It's been a bit of a mix, really.  You win some, and you lose some.  That's just how it goes sometimes.

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I helped an ALTTPR mentee to a victory today!  Always feels good, though of course not as rewarding as the real training sessions that lead to improvement and understanding.  But eh, props to them.

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I had a good session of working on Rhythm Quest yesterday, but didn't really do much "work" today on anything at all.  That said, I did spend a bunch of time on my computer setup, and that has actually been relatively fruitful!

I've switched over to the gateron red linear switches on my keyboard, and overall they're nice, it probably fits the board better, and I don't really have much issue with them (they do have a bit of wobble I guess).  I do still miss the sound of the heavily tactile U4Txs, so it's hard for me to give those up, but for now I'll just run with these.  I haven't been inspired to give another look at the inside of the case or the stabilizers, for now I'm just leaving it be and I'll deal with it some other time.

In the meantime, though, I bought a new monitor for the first time in umpteen years!  Not something that I expected to do, but after getting my new work laptop I started to think about if I should get some sort of updated/upgraded display of some sort.  I've been pretty uninterested since I don't use widescreen displays and....that really limits my options.  I think there are one or two 1600x1200 monitor out there, but they're pretty niche/expensive, so most likely I would have been looking at just replacing my monitors with more 1280x1024 ones -- just, slightly less old ones, maybe with actual hdmi support.  And then I could get a KVM switch or something so that I could swap between my desktop and my work laptop.

Then I discovered the LG "Dualup" monitor from last year, with a resolution of 2800x2560 (18:16), which seemed almost too good to be true.  Marketed as a "productivity-based monitor" designed to basically be the equivalent of two 16:9 displays stacked on top of each other, the idea is to use it in portrait orientation, either for viewing documents/code, or by using an interesting "picture by picture" mode where it splits the monitor into two separate virtual displays (that can come from different inputs).  It also has usb slots and kinda functions as a (sort of) KVM switch as well for your keyboard + mouse.  Ironic that the aspect ratio is seen as this sort of "revolutionary" unique thing, when.....it's really not much different than what we had years and years ago...sigh.

I pulled the trigger on it and am pretty happy with the purchase, though it has definitely took a bunch of work to get it working the way I want for me.  The functionality is an interesting mix of pretty useful while also being jankily unhelpful.

Step one, the c-clamp mount that I got it with (maybe I should have went with the standard stand...) didn't actually accommodate my desk, so I had to macguyver an interesting alternate solution where I clamped it to.....a different clamp.  I had to push my desk out a couple of inches to make room for the arm, so my room feels ever-so-slightly smaller, but I think it's worth it.  I definitely want the monitor to be as far back as reasonable, otherwise the screen is just too big.

Interesting point number two, the picture-by-picture mode.......only supports a top/bottom split, and that's with the monitor in portrait mode.  Since I'm using it in landscape mode, the PBP mode would result in two really tall and narrow displays, which is....pretty useless.  The LG software comes with a janky "screen split" configurator which I thought might control the PBP split, but it turns out that is not the case at all, it basically is just a bad version of desktop splitting where you can pin windows to different arrangements (in other words, completely useless).

Unfortunately the KVM functionality is also a little scuffed.  You can plug USB devices into the monitor and it will either connect them to your computer via usb-B, or connect them to a different device through usb-C.  This works fine for the most part, but there isn't actually a great way out of the box to switch inputs without dealing with the little physical menu knob on the side of the panel (which is a little annoying).

You can download this "dual control" software from LG, but instead of actually controlling the monitor's input switching or PBP at a hardware level, it's....just a jank version of mouse/keyboard sharing over LAN/wi-fi.

Fortunately, after a bunch of twiddling around, I have actually come up with pretty good solutions (so far) for everything that I =actually= want to do.  The monitor itself is very nice for me, it's a big 28" display with an excellent shape for my uses.  The usb-c connection is particularly nice as it lets me hook up to my macbook pro for work, have the usb devices pass through it, AND charge it at the same time.

For switching inputs, some people doing god's work have managed to reverse-engineer a way to switch the input selection through software.  Unfortunately, it's a bit of a hack since LG's monitors apparently don't actually use the normal channel/message for that, and as a result that's only been implemented on the OSX side, and even then, I can't assign a hotkey to it.  But when I'm working on my OSX machine, I can at least switch to windows via software.

I then discovered that if I just disable the display on the windows side (which I can do via a script), the monitor will automatically switch back to the USB-C side.  So I can actually switch back to OSX via software too.  I have a USB hub connected to the monitor, so when I switch between my two machines, my keyboard, mouse, microphone, and webcam (which is an old iphone) switch along-side of it.  I also set up my own keyboard/mouse sharing...

So now I have my work laptop running in clamshell mode, and normally I run the new big LG monitor, plus my two other monitors, all displaying content from my PC Desktop.  But then I can switch the LG monitor in the middle to show the macbook, plus my devices will switch over as well.  =And= while I'm in that mode, if I move my cursor over, I can still control my PC (over the wi-fi/LAN connection) as well.  So I can continue playing music from my PC or do other things there too.  I even have the macbook playing audio through both the macbook speakers as well as the LG monitor speakers at the same time, haha.  Anyways, lots of tinkering!  There were definitely some annoying stumbles along the way, but I'm starting to be really pleased at the end result, I think it's going to end up feeling really nice.

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Unfortunately I seem to have not taken care of myself that well physically this weekend though.  Hopeflly I don't end up paying too much for that.  Well, tomorrow is another day...let's try and get both some good work and some good play done tomorrow.