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

The name’s Ladislav, but where I come from, that sounds really formal, and most people call me Laci. I use the handle “zblesk” in most online places. I work for a small company as a senior software developer and mostly deliver solutions for much larger enterprises. That works quite well for me: My task list is varied, and I don’t have to deal with too much corpo bureaucracy. This is illustrated by my latest large project: When it was starting, I got to do everything “technical” in it—architecture, frontend scripts, backend tools and plugins, web services, integrations, the occasional report. Then, as the project grew, I got to hand off things to other devs until I was left mostly with just the architecture and integrations, the latter of which take up most of my time. I work from home four days of the week.

When I’m not working, most of my time is spent with my wife and three kids, the oldest of whom is ten. We hang out on playgrounds, go on bike rides, play board games, read books, things like that. But the kids are capable just playing among themselves with Legos or various other toys, so even these two summer months, when the adults still have to work but the schools are closed and the kids are home, are quite manageable. They do get some screen time, but it’s very limited.

They’re fun to have around even when I’m working. Last time I went to check on them because they had been suspiciously quiet for a couple hours, and found that the girl had crocheted tiny clothes for a bunch of Lego animals, and they started a puppet theatre. It’ll be so boring in here once they go back to school.

In the few hours of free time I get after all that, I try to do some of my (way too many) hobbies: things like language study, video games (where more than half of my play time is recently spent on retro games), and books. I prefer dead tree editions for nonfiction and audiobooks for most of the rest, because I can listen to them even when driving or doing endless chores around the flat. Then there’s self-hosting: I run dozens of applications, many of which I use daily. I also do programming as a hobby—mostly to write systems that support my other hobbies, and I keep adding just the feature I currently need. So I have my databases for books and games (which are integrated to various third-party data sources for enrichment), various trackers, various dashboards for visualizations and control, a universal search engine that indexes everything and makes it searchable in one place (even things from third-party apps, such as collections of e-books in Calibre, links in Raindrop, audiobooks in Audiobookshelf, our family tree, etc.). (And yes, that does mean I sometimes finish working on some enterprise integration at work, only to start working on my own personal integrations after that. But it’s totally different, honest! 😁) I like taking plenty of notes on the things I learn or do, and occasionally I write blog posts about them as well.

Last but not least, the keyboard hobby was thrust upon me against my express wishes, and I still kinda resent that. 😄 My plan was to get an ergonomic keyboard before I get carpal tunnel syndrome—I didn’t want to know anything about keyboards, didn’t care whether it was mechanical or not, I just wanted somebody to tell me what to buy. After a couple years, it was clear I didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who could help me, so I begrudgingly ordered a switch tester kit and started fiddling.

A funny thing happened: I told a friend I’m considering a Moonlander, and he ended up ordering it before I did. He just asked me what exactly I’m gonna order, and bought the same thing. 😑 But so far, that’s the only person I know who uses a non-boring keyboard.

What hardware do you use?

I’ll start with the hardware I use for fun, because that’s the shortest list. I use three retro game consoles: one is the poetically named Anbernic RG35XX Plus (with Knulli as the OS), which is a great all-rounder. That was my most-used one for over a year, until I got the next two. The GKD Pixel 2 (with RogueOS) is a niche handheld (and hard to get for a normal price) that can play basically the same things, but it’s a lot smaller and very sturdy. Ideal for carrying in a pocket. And the latest (and for now, final) addition is the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 (running Android). Being larger, it’s more of a “couch console”—a larger screen and more processing power that can run newer platforms the others can’t.

As for my daily driver computers, I have a Dell XPS 15 from work. It’s not amazing, but it’s good enough. I only use it directly when at work. When I’m home it just sits in the back, where it isn’t in the way, I sit at my personal computer and RDP over to the notebook. This way, I can access both my personal and company tools while still maintaining complete separation between them.

My kids like to create, and they often make gifts for me. I always keep some of them displayed; in the lower right of the picture, there’s an orange T (for “dad”) made with model wire and crochet yarn, and a green picture of “kitty Kirby with whiskers”; on the top right, a paper butterfly clipped onto a headphone receiver. (I don’t have the entire desk for myself, so the left part off-screen has the wife’s things, and there are boxes with sewing knickknacks under it.)

