Recently I’ve commuted back and forth to a city in the south of Germany to attend a conference for a day. The night I ended up staying at family that lived closer there but on my way back by train I’ve quickly seen that I forgot my laptop there.

This post will go through problems that made me discover in my backup system which I’ve already outlined in the first backup post.

Forgetting the Laptop somewhere is obviously not too tragic, because I knew it would only be for a few days, but not having access to it illustrated how my backups work the same as if the laptop got stolen or something else would’ve happened to it.

Yesterday I’ve had a discussion with my partner about organisation. And being at the intersection of nerd and German I got the need during it to reorganise my paperless-xng to make documents more accessible and sort them more reasonably.

Having <100 documents in there myself, as I haven’t done anything else than being in school / uni normally, I could not on my own find good patterns of what would help very well in sorting them. So came reasonably to the resolution that there are many many people that will have to sort through thousands of documents as a sole person or maybe even tens of thousands in the case of a business, they’ve surely come up with something and indeed they did.

There were some efforts I’ve done the last years that have repaid multiple times by now, want to mention them here individually and talk some sentences about them.

Order is as follows:

1. vim
2. tiling window managers
3. split keyboards
4. keyboard layouts
5. declarative operating systems (nixos)

One last comment before starting, the order is taken from the order in which I stumbeled upon them.

preamble

The last few weeks I’ve had to do a lot of learning for mathematics, that means just solving and trying to understand tasks around six hours day (afterwards the brain stops working). But that has brought me to an issue of the notes I’ve taken by hand. So time has come to rethink another part of my workflow.

Step One – Realisation

Having typed all my life on qwerty or qwertz I got used to it. I got into practising typing to gain speed and accuracy, towards the end I averaged around 90 words per minute (wpm) and had a accuracy of >95%.

But at some point I got fed up with it, why did I still use the normal layout? That has no reason for existing any more and that after I have switched to a tiling-window-manager, vim and countless other things, just to get the last seconds off the clock and have the computer do whatever I want it to do as fast as possible.

The Dactyl Experience

Preface

During the last days and weeks I’ve spend some of my time soldering, configuring and figuring about a dactyl keyboard. Now it is done and I can now type much more ergonimic and better than I could before, in the following I will talk about the process and maybe you can get something out of it :).

About the setup

The goal of the workflow is to be ever evolving to be more efficient and useful. The main application of it is to write LaTeX documents, manage references, figures, etc. So that one does not need to think about it anymore but has a good experience using it and the optimal output.