One month with ZSA's Navigator

About a month ago I got my ZSA Navigator, and have been using it every work day since, so I thought I would leave some semi-structured thoughts at this point.

First and foremost I should say: It took me at least two and a half weeks of puttering around before I was remotely happy. There’s a few things that I did right, and a few things that aren’t yet supported which would have sped that up, but it’s not a “wow, you’re instantly capable” kind of addition. However, if you’re the kind of person who bought a Voyager, I suspect you already are OK with spending some time figuring things out.

Using a Trackball

I’ve long been trackball curious, but I’ve never made the switch. I am incredibly happy with Apple’s touchpads and their acceleration curves, but I have never gotten an amazing setup with my trackpad and my Voyager. Lots of motion, awkward hand positioning from having the trackpad between my Voyager halves. its’ particurly an issue when it comes to having more tent on the Voyager -- it starts to feel like the trackpad is in a hole.

Some people have really nice clever solutions here, and honestly I may look more into them, but I really thought the trackball looked good.

Using the Voyager has shown me that there’s a bit of a mixed bag here. On the one hand, the the ball is quite nice. Haptically I really like it, and I like the easier access and fixed position relative to a Voyager half.

However, dialing in sensitivity has been a journey: If the sensitivity is too low, it feels like it takes forever to get your cursor anywhere, but if you set it too high, a trackball is very sensitive to your hand’s natural motion and hitting a target becomes a challenges of its own! At my preferred setting right now, things feel fine, yet I do feel like it’s still a bit too much jumpiness (there’s an aspect which feels almost like there’s too coarse a motion quantum too, but it’s purely a feeling)

Another interesting problem is momentum. I think Apple’s momentum based scrolling is remarkable. I had hoped that I would have physical momentum on my side with the trackball, but it turns out that the ball isn’t heavy enough or there’s too much friction, and so the ball doesn’t really show enough momentum compared to what I’m used to.

A Trackball With a Mouse For keys

Maybe I don’t brain good, but it’s been a month now, and I still am regularly getting mode confusion and problems. I’ve managed to fix quite a bit of the worst of it by banishing some of the most galling buttons to never-never-land, but it’s far from perfect.

Let me give you an example: The default mouse layout puts scroll lock on T -- but given the default dwell time, I kept hitting CMD-T while the mouse layer was active, setting scroll lock and then not actually opening a new tab like intended. So shorten the dwell time right? Except, then, a moment’s hesitation when trying to do a click with f means you’re filling a channel with mistaken f strokes. Hilariously frustrating when you’re in a shared doc with colleagues as they watch you drop f in random paragraphs.

So I turned off auto deactivate. Now I need to click to deactivate. But this still means that if I jostle the ball or move my mouse for some other reason, I have to remember to hit a key to get the keyboard back into ‘being a keyboard mode’. But it’s fine if you hit most keys, because they’re transparent down to layer 0... except unimportant keys... like d,f and g. Oops. I moved scroll lock to r, so r is also no good.

To know if the mouse layer is active I set a layer colour, which helps. However, you can’t set a layer colour for scroll lock which would be helpful when you move your mouse and seemingly nothing happens, because you’re not in a scrollable container, but you’ve accidentally turned on scroll lock.

So you’re left in this situation where you’re never 100% confident what each button or what the ball will do.

Am I sure that this isn’t just me being dumb? I think this might just be the challenge of wanting to get too much into the same device.

Physical layout

I opened complaining a bit about my trackpad feeling like it was down a well. But the default mount for the Navigator has the opposite feeling -- the ball is so high, you have to reach for it. I ended up getting my 3D printing guy to print me the official thumb shell. Strongly prefer this layout actually, though I miss my higher tent, and I keep thinking maybe I should get him to print me this with more tent.

Lots of Complaining.... you getting rid of it?

No, I think I’m going to keep it for now. When it’s working well it’s actually super lovely! I just think I need to keep tweaking some of this to get even more comfortable with it.

We’ll see what the update looks like in 8 months.

Hyperlinks are Important

Hyperlinks are important. It drives me nuts that many journalism outlets disagree. I see it all the time in The Globe and Mail, the New York Times and others.

Here’s a perfect worked example of why they are important. The Economist writes about how college students can’t read. They talk about a study where students have trouble reading Dickens.

Well. Except it turns out that’s not the whole story! Mark Lieberman at Language Log did the work to find the study, which tells a more subtle narrative than the Economist. Read his post, it’s good.

This brings me to my main point: Journalism needs to learn to love the hyperlink. You want to develop trust in media? Link your sources. Think about a generation raised on media literacy classes that, where they are able to visit the source links for articles and compare; a generation that starts to understand the torquing and nuance loss that comes from a 6 paragraph opinion column. Think about the trust engendered by discovering that some outlets are really good at accurately reflecting their sources, and think about how the lack of links can become a signifier of dishonesty.

“But the sources journalists are talking about are complicated!” Sure! Not everyone will read them. Yet some will. Some will strive, some will learn, and grow. We have to give people the opportunity.

