Piero Lescano

Colophon

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 03:39:32 GMT

A colophon is a page or section (typically in a footer) of a site that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies, and often published on personal sites at a top level /colophon page.
Colophon - IndieWeb

General

This website is build with Astro and TailwindCSS. The font is JetBrains Mono and the theme is based on colors from kanagawa.nvim.

The site is currently hosted on Cloudflare Workers. The code repository is hosted on GitHub. I have a simple deployment pipeline to build the site every time new commits are added to the main branch.

Content

Most content on the site is written in Markdown and managed using Astro Content Collections. I’ve also used Astro Islands for interactive components in one blog posts, but I plan to migrate to web components when it comes to content. Mainly to increase portability in case I need to change frameworks in the future.

Publication and update dates for are generated based on the git history and include links to the corresponding commit on GitHub.

I use Mermaid for diagramming in some of my notes. SVGs with the diagrams are generated during the build process using Playwright.

I provide an RSS feed for blog posts. Feeds for other content on the site are coming soon.

I use giscus for blog posts comments.

Now

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 03:42:00 GMT

This is a now page. A list of the things I’m focusing on at this particular time in my life.

Working as a software developer at Rhinolabs.
Practicing touch typing from time to time. I’m aiming for 100 wpm.
Working out. Mainly by running, doing calisthenics and using kettlebells.
Trying to get through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Porgrams.
Exploring Hypermedia-Driven Applications.
Studying for the SAA-C03 certification.

Reading

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:23:18 GMT

Finished Reading

2026

Title	Author	Read
Warbreaker	Brandon Sanderson	2026-03-10

2025

Title	Author	Read
The Hero of Ages	Brandon Sanderson	2025-12-30
The Well of Ascension	Brandon Sanderson	2025-12-19
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter	Brandon Sanderson	2025-12-10
Mistborn: The Final Empire	Brandon Sanderson	2025-12-08
The Sunlit Man	Brandon Sanderson	2025-11-13
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again	Johann Hari	2025-10-04
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist	Liz Pelly	2025-09-30
Blood Song	Anthony Ryan	2025-09-17
Resilient web design	Jeremy Keith	2025-03-14
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	2025-03-08
Co-Intelligence	Ethan Mollick	2025-02-03
Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	2025-01-18

2024

Title	Author	Read
Understanding Distributed Systems	Roberto Vitillo	2024-12-17
Four Thousand Weeks	Oliver Burkeman	2024-09-28
Rhythm of War	Brandon Sanderson	2024-08-25
The Road	Cormac McCarthy	2024-01-05

Uses

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 03:41:09 GMT

This is my /uses page. It contains a list of some of the tools I use on a regular basis. This isn’t meant to be a complete list, but a highlight of the tools I use the most.

Hardware

My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s running Arch Linux. I use this laptop for all my software development work.

Component	Details
CPU	Intel i7-8550U
GPU	Intel UHD Graphics 620
RAM	16 GB
OS	Arch Linux
WM	Sway

Software

Environment

Sway - Wayland compositor
Waybar - Status bar
mako - Notification daemon
Rofi - Application and script launcher

CLI and TUI

aura - Package manager
zsh - Shell
neovim - Text editor
lf - Terminal file manater
tmux - Terminal multiplexer

GUI

Alacritty - Terminal emulator
Thunar - File manager
Zathura - Document viewer
Firefox - Browser
Thunderbird - Mail client

For more details on the software I’m running feel free to check out my dotfiles repo.

Adding Comments to My Blog with Giscus

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 15:34:58 GMT

Use GitHub Discussions to add comments to your blog.

Building a metronome: React vs Alpine

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:30:33 GMT

Building the same component with two different frameworks.

iCal feeds

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:48:33 GMT

As you might or might not know, iCal is a format to store and share calendar events. Calendar applications use this format to display events, but you can also share and iCal feed in a website similar to how you would share an RSS feed.

My interest for this of feeds started a couple of months ago when I came across a post by Taylor. I learned that meetup.com offers a feed for the events of a specific group. I found it very convenient after using it a for a while.

Sadly, I haven’t found many websites that share calendars using this method. Twitch offers iCal feeds for channels, but it has some problems. If you’re into F1, you can subscribe to the events of the current season. You need to create an account to access it.

