Latest

My job is typing. It doesn't matter if it's sentences or code. I type. A lot.

I don't understand people spending the majority of their time in front of a desk and not upgrading to a nicer keyboard. There are three essentials in my eyes: a good chair, a good mouse, and a good keyboard.

I understand not everyone wants to spend a couple hundred eurodollars to get something like the Mode Envoy (it is a beautiful keyboard, though).

But nowadays, you have budget-friendly brands making great keyboards at great prices. People are spoiled. Cue old me: you don't know how good you have it!

Which brings me to the EpoMaker RT82. It costs around $90, and for $90 you get a wireless 75% mechanical keyboard, with a cute screen, custom switches, and a retro design. And I've been using it at the office for the past couple of weeks.

EpoMaker sent me the keyboard in exchange for my thoughts. No money changed hands, and I do not take money for this blog anyway.

Using it at the office is only possible because the version I picked came with Sea Salt Silent switches. They are, in fact, silent. One other person has a mechanical keyboard in my office, and the poor guy had to add o-rings to his keycaps, because his keyboard was (and still is) too loud. I wouldn't wish o-rings upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the Sea Salt Silent switches are good. They are linear and make a barely audible thock sound, which is honestly even less audible than the cheap AF membrane keyboards provided to us by the IT department. Fuck these keyboards.

Thankfully, the Sea Salt Silent switches also feel smooth and are soft to press. I don't like them as much as my Gateron Oil King switches, but the Oil King switches are both much louder and much more expensive. Also, the keyboard has a hot-swappable PCB, so I could change them to anything else if I wanted to.

Oh, also, it has RGB backlights, but I don't have see-through keycaps, so it is mostly for flavour. Also, I obviously don't work at the office at night, so it doesn't do a lot for me. Besides that, design-wise, this keyboard looks good enough. I don't particularly care about retro design in general, but the RT82 is charming.

And while it has a plastic case and thus feels cheaper than my Envoy, it is also a fraction of the price. And built like a tank. I dropped it once, and while the keycaps flew in every direction, besides a smudge, no damage was done.

The keyboard has three connection modes: cable, Bluetooth, and 2.4 GHz via a provided dongle, which you can easily store in the keyboard.

I use it with the dongle and get a workweek (40 hours) of battery out of it before I need to charge it. (This is with RGB off, but the screen on. And I turn it off in the evening.) When I charge it, I just connect the cable to a charger and keep typing via the dongle.

Thanks to VIA, you can configure the keyboard via the browser. Thank Zeus for that. This means this keyboard is configurable through Linux and I don't need to rely on some Windows software to configure settings. But you need a second tool to load GIFs onto the little screen. I tried VIA on Linux and swapped the Win key with the left Alt key. That was the only setting I changed.

Here is my issue with the screen, though. It's cute, but I don't know what to do with it. I have it display the time, but the more I use the keyboard, the more it desyncs (there is a 10-minute desync at this point, and I haven't bothered fixing it yet). It shows the battery, and it shows me if Caps Lock is enabled. Which is surprisingly helpful and explains why I keep mistyping my login password.

I don't know what else I am supposed to do with the screen, but people love talking about it. It's like the number one thing people ask. All the freaking time. If you don't like talking to people, I suggest you remove it since it's magnetic and uses pins to connect with the keyboard.

My Mode Envoy is as much a designer object as it is a keyboard. The RT82 is much more of a utility that makes typing in the office enjoyable. Yes, the screen is a little useless, and yes, so is the RGB with the stock keycaps, but the typing experience is great, and that is what counts the most in a keyboard, anyway.

I've been using mechanical keyboards for close to 20 years now, and I think I'd go insane without the EpoMaker in the office.

My Envoy costs 5x more. Is it 5x better? Probably not. I still prefer my Oil King switches, but if you want a quiet office keyboard for around $90, I'd recommend the RT82 with Sea Salt Silent switches.

I turn 35 today, which feels like an age where I should probably have some things figured out.

Not everything. That would be ridiculous. Don't be ridiculous. But maybe a few things.

So I spent an unreasonable amount of time recently trying to figure out what I believe in. Not necessarily politically, or in the "which dead philosopher should I make my entire personality" sense (looks at his Marcus Aurelius and Buddha tattoos). More basic than that.

What do I think makes a good life? Turns out the answer is mostly:

Having a good life.

Wow. Very helpful. Thanks, Kevin!

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have spent quite a lot of my thirties figuring out what that means by accident.

Take work.

I have been at the same company for 11 years now. Which sounds horrible when I write it down. Not because the company is horrible, but because 11 years at the same place sounds like I should have one of those little glass cubes on my desk thanking me for my service.

I don't. (I did get 500€ after 10 years, though. Before taxes, which ate half. So thanks, I guess.)

And I have changed what I do every two or three years anyway, so maybe that is the trick. The place stayed the same. The work didn't.

More importantly, the job gives me something I only really started appreciating once I thought about it. It pays enough. It is interesting enough. I work from home three days a week. And when I close the laptop, there is still some brain left.

That last bit might be worth more than another 1000€ a month.

Actually, probably much more. If somebody offered me another 5000€ every month but wanted ten more hours of my week in exchange, I genuinely don't know what I would do with the money.

What would I buy? I already buy too much shit.

