It’s been a while since that last semisuccessful attempt at wordplay in the post title. I say ‘semi’ only because I am a prime-ish example of how humility works etcetera and not because it was halfbaked-slash-unoriginal in a semifulfilling way. Anyway.

In other news, post much trepidation (brand-appropriate), hesitation (just appropriate), and calculation (GST-appropriate), we brought home a Himalayan (the 450 in Kaza Brown) the day before Onam last year.

I was a fan of the 411 from the day it launched and had been drooling over first-second-third-hand market listings ever since. Post turning 36,  watching reviews back to back wasn’t doing anything to calm down the good-old early midlife crisis. I decided to go take a test ride. R was more than fully supportive of the thing and did a stellar job of keeping her concerns from showing.

The bike was heavy and I am not as old as I was when I first rode all the 500s in Gurgaon. I could feel the weight before the first test ride but not during. That supershort ride—through horrible Whitefield-Bengaluru traffic—sold whatever was left to be sold, and got me into the typical longwinded waiting game that is the backbone of an RE-buying experience. 
I took one more longer test ride loop midway through the long wait just to be sure that the first impression wasn’t just wishful thinking etcetera. This time I chose a less trafficky day and the loops-around-town were lovely. The test-ride bike wasn’t in the best of shapes yet the engine-gearbox-suspension trio worked like butter over abrupt slowdowns and huge-ish speedbumps.

I am an equally huge fan of the older Himalayan hillrange wordmark and absolutely hate the abomination that sits atop the new 450’s tank. I asked D for the old vector file so Welpac could help me deal with the daily pain of having to look at the crossbarless capital As messing up that nice offwhite volume. That conversation helped in other ways too; D’s call to the higher ups at RE helped cut my wait time really really short. The ASM was nice enough to call multiple times to make sure the delivery happened sooner and the dealer was a little surprised it did. I kind of embarrassed R with my PDI/PDF shenanigans (thanks to TBHP) but all was well.

RE has managed to build the machine well. I am not used to their bikes having this level of finish or refinement and that is a welcome change. The Himalayan sits happily at 4–5K RPM and makes a lovely drone on revs. (This is new, coming from the low-rev-loving vibey C350.) Almost all the weight sits on top but that makes itself felt only in parking lots and awkwardly slopey traffic stops. (Of which Bengaluru has many fine examples to throw at you.) I managed to drop it once on the way to JCRoad over a pothole-at-a-90-degree-turn as the ground gave way and I had to slop for the turn. I’ve set the stock seat height to its lower setting. With that and the front footpegs folding out of the way when walking the bike through slowmoving traffic, there isn’t as much tiptoeing as I thought there would be. I watch out for potholes and low kerbs now.

Post the first service, went on a ride on the OMR–KGF stretches touching 100 and all was well. Except for all the wind hitting the helmet and all of that getting a little noisy. I’ve since upped the windshield to the touring version but haven’t tried hitting a hundred. I don’t think I am a fast rider anyway. I do look forward to some tricky uphill-downhill geography though. It will be lovely to ride to Wayanad on the twisty estate roads.

I’m keeping it a single-seater till R is fully A-OK with riding pillion. (And generally otherwise.) It is a bit tricky to refuse pillion-ride requests but I’d have it no other way. There are two Rynox Stacker (10L) bags on the tank rails and the straps for a third 30L one on the back seat, permanently. I love front-mounted panniers in general; on the bicycle there are two Ortliebs on the front forks when I am carrying cargo. I think I’ll eventually get the OEM pannier stays and switch the Ortliebs over to the 450, though.

The volumes are clean in a different way (than the 411, which I loved for how unassuming the shapes were). The little details (though not as refined as some of the other everyday machines) are lovely. The Kaza Brown colourway has the nicest stickerwork of the lot (also because there isn’t a lot of it). I’ve grown to prefer as little visible branding on the products-slash-tools I use, even as I admire boldly plastered well-designed logos on everything else, from packaging to stationery to T-shirts. Even the LCD instrument cluster does a good-ish job in presenting the information needed clearly. I think this is one of the most usable—and therefore, best—LCD layouts out there on two-wheelers today. In the analog speedo mode. In the analog speedo mode the layout takes the best parts of actual-analog clusters and complements that with really straightforward typography and colours. I wish they’d picked a monospaced face for numbers though. (It irritates me to no end when the numbers jump around as they update. On the Indie’s instrument cluster, we stick to all monospace mainly thanks to that being segmented LCD but the decision wouldn’t have changed even if it were a TFT. Lots more on that soon.) I’m ordering an AOOCCI or something for GPS soon; the navigation integration via the RE App is a gimmick at best and the lag catches up with you when in unfamiliar parts of the city.

The bike makes me want to ride more, and admire it whenever I am off it. R knows I intentionally forget grocery-list-items so I can go for another short ride. It makes me feel younger and happier on even the commutes through office-going pedestrian traffic. There are days when the Tabebuias are falling onto the windshield and sometimes hanging on to the tank-rail bags. Those days I reach the studio with a smile in my head and happy to take on some new marketing bullshit.