Maybe, just maybe, the Hyperlink is a key part of making sure that we understand the society we live in.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea

I’ve recently finished reading the cozy fantasy novel Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea. While the weather was too hot to feel warmed by it, I nevertheless enjoyed it.

I love me a story with

• Characters who talk through problems. In fact, my least favourite narrative tropes are where the problems are created by two people, ostensibly who care for eachother, but cannot have even the simplest lowest-level honest conversation. See also “Could Have Avoided This!” Plot and Poor Communication Kills.
• Community Building, and community raising; the cynical part of me feels like this might be the most fantastical part of the book, but how I love it.

and of course, the requisite easy entrepreneurship.

It’s not a perfect book, but was a good distraction, and I’ve put the next on my borrowing queue at the library already.

Open A Channel: A Women’s Trek

I just finished Nana Visitor’s book. What a fascinating read. Looking at Star Trek from a woman’s perspective, both Visitor’s, and the many women she interviewed.

It’s a book I actually wish was about five times thicker: you can feel the hours of interview that -didn’t- make the pages. I would have loved to hear more from many of the women she talked to.

It’s a hopeful book, though I did learn about Visitors traumatic sexual assault via this book, which I had never known about previously; a content warning of sorts.

As someone who was a child in the 90s, Visitor’s stories of Hollywood of the 90s are totally believable and yet horrifying. One of the through lines of the book is the way in which you sometimes cannot see the wrongs within which you swim. I have a few inklings about what we’ll say about 2025, but I wonder what we will see with more clarity in 2055.

Summer Guitar Lull

I’m in a bit of a summer lull with guitar.

Bad: I’ve totally fallen off my discipline, and haven’t accomplished even one thing on my summer goals list

Good: I’ve been having fun. Playing riffs with totally incoherent tones, and having a blast — Lemme tell you, there’s a punk cover of Cissy Strut waiting to happen I’m sure.

I’m sure I’ll find my discipline again. But maybe I’ll go dig my loop pedal out until then.

Redefining Prosperity

I really hate the term prosperity — no one means the same thing when they say it, and a heck of a lot of people think it means “I’m gonna be a {million,billion,trillion}aire”.

Maybe it’s time for a new definition of prosperity:

• The ability find friends, make friends, see friends.
• Time to enjoy the changing of the seasons.
• The time and money required to have a hobby, or three.
• Time with your kids; the resources to have kids if you want them.
• The freedom to feel like a hobby is worth doing rather than a dereliction of your duty to the machine.
• Access to people who make you feel whole; access to community that makes you feel whole. Encouragement and support to grow our communities, and build bonds.
• Jobs with dignity, jobs without moral injury.
• The freedom and safety to explore different versions of yourself; intentionally low costs for decisions.
• The ability to stop feeling like the machine is grinding you down.
• The ability to become ill or disabled without fearing for your life falling down around you because you have become useless to the machine.
• The freedom to make art if that calls to you.
• The freedom to partake of art if that calls to you.

What does concrete policy look like that chases this kind of world? I don’t know that I have great answers. There’s a few things:

• 30 hour work weeks?
• Job Sharing?
• Community business support?
• Basic Income?
• Wealth taxation?
• No more billionaires? Wealth maximums?

That certainly feel aligned, but I can’t say I have all the answers.

I yearn for a politics that fights for these sorts of things. I yearn for a prosperity that focuses not on what you’ve got in your bank account, but the lives you’ve touched, the fun you’ve had, and the safety you’ve felt while doing it.

A letter to the ministers of Environment and AI

Just sent this letter to the ministers of the environment for Canada and Alberta, as well to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.

Honourable Ministers,

The momentous rise of AI has many people wanting to build data centres. While I personally am skeptical of the long term impact in terms of jobs, even if you take claims at face value it is incredibly important that we not let a burgeoning industry push us backwards on climate goals, as neat as it seems.

We’ve already seen bad outcomes in the US and Canada from the chase of data centres:

- In Memphis, you have xAI building illegal gas turbines [1]

- You have AI data centres draining water from communities [2]

- Data centres being built in Alberta [3], which has one of the least green electricity grids in the nation.

A nation we need to establish some ground rules. New data centres need to be

1. Using renewable energy, or create appreciably more green generation than they are expected to consume. Carbon Capture, if deployed, must be required rather optional.

2. Be tightly regulated on their water consumption.

3. Have incentives provided to use waste heat from them for secondary purposes. Every data centre is an opportunity to build a district energy system and heat storage system to help heat homes through the winter, providing climate impacts.

We have an opportunity to set our regulatory environment to minimize our regret in the future.

We also should encourage the industry to change. We should be working with international partners to start labelling model hosts with a “tokens-per-tone” measure of CO2 intensity, and encourage the development of time-of-use token pricing to build efficient use of renewable resources into models.

[1]: https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-musks-xai-datacenter-has-nearly-doubled-its-number-of-polluting-unpermitted-gas-turbines/

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

[3]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/property-report/article-new-data-centre-will-be-one-of-canadas-most-powerful/

Style in the Age of Robots

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Dittttttttto the vIS-yu-al arts?