Apart from the meetup events I’ve been using iCal feeds to keep up to date with the schedule of wrestling shows. For this, I’ve been using TVmaze, which offers a basic feed for the TV shows you have on your favorite list.

Outside the personal use cases, it seems like iCal feeds are also used so synchronize the availability of rentals and reservations between booking applications like Airbnb and Booking.com. I haven’t done much research regarding this use case yet, but if I ever get a gig working on a booking management system I know where to look.

Jailbroken Kindle

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 14:48:25 GMT

I’ve never had a proper e-reader. For years, I’ve been reading digital books on my phone. I tried a Kindle Fire a few years ago but didn’t like the experience. The device didn’t have an e-ink display, it was really slow and adding PDFs or e-books not bought via Amazon was a major hassle. After that experience I went back to my phone and forgot about e-readers. At least until last week.

Last month I started coming across some videos about jailbreaking Kindles. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to try something new. Also, I haven’t been reading much lately, and I thought a new single purpose device could help me get back on track. After some searching, I found a good deal for a second hand Kindle Paperwhite and bought it right away.

Why the need for the jailbreak?

So I can read the digital books I already have without hassle and not have to worry about Amazon deleting books, banning my account or spam me with “special offers” ads I don’t want to see.

I also like giving old devices a new life. The Kindle I got for this experiment is from 2015. I guess is similar to installing Linux on old ThinkPads. It is just a cool small project to try.

Breaking the jail

The jailbreak instructions are in The Kindle Modding Wiki. They are easy to follow if you are somewhat computer-literate.

The guide recommends filling almost all the storage in the device to prevent automatic updates. I had success running the jailbreak without the need to fill the storage, but your millage might vary. I would suggest following the instructions to fill the storage just in case.

After following the instructions you will probably want to install KOReader. The whole jailbreaking process seems like foreplay for this.

KOReader is amazing. You can tweak lots of options for how to display your books, connect to Calibre, use Wikipedia, add custom screensaver or even make add plugins to interact with LLMs or Zotero.

Wrapping up

I like the idea of single purpose devices. I’ve been reading more without distractions, enjoying the experience of the e-ink screen and actually looking forward for the next book. The device I got is a bit old, but it serves me well. I hope I can use if for many years to come.

My computing setup for 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:56:39 GMT

This is a walkthrough of my current setup. I have a /uses page where I keep a list of some of the tools I use. However, I thought doing a deep dive of my current setup would be a good thing to do as my first post for the year.

Basics

Let’s start with the basics. My main computer is a ThinkPad T480s running Arch Linux. I’ve been using Arch for almost 4 years. My current installation is almost 2 years since I changed my laptop at the start of 2024.

Arch meets all my needs. I have a system that is almost always up-to-date. The documentation is second to none. If a package is not available in the official repositories I will probably find it in the AUR. I wouldn’t want to use another distribution for the time being.

Window manager

Instead of using a full desktop environment like GNOME or KDE Plasma, I use Sway, a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor. It has been my window manager of choice since I switched from GNOME. I’ve tried other compositors like Hyperland, but Sway works well, so I haven’t had the need to switch.

I don’t do much ricing but when I stated using Sway I did tinker with a bunch of configurations until I settle on what I have now. Likewise, I try to stick to the default keybindings most of the time. I might change this in the future in order to make the setup easier to use with my Corne keyboard.

Status Bar

I use Waybar for the status bar. I’ve tried to keep my configuration as simple as possible. I only have one custom module used to display if wlsunset is running. More on this tool later.

Launcher

I use rofi as a launcher. When making custom scripts I stick with the dmenu mode. I do this just in case I want to try another launcher since most of them have a mode compatible with dmenu.

I use networkmanager-dmenu and dmenu-bluetooth for easy access to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth configurations.

So far, I haven’t had the need to switch launchers. However, Vicinae looks like something I would like to try.

Audio

I’ve been using PipeWire and WirePlumber since I started using Linux. Volume levels for both audio inputs and outputs are controlled by keybindings configured in Sway. I have also built volume-notify, a small program to display notifications whenever volume levels change.

Whenever I need more control I use wiremix and qpwgraph.

Power

I use TLP to optimize battery usage. I also wrote a custom program called battery-notify to remind me to plug in my laptop when the battery is running out.

Browsers

Firefox is my main browser. Mainly out of habit although I really like multi-account containers. I use it to compartmentalize how I browse the web. The only extensions I currently use are uBlock Origin and Surfingkeys.

