The people who use our boards.

Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

My name is George Cummings. I am a 53-year-old English-Canadian, a married father of two splitting time between Montreal and the Eastern Townships. This year, I am a senior automation specialist working as designer and microservice programmer in cloud operations.

Outside work, my interests are broad: shiny IT things, programming techniques, presentation techniques, music performance, lifelong learning, woodworking, military history. I’ve been a musician, soldier, choir director, sysadmin, netadmin, on-premise and cloud architect, mediator, programmer, teacher, and karateka. Only the IT stuff ever put money in my pocket. I cannot say that I mastered any of my interests, but life is a gift and mine is one big survey course.

What hardware do you use?

I’ll start with the ZSA Moonlander. I figured that if I’m going to spend most of my life contributing to my eventual demise through RSI, the keyboard had better be good. To keep torso twist to a minimum—possibly too late at my age—I try to avoid mouse-work, but sometimes you cannot so I use a Kensington Expert Trackball.

My daily driver, goemon, is a DIY build: a Fractal Design North tower enclosing a 12th-generation Intel i5, 64GB DDR4 RAM, 4TB NVMe storage, and an AMD RX6600 GPU. Sound is provided by a Steinberg UR12 connected to a pair of Eris 3.5 studio monitors. This is hardly cutting-edge to your flashier users but it is certainly enough for what I use it for, including cranking Rammstein, Rush, Tool, and ABBA. For outside, I carry an encrypted Lenovo Thinkbook Yoga 14s ITL, murasaki, that is configuration-synced with goemon.

My lab has all sorts of recycled parts and Raspberry Pi 3s all over the place, but the centerpiece is a Kubernetes stack on HP ProDesk and EliteDesk minis, tricked out with NVMe’s and maximum RAM, all connected to an old Juniper CX2200. I build my own furniture, including the 19” rack, out of plywood, pine, oak, and PLA. I keep to the Fractal North aesthetic.

Oh yes, my work supplied me with a MacBook Pro M1, which I connect to my peripherals through an oddly behaving small KVM, and a bunch of expensive monitors, only one of which I really need.

And what software?

Most of my workday is spent in a Mac terminal window on Neovim, but senior work requires Slack, Teams, Safari/Chrome/Brave, Office365, and Advil. I use Apple Reminders for task management. Most of my personal computer time is spent in NixOS and Hyprland on a kitty terminal window opened to Neovim. When not going down rabbit holes in Brave, I use OrcaSlicer for 3D printing; Spotify, Steam, and VLC for entertainment; and Obsidian for study. I’m writing this text in OnlyOffice.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

As I write this I am using GMC-Tarmak2-DHm. I am transitioning from QWERTY to Colemak-DH for ergonomic reasons. Since I need to remain productive while retraining my muscle memory, I’m attempting the Tarmak approach: Transition three to five keys every month. I will switch to GMC-Tarmak3-DHm in mid-March. Hopefully I’ll master “F” and “B” by then.

The GMC series—QWERTY, Tarmak, and Colemak—is fairly simple. It has three goals and two guidelines:

1. Take heavily used keys away from the pinky fingers;
2. Allow multilingual writing without interfering with programming. Any programmer in Quebec forced to use a CSA keyboard knows how awful it is for braces, brackets, and dead-keys;
3. Converge Linux and Mac altGr/Option key combinations;
4. Avoid three-finger combinations outside capital letters; and
5. Do not introduce lag, i.e., avoid assigning two layout switches to one key.

I use blank keycaps, but since password complexity defeats touch-typing and transition is hard, I printed small stickers for the vertical surfaces. By this summer, I should have the stickers off.

What would be your dream setup?

That’s a toughie. I build as I go and frankly I cannot see myself moving away from the Fractal North. Some days I want to replace the glass top with hardwood so I can create built-ins, but other days I’m pleased with the lighter look. I want to replace or complement the trackball with something smaller and tighter in the centre, perhaps the ZSA Navigator. I enjoy my Moonlander, but since it is attached to The Platform I cannot lug it to work on hybrid days. The ZSA Voyager was delivered to the Townships yesterday.