquished tool to download YouTube videos. (We're using the Python package because the apt package is too old to work):

pipx install youtube-dl

Goal fulfillment

Here, download your precious audio:

youtube-dl -x --audio-format=best URL

Where:

• URL is the encoded version of the video URL (i.e. like "youtu.be/XXX"), obtained by hitting the 'share' button on the YouTube page.
• -x requests just the audio part, with no video.
• While --audio-format=best is ostensibly the default setting, meaning YouTube decides which format to send, using -x seems to fail if we don't specify this explicitly. Alternatively, you can explicitly request "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or "wav". As I understand it, YouTube will only send the requested format if the uploader provided it. If they didn't then we get whatever YouTube provides and then convert it locally using ffmpeg. So you sometimes won't be getting the benefit of those lossless formats.

But mp3 works well enough for my needs.

Alternatively, for playlists:

youtube-dl -x --audio-format=best --yes-playlist -i URL

Where:

• --yes-playlist / --no-playlist chooses which to download if the URL you provide is both a playlist and a video.
• -i ignores errors, so one bad track in the playlist doesn't stop the whole thing.

My previous inferior way

This method is worse because it downloads the whole video file before extracting audio locally, and the download gets throttled by YouTube in some way, which of late is very slow indeed, i.e. substantially slower than watching the video.

Download the video from YouTube:

youtube-dl URL

This results in a webm file. I have no idea what that is, and am relieved to discover that converting it into an mp3 requires just:

ffmpeg -i MyVideoFile -vn MyAudioFile.mp3

Where -vn disables video in the output.

by Steven King, 2011

Prompted by a conversation at work about favorite time travel stories, I snagged this from the library.

English school teacher Jake is roped into a dying man's plot to exploit a mechanism of travelling back to 1958, from which, with many complications, he waits out the intervening few years in order to prevent JFK's assassination.

I found it a page turner, certainly. But nonetheless I was slightly disappointed, perhaps because of my reverence for such a successful author, who I haven't actually read since my teens. Expectations of mastery clashed with what, for me, felt like lowest-common-denominator style.

King knows exactly what he intends - to use time travel as a hook on which to hang a human tale of drama, aspiration and loss. He has no interest in my personal predilections, such as messing with the logical conundrums of his chosen time-travel mechanic, and he declares this straightforwardly. When the main character asks "But what if I end up killing my own Grandfather?", his mentor shoots him a look of incomprehension, replying "Why in hell would you want to do a thing like that?" Subject closed, and fair enough.