I have a setup for coding on the go which I have had a few people compare to gargoyles from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash¹. Gargoyles are people who are connected to their terminals all the time by wearing goggles and other tech equipment.

Which is precisely what I am doing on the overground, during my commute to and from work (one hour each). It does make me look a bit odd (if I’m being generous), but it means I spend that time constructively, and to be honest, who cares about other people on the London public transport.

I recently got a new keyboard off AliExpress, and been very happy with it! It is sold under the name DO52 Pro. The whole thing cost me only about £90 (about £40 for the keyboard, £20 for the keycaps, £20 for the switches, £5 for the hot-swap sockets and £5 for the batteries). Given it has a trackpoint, I think this is very good value for a mechanical keyboard.

It has quickly become one of my favourite keyboards, I’m using it with an nRF52840 SuperMini with ZMK firmware, OUTEMU half-height switches (full-height Cherry footprint compatible) and XVX wavy pink skyline low-profile keycaps.

Having access to a laser cutter can be very useful – while I was at the computer lab I had access to one and used it to make a keyboard suited for my fingers.

Conclusion: the natural resting position for fingers didn’t take into account the differences in reach/the awkwardness of pinky bottom/ring finger top row, especially since on my right hand the pinky and ring fingers are connected.

The firmware is available on my fork of qmk_firmware, branch kovirobi-steno-updated.

I had the fortune of snagging a cheap Stentura 200 SRT from eBay. I did end up using it for a while, even wrote my CompSci bachelors dissertation (both the software and the write-up) using it.

Later, I modified it to make it look more steam punk: put leather imitation key covers, repainted it; and I also replaced the internals with a Raspberry Pi (model 3B I think) to make it be more like a laptop and not require a serial port.