I keep Chromium and Brave installed for web development. They are nice to have if I want to try features that are not yet available in Firefox.

Terminal

Most of my work is done in the terminal. I use Alacritty alongside tmux.

When it comes to tmux, I mostly stick to the default keybindings. I’ve set my prefix to Ctrl + Space because it feels better on the hands.

Shell

I use zsh. I don’t use any framework like Oh My Zsh. I only use starship as my prompt and rely on tools like fzf and zoxide for easy navigation.

Text editor

My text editor of choice is Neovim. I use it for everything that involves editing files. That includes writing code, taking notes, doing some plain text accounting, among other things.

I use a moderate amount of plugins, my setup is pretty stable, and I can do productive work in many programming languages. One thing I haven’t added is any AI integration. That’s something I might try in the following months.

When it comes to other options, I’ve tried Emacs. However, it never stuck with me. I would like to give it a try again but the effort to configure and learn a new editor is not something I’ll like to spend my time on at the moment. Maybe in a few months I can get some free time to try Emacs again. I do like orgmode though. I’m currently trying out a port for Neovim.

Screen ergonomics

I used to use dark mode exclusively. However, I work outdoors from time to time and dark mode is a pain for these situations, so I use darkman to switch between light and dark mode.

I also use wlsunset to adjust the screen temperature. It works automatically depending on the time of the day, and it’s almost always on when I’m using dark mode.

Everything else

I’ll try to do some more writing for specific parts of my setup and how they relate to my work as a developer. If you find any of this interesting feel free to browse my dotfiles repo. Everything I didn’t mention here can probably be found there.

Status update, January 2024

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 03:03:50 GMT

I’ve been wanting to establish a writing habit for quite some time now. So this year I’m committed to publishing at least once a month. Inspired by the likes of Tom MacWright and マリウス, I’ll be sharing monthly updates on some of my professional and personal project. I’ll also be sharing things that caught my eye during this period.

Personal

Let’s start with some of the changes I’m making to my setup. I got a new laptop, a second hand Thinkpad T480S. It will be replacing my old 2012 MacBook as my main workstation. I broke the MacBook last year and now the lid cannot be closed, making it unportable. Everything else still works, so I’ll see if I can get it fixed and keep it as a backup machine.

In other news, I’ve been getting into self-hosting. This month, I managed to deploy some services on a VPS using Docker Compose. Here’s a list of the things I’m currently running:

Baikal, a CalDAV and CardDAV server.
Linkding, a bookmark manager.
Miniflux, a feed reader.
Nginx Proxy Manager, a tool for easily expose the services with SSL certificates.

The current setup is still experimental, so there’s room for improvements. I want to add restic to handle backups, and maybe deploy a few more services. I think I’ll be able to get everything done within the next few weeks.

Regarding the things I’m consuming, I started off the year reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was a pretty good read. I’m eager to see how the movie adapts the book. Right after finishing it, I moved on to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I’ve been wanting to read this book for months and so far it’s keeping me hooked.

Reading is one of the activities I put away when I started working full time. I didn’t read much last year so I’m glad I was able to find the time to get back to it during the last few weeks.

Professional

My job’s been tough lately. I’m working on a project built with Angular. I’m not loving it, but I have to admit there are some features and patterns that do appeal to me. Built-in dependency injection makes components and services more reusable and easier to test. RxJS has also captured my interest because of how different it is from what I’m used to.

I’m also curious about the framework’s new features. SSR support, signals, and the new template syntax might change my feelings about Angular, but I haven’t tried them yet. I also want to give Analog a try. It seems like it could drastically improve the experience of building web apps with Angular.

On to other things, I recently made a small contribution to the open-source project gum, a small tool within the Charm ecosystem that aims to enhance shell scripts. Charm was the reason why I started to learn Go. I specifically wanted to use the Bubble Tea framework to build terminal applications. I already have a couple of these apps in the pipeline, and I’ll be sharing them next month. Stay tuned for updates!

Status update, February 2024

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 04:05:48 GMT

Personal

This month I received a RaspberryPi 3B as a birthday present. The Pi, as some people call it, is a small single-board computer that has tons of use cases. My initial plan was to use it as a home media server but realized that it doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements to run Jellyfin effectively. Additionally, I don’t yet have a proper power supply for the Pi, so it is running underpowered.