The personal computer has a Ryzen 5 3600, 32 GB 3200 MHz RAM, and a GeForce RTX 3060 (OC 12G V2). That’s enough for my work and hobbies, as well as video games. It helps that I never really felt any need to follow the hottest releases, nor do I insist on the highest graphical settings, so I’ve upgraded the PC maybe once in 8-10 years. And I keep adding old drives as they accumulate.

Not much to say about the displays—they were cheap, and two of them are also quite old. But they’re all hanging off arms mounted at the back of the table, which gives me more flexibility to move them about—which I do surprisingly often—and leaves the desk clean.

When my super-cheap vertical mouse finally died after ten years, I bought the MX Vertical Mouse. I have large hands, and while this is not perfect, it’s the best one I’ve tried.

Among my favorite gadgets is the tiny Niimbot Q110 thermal printer for label stickers (it’s the small white box under the right display). I also have a collection of (cheap) gamepads which I use with my PC or the retro consoles. With larger gamepads I prefer the Xbox-style layout; I have the Anbernic RG P01 and the 8BitDo SN30 Pro. I also love the very small ones; I used to buy the 8BitDo Zero 2 gamepads while they were cheap; I gave a bunch of them to friends to get them into gaming. They tend to be too expensive for that now, so I switched to the ShanWan Q36. You can often get them for 5-6€ apiece. When the kids wanted to see what gaming was like when I was a kid, I connected a couple of them to the RG35XX console and hooked it up to the TV via HDMI. Then we played some NES games.

And the last part is my “server stack,” which I’ve made into a literal physical stack and stuck it into the inaccessible, empty space between my PC and the wall.

The most important in there is my server, which runs a bunch of apps and hosts all our files (i.e. it’s also a NAS). It’s the Aoostar WTR Pro AMD Ryzen 7—one of the cheapest that also has enough processing power for more than just hosting files, and enough space for drives. (It takes up to four HDDs and two M.2 SSDs.) Right under it is a UPS, and behind it—a tiny switch.

An old Synology NAS placed at my parents’ house works as off-site backup, synced with Resilio Sync.

And what software?

My home computer runs Windows 10, which I used to like before they added so many more ads. The first Windows I used was 3.11, and I’ve used pretty much every version since then, and liked them at the time. That streak broke with 11, which completely sucks. That’s what my work computer runs. Fortunately, there’s StartAllBack “to fix all Windows 11 deal-breaking UI issues.”

I keep trying various desktop Linuxes (or is it linuxen? English is hard), but I’ve always bounced off—until this year. I put Zorin on a spare home notebook, and it actually seems nice to use? I kinda want to use more of it.

My NAS runs Unraid, because I mainly need reliable storage; and all my headless servers and devices always run Ubuntu Server. My phone runs Android. And all devices are connected to a mesh network with the Tailscale VPN.

The apps that are most important for me are virtually always running. I use KeePass for passwords, and also have it integrated into Firefox. For notes, it’s Joplin with a bunch of plugins. I take notes often and have tried many apps and platforms, and this one has beaten ’em all so far. I use Element (for Matrix) for all my chats. Listary is a blazing-fast search & launch tool that integrates well into many parts of Windows. I launch it with the left red button on my Moonlander. For music, I like Feishin.

Besides those, I use ShareX for screenshots, Heynote for cute scratchpads, and Mailbird for legacy mailboxes, though I’ll switch the moment I find something better.

I used to like Python, but didn’t like how it—and even more importantly, its tooling and ecosystem—has evolved over the decades. So my most-used language currently is C#, which has a mix of high-level constructs, low-level features, dev tools, and analyzers that I think is unmatched by anything else. So for that I use VS Code and Visual Studio 2022, complemented by LinqPad. Either because of work or because of all the integrations and plugins I write in my spare time, I also use JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python. And because I’m interested in programming language design, I sometimes experiment with others, to write smaller subprojects in; for example, Crystal is interesting and fun to work with, and does some novel things with static type checking. The hardest thing for me to do well is CSS.

PowerToys is a great collection of utilities for advanced users—my most often used ones are Image Resizer (integrates into the Explorer menu), Fancy Zones (a window manager), Text Extractor (like a screenshot, but only extracts text from the selected area) and Power Rename (integrates into Explorer menu, allows for regex-based renames; for more complex tasks I use Advanced Renamer.)

I use the Proton suite for email, calendars, privacy VPN and cloud backups, and I use Resilio Sync to back up data from my computer drives to my NAS.

On Ubuntu Servers I always install the fish shell with the Fisher package manager and extensions Z (for FS navigation) and Tide, “the ultimate Fish prompt.”