I can travel. I can buy books. I can buy a stupidly expensive pair of headphones because for three months I suddenly decide headphones are the most interesting objects ever invented (heh!). There is a mortgage, and it gets paid. There is food in the fridge. I can save some money. I can invest some money.

So what am I working ten more hours for? To watch big number go big?

I think this is one of the things I believe now but did not really understand ten years ago: "more" needs a reason.

Same with health.

I am apparently very disciplined about some things and completely unwilling to give up the things I enjoy.

I exercise. I track my food. I like sleeping. I barely drink. None of this feels particularly sacrificial because, conveniently, I enjoy most of it.

But if you tell me I can die at 90 but have to refuse pizza for the next 55 years, or die at 85 (my predicted lifespan) while continuing to eat pizza, I am picking pizza. Unless you put pineapple on it. Then I'll die at 35.

I would also take an immortality pill tomorrow if somebody made one, so this is not me having some romantic idea that death gives life meaning. Fuck that. Death seems like a pretty major design flaw. Somebody should fix it. I just don't think living longer is useful if I spend the extra time making my life worse.

Somewhere around here I think "optimization" breaks.

Optimizing things is not bad. I like it. Obviously! overkill exists because I enjoy spending six hours solving problems nobody else knew they had. But you can optimize one part so hard that you make the whole thing worse.

I did that with this website, actually. For about three years, overkill was a company. There were invoices and taxes and revenue and all the boring things that make something officially Serious Business™.

And suddenly I had to care much more about traffic. What gets clicks? What do I need to publish? Should I write about this thing because I am interested in it, or should I write about that other thing because people are searching for it? Reddit really likes Steam sales posts. A lot of clicks, a lot of ad money. I fucking hate them.

Turns out I do not enjoy thinking like that very much.

So I killed the company. Now overkill makes no money. I have no real idea how many people read it. I have no clue how many email subscribers I have, but I know they cost me 30€ a month. And I pay for it myself.

This sounds like a spectacular business failure because it is. I don't give a shit. It made the website better for me. I write what I want again.

There is probably something irresponsible about spending your free time writing thousands of words for an audience you cannot quantify and then paying the server bill for the privilege, but I like doing it. That seems like enough of a reason. (I also still feel happy feelings every time I get an email from one of you.) Also, that is, quite literally, what hobbies are.

Same with my journal. Nobody except me will ever read it. I have thousands of photos sitting in Immich. Nobody except me will ever see them. I started putting photos and little observations into an orange notebook recently. Nobody except me will ever leaf through it.

I think I used to have a stronger sense that things should eventually become something. A hobby becomes a skill. A skill becomes expertise. Expertise becomes a publication. A publication becomes a company. A company grows.

And then what?

There is always another rung on that particular ladder, which is useful if you actually want to keep climbing.

Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I want to take photographs because taking photographs is fun. Sometimes I want to read a book because reading it is fun. Sometimes I want to spend a month learning far too much about coffee grinders and then never think about burr geometry again. (I am looking for a grinder for filter coffee, I'll take any recommendations.)

I am also increasingly okay with abandoning things.

If somebody depends on me finishing something, that obviously changes things. But if I start a project because I am curious, spend three months on it, learn everything I wanted to learn, and then stop caring before I reach whatever arbitrary finish line I invented at the beginning...

Okay? What exactly would finishing achieve? I got what I wanted out of it. Kthxbye.

Maybe that's the kind of change I need. My interests shift. I follow them. The rest can stay pretty fucking stable.

I could live in the same house until I rot if it is the right house. I have been with the same person for a long time. I have been at the same company for 11 years.

Same house, new obsession. Same partner, new shared interest. Same job, new role.

And that is probably also why trying to fit everything I care about into every day makes no sense.

My partner. Friends. Family. Reading. Writing. Games. Going to the gym. Learning random shit. Time alone. Time where nothing is happening.

I want all of that in my life. But I don't need all of it today.

This is where I think I have accidentally found the most useful sentence in this whole exercise: A day is short. A life is long.

I don't need to write today. I don't need to go to the gym today. I can spend an entire Saturday playing Pokémon and drinking coffee and eating pains au chocolat (I love pains au chocolat) and call it a successful Saturday because I enjoyed Saturday.

It only becomes an issue when "not today" becomes "not this year."

If I haven't written anything in six months even though I still claim writing is important to me, maybe something changed. Maybe I don't care about writing anymore. Fine.

Or maybe something else ate all the time that used to belong to it.

A bad Tuesday does not matter. A weird month probably doesn't matter either.

And I think that is the closest thing I currently have to an answer to what makes a good life.

Just one where, if I zoom out far enough, the whole thing still looks good.

I don't particularly care if it amounts to anything beyond that, either. I have never understood the obsession with leaving a legacy. If people remember me in 100 years, cool. If they don't, I will be dead and therefore have no shits to give.

I want to live for as long as possible. I would take the immortality pill from earlier immediately. I just don't need to be remembered for as long as possible.

Maybe that is all it is.

Every now and then, zoom out a little.

Does work still leave enough of me for everything else? Am I still curious? Has something I used to enjoy turned into maintenance? Is this still a good life?

Right now, yeah. Pretty fucking good, actually.

I am 35.

I think I have figured out a few things.

Happy birthday to me!