I also considered using the Pi to host some of the applications I’m currently running on a VPS. The services are intended for personal use and only accessible via Tailscale, so it will be cheaper to host them myself. However, I decided to postpone the migration until I get a proper power supply for the Pi

Instead, I decided to set up a Directus instance on the RaspberryPi. Directus describes itself as an open source backend to build anything or everything. I’ve been using it at my job as a headless CMS. However, I don’t get the chance to use all of its features. I want to explore its potential as a Backend-as-a-Service, so I’ll be using it for prototyping some personal projects.

Professional

I’ve been working with Angular for the last few months, and it hasn’t been the best experience. However, there are a couple of new project coming in that will be using other frameworks. I cannot wait to start working on them.

One of the new projects has many requirements and few complex features. I’ve been having meetings to give some feedback on the UI design and to discuss some of the implementation details to ensure that all necessary features are accounted for.

To round things off, I’ve had limited time to code outside of work, but I hope this changes in the following weeks. One of my side projects is nearing completion, but I haven’t given myself enough time to finish it. I’ll be aiming to wrap things up next month and sharing more details about it in a dedicated blog post. In the meantime, stay tuned for updates.

Full-text search with SQLite.

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 23:44:27 GMT

I recently discovered that SQLite has support for full-text search. We just need to use the FTS5 extension to create a virtual table. All full-text search queries are run against this new table.

Let’s see an example. I’ve been playing around with some food datasets, so I’ll use a table called food for the example.

CREATE TABLE food (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    name TEXT,
    description TEXT,
    category TEXT,
    carbohydrate REAL,
    cholesterol INTEGER,
    protein REAL,
    monosaturated_fat REAL,
    polysaturated_fat REAL,
    saturated_fat REAL
)

I want to be able to search the records using the name, description or category columns. To accomplish this I can create a new virtual table called food_fts containing these columns.

CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE food_fts
USING fts5 (
    name, description, category, content = 'food', content_rowid = 'id'
);

I’m creating another table to handle full-text search because I don’t want to use columns like carbohydrate or protein when searching the collection. Notice that I’m also declaring two additional options, content and content_rowid. This is to make sure that the food_fts table only stores indexes. The actual content lives in the food table.

Then we need to populate the new table.

INSERT INTO food_fts (rowid, name, category, description)
SELECT id, name, category, description FROM food;

After that I only need a query like this to search for records in the food table.

SELECT
    food.*
FROM
    food_fts
    JOIN food ON food_fts.rowid = food.id
WHERE
    food_fts MATCH 'The thing I am searching for';

I’m doing a JOIN operation, so I can also get the other columns in the food table. The MATCH keyword is the thing what that does the magic. This allows me to use the foods_fts table to search the records.

A picker for bullet journal style checkboxes in Neovim

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:47:35 GMT

Ever since I discovered Obsidian a few years ago, I’ve been using with the Minimal theme. The only reason being that this theme supports alternate checkboxes which provide a bunch of icons similar to the ones you would have in a bullet journal.

Obsidian is great, but in the last few months, I’ve been moving most of my note-taking to the terminal. After discovering render-markdown.nvim, a Neovim plugin which also renders alternate checkboxes, I decided to move my note-taking workflow to Neovim. And since I already commit to only use Neovim, why not write some Lua to make it easier to work with checkboxes?

I wanted to create a simple automation to easily change between checkboxes. First, I created a table containing the all the custom checkboxes I use. For my use case, I’m sticking with a few similar to the ones that come with the minimal theme.

-- This is using nerd fonts, so you might not be able to see the icons.
local checkboxes = {
  { char = ' ', icon = '', label = 'to-do' },
  { char = '/', icon = '', label = 'incomplete' },
  { char = 'x', icon = '', label = 'done' },
  { char = '>', icon = '󰒊', label = 'forwarded' },
  { char = '<', icon = '󰃭', label = 'scheduling' },
  { char = 'l', icon = '', label = 'location' },
  { char = 'b', icon = '', label = 'bookmark' },
  { char = 'u', icon = '󰔵', label = 'up' },
  { char = 'd', icon = '󰔳', label = 'down' },
}

Then I wrote a function. The logic is pretty simply. First, I’m running a couple of checks to make sure I’m in a markdown file and that the current line contains a checkbox. Then, I’m using vim.ui.select with the table of checkboxes as the options. Finally, if there is a selection, I’m changing the checkbox in the current line using string.gsub. That’s it. Not a lot of code.

