Technik-O 4x12, Dear PyGui, and VPNs: ttftw 2023w19

Three things from this week.

This week I have too many browser pages open so you’re going to get three tabs from this week.

Boardsource Technik-O 4x12

First up, here’s a little image I made to help me learn to type on my 40% keeb.

I made it by messing around with this script. Then I printed it out and put it above the keeb.

And no, I am not typing this text on that keyboard right now. It’s a steep steep learning curve but it’s a fun toy. Instead of trying to drop it in as a replacement for my usual keyboard I keep both plugged in and pull out the 40% when I want to play around a bit. To be honest though, I’ve had it for a while and just finally dug up the actual keymap now.

The QMK source code for this board has a good short description and the specific default layout is in config.c.

The keyboard codes in the picture are explained in the QMK docs.

I bought this Technik-O low profile second hand which saved me a whole lot of thinking. It’s the first time I’ve used low profile “choc” keys and I like the feel of them. There’s something appealing about such a tiny cute keyboard and the logical simple grid layout that I find appealing. If I can find some pretty keycaps that aren’t blank that’s one change I might make.

Dear PyGui

Dear PyGui is a Python GUI library built on top of Dear ImGui. Neither of those things meant anything to me until just recently. Instant NGP tipped me off to Dear ImGui - it’s how that tool creates its highly responsive interface. Dear PyGui is interesting to me because it exposes this highly responsive rich UI library with a Python API.

The UI elements don’t follow the usual look and feel of other UI toolkits but it does make all the widgets like buttons, sliders, textboxes, etc. The demos look great but what I really love about the demo is that there’s a simple demo method that takes about 10 lines of code to copy/paste. The demo links to its own source code so you can see it working first and then imitate the demo to learn how to build your own UI.

I’m not sure what I actually want to use it for but I feel drawn to the built-in node editor which is reminiscent of the Blender node editor.

Unofficial Wireguard docs

Wireguard simplifies tunneling traffic and it’s very flexible but it’s just one component of modern complex networks. I’ve had some success setting up Wireguard as a VPN on a couple LANs. PiVPN helped me get started and on a simple home LAN I’d stick with it. One particularly nice thing about PiVPN is that it’s just some bash scripts so the config files that it creates continue to work fine if you move off of PiVPN and on to managing your own wireguard configs.

As I complicate my LAN life I’m finding more and more tunneling experiments I want to try. And I have to dig in to bridging, routing, and setting up custom routing rules with iptables. These unofficial docs cover a lot of details - I found the sections on usage and config reference to be helpful.

And if you are getting into your own LAN with a VPN from the outside world, here’s one last tab I have open: NirSoft’s WakeMeOnLan. Wake-on-LAN is a feature that wakes up your machine from suspend by sending a magic packet. There are some hardware restrictions around where it’s able to work so expect to spend a little time tinkering to get WoL working.

• ttftw