The other important part of the software I use are all the apps I host myself. They either run on the Aoostar NAS I already mentioned, or on a cheap Hetzner VPS (running Ubuntu Server). There are dozens of apps I host, so I’ll only mention the most often used ones here. Keep in mind that this is what I use for my personal stuff, not my job.

I really like Obskurnee, which I wrote as a companion app for book clubs. Audiobookshelf and its companion Android app are great for audiobooks. Miniflux handles my RSS/feed reading, and for other reading I turn to Karakeep. Karakeep was originally replacing Pocket for me, but I now often use it for archives as well. I’m still keeping ArchiveBox, where I already have a big library, including sites no longer online; but that project has issues and is not very active, so I find myself using it less and less.

I use Forgejo as a git repository/code forge. Joplin Server synchronizes my Joplin notes and attachments across devices. I like NocoDB for spreadsheets, databases, and their APIs. It’s similar to Airtable and extremely useful for all sorts of things. For dashboards, I use Metabase; I like n8n for workflows and automation. Ignore all the “AI” stuff on the n8n website; that’s new, and the app itself is powerful and nice to use. Nextcloud is mostly for sharing files with friends, and Immich holds my family’s photo library. I use Navidrome for music. For identity and access management, I use Authentik; I now have single sign-on for a whole bunch of these apps. The open-source community never ceases to astound me.

I like owning things I buy, so I mostly buy media (music, audiobooks, games) in places that don’t put restrictive DRM on them. Thanks to that, I could load all my purchases into my servers when I decided to host my own libraries.

I also run Synapse server for Matrix, a decentralized, federated chat platform. That basically means—you know how you can send an e-mail to any recipient, regardless of whether their mail servers run in Google, Microsoft, your company, or wherever else? But you can’t send a message from WhatsApp to Messenger or Instagram, even though they’re run by the same company? Matrix being “federated” means you can host your own server and chat with anyone on any other server, just as you can send them an email.

The next logical question is: Why would I care if nobody else is using it? And that’s a valid argument. Luckily, there’s a host of “Bridges,” which let you connect your Matrix server to WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, and a couple dozen other chat services. The result of this is that I only ever have to use one chat app, the Element I mentioned above. (Most Matrix-related software has generic, hard-to-google names, sorry.) It’s available for all platforms, including the web. That means on any of my computers or phones I only need this one app to get access to Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal, or whatever else I want.

What started as a throwaway experiment (“It sounds cool, but why would I use it when nobody I know even knows it exists?”) quickly grew into one of my most-used, load-bearing apps. It’s the only chat app on my phone.

There’s also a bunch of other apps I host, but these lists are long enough already. So just a quick mention of Webtrees for genealogy, Podsync for generating podcasts from YT channels, recently added LubeLogger for tracking my car-related expenses and maintenance, and Nginx Proxy Manager.

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

In the first question, I talked about how I didn’t want to know anything about keyboards. For me, none of this was ever about style, or mechanical properties, or typing speed—just ergonomics and comfort. By the time I was confident I could order a decent keyboard that I’d maybe like using, I knew what a broad hobby it can be, but still thought to myself—haha, why would anyone choose a weirdo layout? And solder their keyboards by hand?

Fast forward half a year. I disliked bringing my Moonlander to work because it’s bulky, and setting up/tearing down the tenting multiple times a day is a hassle. But there was no way I could (or would) spend that much money on a second keyboard. But some of these kits I saw online looked pretty nice!

So I ended up making a prototype by hand, then a macropad or two, then a portable keyboard from a kit. Then, when that turned out not to be ideal, I made another one a year later. Thanks to the controllers and switches (i.e. the most expensive parts) being socketed, the budget for a complete keyboard changeover was about 40€. That’s how I ended up with my current Rev57LP—a “split unibody” type of keyboard that’s pretty portable and fully wireless, so I can use it with my phone as well. Since I wanted for it to be as portable as possible, it uses the low-profile switches and has no LEDs. I wanted the lightest possible switches, so I got Kailh Purple Choc v1 (25±5gf), because the Pinks (20±5gf) weren’t available yet. I had an annoying problem, though: When my hand was in the resting position, I kept pressing the thumb key by accident. I started thinking about how to fix that in the ZMK firmware, but fortunately, it occurred to me to just switch the switch for a Kailh Heavy Dark Yellow (70±10gf). That solved the problem, though in retrospect I shouldn’t have gone for the heaviest one available.

