Waylon Walker

I’ve been fighting not having a proper pick/hook in my toolbox for a long time. This fathers day weekend my son pulled out an old box of rc plane supplies from my days trying to build planes like flight test. Inside there was a pack of piano wire.

Rules-8

Need a tool make a tool.

He had pulled this out while I had the soldering iron hot plucking away at a keeb build that I’ve had sitting idle on the workbench for a long time. The dream of having several identical working builds at the same time is very close to fruition, I just need some more work on the clone.

Posts tagged: keeb

I was struggling to pull wires through traces of 3d prints. You see I was once a mechanical engineer, not electrical, so 3d modeling is my hammer that I can turn into a tool for any solution, and I’ve just not put the time into learning pcb design. Someday maybe. I always just take some scrap copper make a little look and twist it around until I can get it close enough to pull with some tweezers.

As …

Today I got sick of my go to online keyboard tester [1] not supporting holds and fighting an issue with holds on one of my boards, I vibed out a replacement. I did a bit of work with it to get it how I wanted. gpt5.4 still likes to make lots of cards and build readable sites with a reasonable width for reading, not full page apps.

keyboard tester A keyboard tester that works for me, how I like it keys.waylonwalker.com [2]

The main feature is to be able to see when alt+key or shift+key is pressed, the keyboard tester was not able to do this.

Here is a video of me using it.

I tend to use keyboard tester a lot as I build a lot of weird keyboards so I suspect this one to get a lot of use and may grow over time, but for now it works good enough for me.

I can already think of a whole list of features like supporting keycodes for js, pygame, zmk, qmk. But for now I’m just building what I need and not overcomplicating it.

References: [1]: https://www.keyboardtester.com/ [2]: https:…

Recent Arch linux vulnerabilities are a good reminder of a few things.

• AUR is not the official package repo

• The AUR is community driven

• AUR packages are not always safe

The first thing I’m doing to stop myself from running any aur updates automatically is removing any arch helper.

sudo pacman -Rns yay paru paru-bin Currently the reported vulnerabilities are supply chain attacks limited to the aur, keep your arch system up do date, BUT do not update packages from the AUR right now. In fact I’m auditing my aur usage and removing anything I have not used in awhile.

Here is a nice script I’m using to walk through my packages and get rid of things I installed and probably don’t need anymore.

pacman -Qemq | fzf -m –preview ' echo " package " pacman -Qi {} 2>/dev/null echo echo " required by " pacman -Qi {} 2>/dev/null | grep "Required By" ' | xargs -r -o sudo pacman -Rns Supply chain attacks are getting real scary in 2026, maybe we should listen to Ginger Bil…

Agentic coding has this nice trick of letting you bang out a project in an afternoon, something complex that would have take some real time to implement, not just some rounding error that can slip right in between the jira board. Then it will be perpetually never done. There will always be bugs and thorns rear their head up, new features no one ever thought of, and now no one really has to think much about beyond having the idea.

This part of software engineering has always been here, its the root of the never complete 200 side projects. But now it feels like fuel has been poured on the fire, like we can get more done than ever. But we are tricking ourselves, these projects will never be “done”. There’s always more to add. Without feeling any of the pain of implementing it yourself, why not just keep adding new features forever. This is the mentality that is crushing me right now.

It pulls at your token anxiety like crazy. You look at the usage board and you are almost cooked so y…

EDC

I try to keep a pretty light every day carry, but it never works out, keyfobs and headphone cases end up causing more bulk than I’d like, but My EDC is no where near the bulk I had as a kid with my cargo pants decked out with everything I could possibly need.

I hold no attachment to anything in my EDC. Nothing on my person has sentimental value. Anything I carry can be lost, stolen, or destroyed at any point in time. I pick things of sufficient usable, utilitarian, quality sufficient to work. No extra fluff.

---

• Google Pixel 6

• Ridge Wallet

• Olight Perun - Since April 2022

• Civivi Qubit - Since March 2024 after my last one was donated to the Indianapolis Stadium

• OpenFit Shokz

---

Rules

• lightweight

• replacable

• no emotional attachments

• utilitarian

• everything serves a purpose

My kit

Photo taken March 2023

Phone

Google Pixel 6

I will not get finance a new phone for the foreseeable future again. The last time I feel like I got a phone that felt lik…