See and Download my Current Layout Here

Back at the start of the year, I picked up an Ergodox EZ keyboard; in an effort to save my wrists from the terrors of RSI. The keyboard, is actually quite alien compared to most standard keyboards, with something of a split QWERTY layout, it still bugs a lot of people when they see the keyboard.

Needless to say, it’s taken me quite some time, in fact, I still am adapting to using this keyboard. It doesn’t help even more that I’m using a regular shaped keyboard at work everyday, either.

I still make a lot of typo errors, and I’ll stumble every now and then based on games asking me to press certain non-alphanumeric keys (Ctrl, Shift, etc.) and I sorely miss the arrow keys being in that familiar up/down/left/right shape on a regular keyboard. Instead, it’s an almost Vi-esque left/right/up/down setup. Still, I’ve persisted, and my typing speed almost matches the original keyboard layout speeds I had.

Where I really started to fall in love with the ErgoDox EZ though, is the eventually gentle tweaking I’ve been doing over time to the default key layout that the keyboard shipped with. It’s really become my own keyboard, and it’s been a journey that I’ve found myself looking at other lovely keyboards and told myself “No, I’m going to tough it out with the ErgoDox, because it’s unique, it’s mine.”

Without further ado though, here’s the layout – it’s split over two layers, with a toggle button in the bottom right to switch between layers. I can add a couple more layers on top (0 – 3 layers), but I’m trying to keep it to a minimum.

LAYER 0

LAYER 1

And as per the link at the top of this post, you can see and download my Layout Here. It’s dubbed version 3.4 — if you search the layouts on the configuration site for “jaytwitch” it’ll interestingly bring up a few of my historical layouts too 🙂

So, it’s been quite a while! Today I’d like to make a fairly quick post about my most recent toy, and the impact it’s actually had (within 24 hours – that’s pretty impressive!) on the way I’m working and doing eLeague.gg stuff!

Behold, my newest gadget (toy) – the Gigabyte P57X-1070-603S:

It’s a pretty big 17″ Laptop, with the new GeForce 10 series graphics cards built into it (a Geforce GTX 1070 to be exact). It’s a device of many firsts for me:

• My first gaming dedicated laptop
• My first $2500+ laptop
• My first 17″ laptop
• My first attempt at rolling everything I do into a single machine, realistically

It’s the fourth point that I’m going to be rambling on about today. Prior to owning this laptop, I was always a fan of the MacBook Air – using it in excess of 8 hours a day, I was essentially surgically grafted to it. It let me move around and still keep up coding.

The way I worked revolved around a core desktop setup (5 monitors, nice keyboard, etc) and I would float around coding on my laptop during the day. But unfortunately, I noticed something:

1. I would splurge on my desktop, and it was great, but…
2. I spent more time on my laptop than at my desktop at home
3. I couldn’t do everything on my laptop (like photoshop, gaming, etc)
4. At eLeague.gg events I ended up bringing both desktop & laptop

So I figured that I would really need something that could let me roll everything into one. How fortunate it was for me then, that NVIDIA rolled out its 10 series GPU into laptops that essentially, had all the clout of modest desktop gaming PCs with minimal compromise. Hence, I’m now a primary laptop user, back in the Windows ecosystem.

The benefits are pretty amazing so far, and I haven’t even had an opportunity to attend a LAN yet:

• My laptop replaces my current primary machine at work, and is far and away the most powerful machine in the office.
• At eLeague.gg I can now focus on immediately using my laptop to begin management and deployment of the event’s technical features without having to wait for the team to roll out network and power functionality. More time for management, less time in labour means I can focus on refining the event for both our (growing number of!) attendees, and sponsorship commitments.

In the spirit of brevity, I’ll go over how things are changing in our development and workflow, especially on a code level in another post, for now – this laptop appeared at a time of drastic change in how things work for us here at eLeague.gg