The next keyboard I always keep on my desk at home is the Reviung5, a tiny macropad I use for media controls. It was designed to be wired, but I hacked it to make it wireless. (It can be quite easy! I wrote about it on the blog, but my article named “Turn your wired QMK keyboard wireless” also came out as part of Issue #6 of the Paged Out! zine. If you don’t know it, check out its cool, experimental format!) It lasts for months on a single charge. And I got the funky keycaps as a Christmas gift from a friend—she knows nothing about keyboards but wanted for it to be a surprise, so she read my keyboard-related blog posts and then hoped she got it right. I was quite impressed by that.

Both of those keyboards were designed with the QMK firmware in mind (the one ZSA’s keyboards are based on), but I converted both to ZMK. Initially, that was because of ZMK’s first-class wireless support and excellent power efficiency, but I ended up liking it far more than QMK and would use it everywhere if I could. Firmware for the Rev57LP was readily available, but the one for Reviung5 I had to create myself. Huge thanks to the very helpful folks in the ZMK community. (I also contributed to it, so it should be easier for you.)

And now we’re circling back to the Moonlander. I’ve been using it for perhaps two years and been quite satisfied, but I started noticing I prefer the feeling of the low-profile switches to the bulky MX style. I didn’t really want to get rid of the Moonlander, but wasn’t sure what else to do, and how to keep the costs down. It took me embarrassingly long to come to the idea of converting the Moonlander to low-profile switches. During my research, it occurred to me to contact ZSA’s excellent support, and it turned out they were experimenting with this as well for a blog post. I wrote my own blog post on the same subject—but long story short, with their guidance, I ended up using the linear Outemu Low-Profile Red switches (50gf) and the Tai-Hao Thins LP Black Keycaps. (They didn’t have a set that would suit me, but were willing to make a custom one for me.) To spice it up a little, I got the clickiest switches I could find (in this case, Outemu Low-Profile Blue, 60gf) and put them on some of the rarely used keys, including the big red ones. The occasional clicks while I work make my day.

Word of warning, though: It seems to me the clearances are a bit too tight, and the Outemu switches are quite difficult to pull out. I’ve destroyed a few of them and bent my key puller. It’s not a problem now, but I would be hesitant to change them again, in case I damage the keyboard.

I clearly didn’t have enough problems in life, because at this point, I started thinking about changing my layout. When the keyboards are this nice, QWERTY starts to feel more and more uncomfortable and annoying. But the question of what to switch to is not an easy one. The ideas behind Colemak Mod-DH sounded great, but the layout was designed for writing in English. I write a bunch of Slovak as well as English, so the letter and bigram distribution would be different. But I didn’t want to go for something completely custom, either, and eventually settled on the Savetier layout. I won’t go into the details here, but there’s a bunch of them in my blog post Alternative keyboard layouts for Slovak if you’re interested in more info on how I chose the layout, made the transition, and evaluated the results. I’ve been using it for almost two years now, and I’m not going back. I don’t know of anyone else using Savetier though, so if you do, drop me a line.

Other than that, my Moonlander layout is nothing special. A lot of tap mods (~30 on layer 0), a layer for symbols and shortcuts, and some other layers I don’t use much anymore—for example, I have a layer for media controls which is quick and easy to use, but now I just use the Reviung5 macropad instead.

One problem with non-QWERTY layouts with a bunch of tap mods: Good luck gaming on them. I work around this problem by having a Games layer that is just a vanilla QWERTY with no special functions, and the numbers and F-keys rearranged so that games can be played using the left half only.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m quite happy with my current setup, so no big complaints here. But there’s always something to tweak. For starters, I would like to have higher quality displays—preferably all of the same kind and quality. The NAS could use quieter fans and a small KVM.

If Outemu LP switches for the Moonlander were available in lighter versions, I’d make the switch, pun intended. Chair-mounting also sounds good in theory, but I haven’t had a chance to try it in practice, and the whole setup is too expensive for something that might not stick.

The Rev57LP has the most things I’d like to change, but they don’t seem very realistic. (It is open source, but I currently don’t have enough free time to learn how to use KiCAD to make the modifications myself.) The biggest flaw is that there is no cover on the controller board, and the pins often snag on things. I also wish it had a horizontal rotary encoder, support for a low-powered display such as the nice!view, and a pointing device.

One day, maybe.