local function select_checkbox()
  if vim.bo.filetype ~= 'markdown' then
    return
  end

  local pattern = '%- %[.-%] '

  local line = vim.api.nvim_get_current_line()
  if not line:match(pattern) then
    return
  end

  vim.ui.select(checkboxes, {
    prompt = 'Checkboxes:',
    format_item = function(item)
      return string.format('%s %s', item.icon, item.label)
    end,
  }, function(choice)
    if not choice then
      return
    end

    local checkbox = string.format('- [%s] ', choice.char)
    local modified_line = line:gsub(pattern, checkbox, 1)
    vim.api.nvim_set_current_line(modified_line)
  end)
end

I think this can be improved by making use of tree-sitter, but this is more than enough for me at the moment. Now all we need to do is to create a keybinding.

vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>tt', select_checkbox)

Status update, March 2024

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 21:33:09 GMT

For this status update, I’d like to focus primarily on my personal projects. Unfortunately, there isn’t much new to share about my job, as most of my tasks have been repetitive over the past few weeks. However, I’ve continued to learn new things during my free time. Given that this year’s theme for me has been hosting services for personal use, the projects I’ve been working on during this month revolved around this topic.

To start off, I deployed Ollama on Fly.io after I came across this article. Previously, I had been running Ollama locally but found that even the smaller models were extremely slow due to the limited hardware on my machine. I decided to use Fly because of its support for GPUs and the feature that allows machines to be stopped when they’re not being used. With Fly LLMs run smoothly, and I only get charged for the amount computation I actually use.

On to other things, I’m now hosting most of my services on a Raspberry Pi 3B. Previously, I had been running them on a cloud VPS. However, after getting a power supply and case for the Pi, I decided to set it up to work as a mini home server. I moved all the data to the Pi and set up a basic backup strategy using Restic. I’m also using Tailscale to access the services when I’m not at home.

Finally, the highlight of the last month was the deployment of a messaging service for personal use. I started hosting my own services because I wanted to have full control over my data. Given that online communication is such an integral part of my digital life, it makes sense for me to host my own private messaging service. To accomplish this, I decided to use ejabberd, an open-source instant messaging solution based on the XMPP protocol.

I was initially reluctant to host a messaging server. Moving to a privacy-focused platform can be hard. Most people are content using well-known platforms and may not be interested in privacy-focused alternatives. In most cases, asking them to try another platform could result in a negative response. That wasn’t my case though. I found that close relatives and friends were willing to give the server a try if they know it was something I was running.

I’ll continue to explore self-hosted solutions for most of my needs. I’m currently looking for an inventory management tool and a fitness tracker. In addition, I’m eager to delve deeper into XMPP. I want to gain deeper understanding of the protocol and its potential use cases for real-time applications. Stay tuned for further updates.

Status update, September 2024

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 14:01:08 GMT

Reading

I haven’t been reading much since the last time I wrote. But for the last couple of months I’ve been trying to keep up with the things I enjoy the most. I finished two books this month: Rhythm of War and Four Thousand Weeks

Rhythm of War wasn’t my favorite book out of The Stormlight Archive, but somehow Sanderson makes me have the same excitement I had when starting the series. The plot thickens with every book. I cannot wait for all to pay off when Wind and Truth is released.

I think Four Thousand Weeks ended up in my list after hearing a recommendation on a podcast. I don’t really remember. It’s not the kind of book I’ll usually read, but Oliver Burkeman did provide a few ideas worth thinking about.

Watching

I haven’t watched many movies these last few months but Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is my favorite movie of the year so far.

My brother also got me into watching wrestling. It all started with WrestleMania XL early this year, and I’ve been getting into it since then.

Gaming

I started playing Valheim after realizing that it isn’t that hard to play games on Linux anymore. I’ve running Steam though Flatpak on Arch Linux and haven’t had any issues so far.

Coding

A few weeks ago I wrote go-linkding, a small Go package to interact with Linkding. I’m working on two personal projects that make calls to the Linkding API, so I decided to extract the code into a package and publish it.

Status update, October 2024

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 04:25:02 GMT

Personal

I made a trip to Santiago de Chile to visit some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. I traveled with just one backpack containing all the things I thought I would need. However, I ended up taking with me a bunch of clothes I didn’t get to wear.

