A Weirdly Productive Sunday

I woke up today at a time I never thought I’d see again: 8am. As someone who usually wakes up around 5:30-6am unable to return to sleep, it was definitely a welcome surprise. But more intriguing was the sleep chart from my Fitbit.

This is practically a template for a perfect night of sleep. Early dive into deep sleep for several short durations, and then a remainder of REM and light sleep. I don’t know what I did, because that’s something I definitely need to repeat.

In any case, I’m going to start adding Pregnenolone into my daily vitamins. Apparently it’s a base hormone for over 400 different systems in the body, and you lose about 2% per year after 30. Given that I have a Dacron patch in my heart which is made of PET plastic—a known endocrine disruptor—this is probably something I should have done 20 years ago or more. The idea is to start low at around 10mg and work up to 50, which seems to be the “accepted” dose for someone my age. It’ll probably be a few months (if ever) before I notice any differences, bet we’ll see.

I fiddled around in the morning a bit and made breakfast, took a shower, and so on. I don’t always get a chance to take everything slow like that, so I probably dragged things on a bit more than I would have otherwise. But as a result, it was 11am by the time I decided to leave to pick up some more cat litter, wet food for Luna, and get a haircut.

That out out of the way, I was in the mood to tinker. So I cleaned the inside of our stove’s vent hood. It had accumulated a substantial amount of greasy… fur? on the mesh grate over the filter, and I don’t think it was clean even before we bought the house. Now it looks practically brand new, which is a relief, because I had already looked up the part number for a new mesh.

Then it was time to try and fix the door to the garage from the house. Recently it hasn’t been latching, and we’ve resorted to blocking it with a bottle of bleach to keep the cats out of the garage when it inevitably pops open. I wish I’d examined the scratch marks on the strike plate before to took the whole door handle assembly apart and lubricated it. It turns out the house had settled on that side and the latch simply didn’t line up with the plate anymore.

This isn’t really the whole story, of course. That door had never really behaved, and only years of scraping would have worn those very light marks into the strike plate. Judging by those, the door had barely lined up even when it was latching correctly. Given that’s the case, I’d rather lower the strike plate by using a chisel, filling the old screw holes with wood glue and toothpicks, and drilling new screw holes.

Is there some reason strike plates don’t use elongated holes so you can adjust them up or down, given that houses settle, or doors sag over time? It seems like that would be the obvious and easy fix.

After that, it was time to try and fix my GMMK keyboard by finally adding o-rings. It turns out, this was a fool’s errand. I should have realized it when I noticed that the larger keys on the keyboard, such as Shift, Enter, Backspace, etc., all produce the expected “click”. All of the smaller keys have an overwhelming “clack” instead.

If this were an effect of keys bottoming out, it would affect those bigger keys equally. Instead, the smaller keys are somehow louder and even with two o-rings to prevent the noise, are not muted in the slightest. There is something about the acoustics of this keyboard—perhaps the modular switch mount points—that causes some kind of internal resonance. maybe it’s the more stable metal backplane, rather than my old keyboard’s cheap plastic.

Whatever it is, it’s distinctly not what I wanted. The switches themselves are beautiful, and I consider them a vast improvement over a Cherry MX Blue. In this keyboard at least, the click sound is lost to the clacking, and I’m not sure I want to compromise.

I saw some YouTube demonstrations of the MSI Vigor Gk50 Elite which uses Kailh Box White switches natively, and it sounds like I expected my GMMK to sound. Better yet, the keycaps actually have legends which include advanced features, rather than just the basic letters or symbols.

Before I take that drastic step to basically replace my new keyboard, I’m going to try a couple of other ideas, such as putting sound dampening material under the keys themselves. If that doesn’t work, I’m just going to write to GMMK and ask them what’s going on here, because it doesn’t seem normal to me.

Until Tomorrow