As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used.
Continue reading “No Keyboard for Old Men”New WordPress Editor
WordPress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the WordPress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes.
Continue reading “New WordPress Editor”Traveling Takes Practice
At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies.
Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In…
During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years.
I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free.
Continue reading “Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In…”
New Blog
Yesterday I switched over from using WordPress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official WordPress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using WordPress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual WordPress blogging platform it claims to deal with.
WordPress is an open-source blogging platform, and is very widely used. Wonderful plug-ins are created to increase its functionality and customizability, and I have enjoyed dealing with it. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a company run by one of the people who created the WordPress platform in the first place, but has various hosting options built in. For people who just want to get things going and keep things simple, that’s fine. I still run OHAC on WordPress.com, and things are going fine. But, I wanted more ability to be in control of my personal blog, and not have to worry about something going wrong that I didn’t have control over.
This is in large part influenced by the post I have written which will be published this upcoming week, the first part in a long series about why I use Linux. As you will understand once you read it, one main part of using Linux is freedom to customize the software you’re using, as well as software being actually free. WordPress.com provides neither of these; WordPress as a platform allows both. So, I switched things over, created a simplified dark template, and I’m loving it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it a bit as well.
Spongebob is Back
I recently discovered that Spongebob Squarepants is available on Amazon Prime Video. Since I am still a subscriber to said service, I enjoyed a fun weekend night watching the first couple of seasons. I’ve always had such positive nostalgia for the show, in large part due to how quotable it is. Little did I realize that nearly every line in the show is quotable, and how good each episode was in the early seasons. Even today, they have a certain innocent charm to them, yet the jokes still have enough depth to be legitimately funny now.
Continue reading “Spongebob is Back”
Beating the Schedule
Now that I’ve gotten into my full-time job, and I’m familiar with the area, a certain novelty that comes with a new situation has worn off. I am not finding brand new things all the time anymore. I know where I’m getting my groceries from, I know what I’m having for lunch each day, and generally know what I’m having for dinner. To a certain extent, I have fallen into a fairly predictable schedule on a weekly basis. Thursdays I have concert band rehearsal. Sunday or Monday I record Comical Start with Grant, and edit it that night. At some point each week, I sit down and try to write a sufficient post for this blog. Every so often a surprise phone call, or an episode of OHAC comes up, which I get to work in with everything else. But overall, I’ve developed a schedule.
Continue reading “Beating the Schedule”
Notes On Future Mathematics Posts
Updated November 23, 2022
I’m going back through my posts and recategorizing them, and noticed this one. My plan for having a secondary spot for math posts didn’t take off after I moved my blog to WordPress properly, and discovered the excellent \KaTeX plugin for rendering math.
Original Post
I recently remembered my company, AoPS supports blog creation for their users. In particular, it has the full functionality I’m used to on their message board. In particular, they have native 
Here is my first post, a rewrite of Introduction to Sets. This shows how much more functionality there is, such as the option for “discovery based” definitions and problems, by using the native option to “hide” text for users to click on. There is also support for python code, which I am excited to play around with.
Moving forward, I’ll be porting the current math-related posts of significance to that blog. Any future posts will have an introduction on this blog, so you know what’s going on, and then a link to the AoPS blog post.