My brother gave me an analog camera, and I was planning to take it with me on the trip. However, I decided not to due to lens caps being missing. I didn’t want to take the risk to scratch the lens. I found some 3D models on Thingiverse that would work for the lens, but I still need to fix an old 3d printer I have at home to print the front and rear caps for the lens.

Reading

I started to read Understanding Distributed Systems since I want to get more familiar with system design and backend development.

Watching

I watched two movies this month.

Coding

I haven’t been coding much lately, but I wrote volume-notify, a small program show notifications on volume changes using PulseAudio. The idea came from a shell script by Hugo Osvaldo Barrera that does basically the same thing. I decided to build my own version using Go and later came across a similar project called pa-notify which is written in C.

Status update, January 2025

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 02:52:52 GMT

Personal

Last month I decided to give Org Mode a try. If you don’t know what it is, I would describe it as a markup language with a strong focus on task management and note-taking. One thing worth mentioning is that Org Mode is almost exclusively used in conjunction with Emacs. I’m not really an Emacs guy or at least I haven’t been converted yet. For the time being, I’ve been using on nvim-orgmode/orgmode with Neovim.

Org Mode is great. It scratches my itch for organization software. However, I’ve decided to not adopt it fully for now. The main reason is that Org Mode seems like a good system for busy people, but my current workload is low, and the use of system like this might be overkill. Also, I already have a bunch of notes written in Markdown. I don’t want to deal with migrating them to another format since I’ll have to rework my publishing setup. For now, the only thing I’m using Org Mode for is to track my workouts.

Reading

I finish Leviathan Wakes. I’ve heard amazing things about The Expanse and this book in particular, but I didn’t like it that much.

The other book I read this month was Co-Intelligence. While it provided some interesting insights, I don’t think I got much out of it. Maybe because I work on tech, and I’ve been already bombarded with content discussing the topic of AI and LMMs.

I wouldn’t recommend it if you are already familiar with LLMs. The group of people that would benefit the most of this book are people who are not that familiar with AI or tech in general.

Coding

I’m currently working on a web application to track my workouts. It will be focused on weight lifting since it is what I do, but I might add support for other forms of training in the future. The main goal is to have app that is easy to use and that I can host myself. I’ll release it with open source license when it is ready.

Status update, February 2025

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:26:13 GMT

Personal

There’s not much to share when it comes to personal stuff. One thing worth mentioning is the fact that I build my own desk. I don’t really do woodworking, but I took a course last year and I thought it would be nice to make something on my own instead of buying it.

Writing

I definitely need to write a more. Last month I wrote one blog post talking about a picker I wrote for Neovim.

Reading

I’m about to finish reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was reading it last year but sadly dropped it due to other obligations. That’s why I think I’m feeling a bit pressured to finish it as soon as possible. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it. It’s a fantastic book.

The Art of PostgreSQL is another book I’ve been checking out this month. I like to always have a technical books I can reach to. They provide a bunch of new ideas or patters I can try out. Some of the things that have caught my interest are:

The use of materialized views for caching.
Listen/Notify to have simple PubSub implementation.
A bunch of patterns for writing queries using CTEs and window functions.

Coding

I wrote battery-notify, a small daemon that sends a desktop notification when the battery of my laptop is running out. I want to make some improvements, but it fulfills my current needs, so it’s not a priority.

The project that takes most of my time is a web app I’m building to track my workouts. I’ve been trying to use Go for all my personal projects, so instead of reaching for a full-stack JavaScript framework as I often do, I decided to take a hypermedia-driven approach with this application. The current tech stack is as follows.

Go and PostgreSQL in the backend.
temple to render HTML.
Alpine.js to add client-side interactivity.
HTMX for client-server communication.

I’ve come across a few difficulties, but I think they are just due my lack of familiarity with the tech stack. I still have a lot of work to do but once the application reaches a usable state (i.e. I can use it myself at the gym without any issues), I’ll be open sourcing it.

Status update, March 2025

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:11:57 GMT

March has been a slow month. I’ve not being doing much.

Reading

I’m still waiting for Wind and Truth. It was published last December, but I haven’t found the Spanish translation in any of the book stores I frequent. Just to keep the streak going I started reading The Hobbit. Maybe I end up re-reading Lord of the Rings.

Watching

I went to see Flow, an Oscar-winning movie that happens to have been created with Blender. I’m a huge open source nerd and, to be honest, the fact that the movie was made with Blender was the only reason I wanted to see it.

Self-hosting

I don’t thinker much with my self-hosted setup. It works fine without me having to constantly monitor it. However, once a month or so I check if there are any new applications worth deploying. This month I decide to try to add a single sign-on service to centralize the authentication for the apps I’m running on my Raspberry Pi.

Authelia seemed to be the easiest to set up. It is also written in Go, which is a plus for me. At this point almost all the services I run are written in Go.

Development

I’ve been exploring how to build Discord bots, practicing data structures and algorithms and also checking out some stuff with D-Bus. Apart from that not much else. The lifting tracker app has been staled for a while. I need to get back to it.

Trying out the Corne Keyboard

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 22:38:33 GMT

I’ve been wanting to give ergonomic keyboards a try for while now. Last month I came across a good offer for a second hand Corne, so I didn’t hesitate to buy it. The experience with a split keyboard has been interesting. It felt similar to learning vim for the first time. Strange, uncomfortable, but rewarding nonetheless.

Learning

The first thing that felt weird about the keyboard was, well… the fact that it’s split. The keys were also arranged in straight columns instead of being at an angle. I already knew how to touch type, so it only took me a week or so to get used to the shape of the Corne.

The keyboard I bought came with labelless keycaps. I don’t mind labelless keycaps, however, the keycaps also lacked those little bumps in the F and J keys which cause me to unintentionally shift the position of my hands. I ended up swapping the keycaps for ones from a spare keyboard.

Other thing that bothered me a bit was the small number of keys this keyboard had compared to a regular one. To be able to type numbers or symbols you need to use layers. Layers are similar to how the Fn is used to access media controls in some keyboards. A layer is activated by holding one or more designated keys configured by the user. It seems like layers are one of the things that scare people the most when it comes to trying an ergonomic keyboard.

Finally, as a consequence of the change in layout, the way I type the shortcuts of my most used programs changed significantly. Using things like Sway, Neovim and tmux felt weird. It bothered me a lot at the beginning, but I’m now capable of using the new layout without too much hassle.

Configuration

The Corne is highly configurable. The version I have uses QMK, an open source firmware for custom keyboards. Before diving into writing my own custom layout, I decided to try the QMK default. I got used to most of the layout. The only thing that bothered me was having the Esc on the right side, so I decided to change that.

I also tried VIAL, a fork of QMK that comes with a GUI to configure the keyboard in real time. It allowed me to configure the keyboard without having to flash it every time I wanted to change something. I used it for couple days, but I had problems when trying to configure media keys, so I switch back to QMK.

My current layout. Made with Keyboard Layout Editor.

What’s next?

I’ll be exploring other layouts from time to time. I’m happy with my current setup, but I think I make improve my use of layers. KeymapDB seems like a good website to see how other people configure their QMK keyboards.

I also want to learn how to configure the OLED displays. There are a lot of configuration examples on the internet. I might take some inspiration and see what can I do. It might also be a good opportunity to learn a bit of C.

Building my own keyboard is definitely in the backlog. It’s not unusual to see people in the custom keyboard space crafting their own keyboards. I think that I miss the special part of the process by buying it.

Piero Lescano

Colophon

General

Content

Now

Reading

Finished Reading

2026

2025

2024

Uses

Hardware

Software

Environment

CLI and TUI

GUI

Adding Comments to My Blog with Giscus

Building a metronome: React vs Alpine

iCal feeds

Jailbroken Kindle

Why the need for the jailbreak?

Breaking the jail

Wrapping up

My computing setup for 2026

Basics

Window manager

Status Bar

Launcher

Audio

Power

Browsers

Terminal

Shell

Text editor

Screen ergonomics

Everything else

Status update, January 2024

Personal

Professional

Status update, February 2024

Personal

Professional

Full-text search with SQLite.

Further reading

A picker for bullet journal style checkboxes in Neovim

Status update, March 2024

Status update, September 2024

Reading

Watching

Gaming

Coding

Status update, October 2024

Personal

Reading

Watching

Coding

Status update, January 2025

Personal

Reading

Coding

Status update, February 2025

Personal

Writing

Reading

Coding

Status update, March 2025

Reading

Watching

Self-hosting

Development

Trying out the Corne Keyboard

Learning

Configuration

What’s next?