V took this photo in the River parking lot. He has—appropriate for a product designer—a good eye for composition and good taste in vehicles. (Committed to a cafe-racer-ed Husqy even in Bengaluru’s moving parking lots.) We’ll soon go for a ride together I hope.

Got this split keyboard a few weeks ago. Haven’t been able to use it well enough to reach a good enough WPM. But I am typing this post on it to keep the spirit well connected. This is a completely new and different way to access letters, and that slows one down a fair bit. (As intended.)

It is a Sofle V2 that M from the IMKB Discord built. There are blue Gaterons under the Orthilinear keycaps from Meckeys. The TRRS cable is the weakest link in this daisychain. Looking forward to getting a custom one soon. The rotary encoders work as brightness and volume knobs at the moment. 

Last week R had a muscle spasm and it was really bad. She couldn’t move at all for three days. We took an (ill-decided) ambulance to the diagnostics center and that ride was all kinds of horrible. She’s back to walking—with some pain sometimes, but walking—thanks to physio and pain meds. The whole ordeal made us appreciate the good parts of life and realise again how bad most of life is for most people. More on all this later.

The Orbit makes mouse-movements fun. Makes me want to download IOGraph again.

There is a near-divination-like quality to how the forefinger-middlefinger-trackball operates. I pretend (in my head, I’m not that confident yet to be seen as an odd character at the business-casuals-weekly-standups-type workplace setting) to be dealing with bezier-spirits and calling on them to help deal with filled-to-the-brim layouts and unwieldy InDesign files and curves that change direction without telling you.

I bought this on a whim, having decided to experiment with input devices. My tool-use had gotten boring towards the end of last year. Now every trip to the menu bar feels like a mini-adventure.

It is not as accurate as the Logi Lift. Or perhaps I am not as accurate with it as I am with the Lift, yet. It is predictably inaccurate, though.

I have come to appreciate predictable inaccuracy after living with the Huion-with-its-own-mind for almost a year. The inherent newness of the trackball-led mousing is the only reason this device ‘feels’ inaccurate—is what I think. And that is something one can learn to deal with. It is like knowing how a certain hardware component has its quirks (predictable quirks, even if temperamental) on a device (or a tool or a vehicle) that you use everyday. (Podimol has a heavy clutch that needs a gentle pulling-out every 3/4 presses. That has now become muscle-memory and works well. The front brakes on my FourCorners sqeal once evry two/three rides and needs me to keep the lever half-pressed—like I am autofocusing them—for half-a minute so they stop.) The Orbit needs lasersharp focus working with bezier curves and text editing or anything that involves x-and-y-axes movements at the same time. The general accuracy one needs to work with for such tasks naturally maps to moving the trackball. It is nice how that trains your hand to be sensitive to small movements, too. Unlike the Huion, the Orbit doesn’t randomly ‘jump’ pixels at will especially when you are hyperfocused and making precise small movements. The clicks are not tied to the cursor movement, so the little jerks-on-click are no longer a thing.

The tablet feels actively hostile while the trackball feels like a challenge one needs to (and can) step up to.

The best use-case for the Orbit (or any trackball device, apparently) is with multiple displays and a less-than-ideal desk setup. The mouse doesn’t need to move around for the cursor to move, leaving a lot of area on the desk free for junk-accumulation and ‘research.’ Or just junk accumulation called research. The Orbit covers a lot of screen real estate with simple short flicks of the trackball and scrolls independently with the the scroll wheel. (The scroll wheel isn’t as fancy as the ones on an MXMaster or even the lift—no free-flow-scroll, no ‘weight’ to the scroll for it to ‘feel’ like quality—but works reasonably well with finer control than a typical vertical wheel.)

What I miss are the customisable buttons. Unlike the Lift or the tablets, there are no ‘extra’ buttons to help with ‘reverse/forward’ or ‘sideways-scroll’ or ‘snap-to-grid on/off’ on the Orbit. There is a two-button combo one can activate via the KensingtonWorks software, but that means leaving yet another input-tracker running in the background all the time.

After an unusually long wait and umpteen phone calls, the GAS67 arrived yesterday while I was out paying someone to wash Podimol. The budget-ness shows in its material choices but I say that only because the K2V2 seems slightly better built; not because I know what impeccable aerospace grade plastic on a keyboard flexes like.

In the picture are the BinePad BNK9 with all kinds of switches thrown in and to the right is the well-loved Logi Lift. (You can tell by the oilspill on its side.) I’m never going back to regular mice as long as I can.

The switches are mostly red (Gaterons), peach (Akkos), and black (also Gaterons). it is nice (in a way that surprises me everytime I type on it) and soft and silent. I am making typing mistakes more often though. I think the XDA profile caps are a little too flat to give you any tactile feedback on which row you’re on. (Or I believe that is what is happening.) They look nice though.

The 67 key layout has its problems, too. The K2V2 is 75% and has all the necessary keys for work. The Tilde on the GAS67 here is all the way to the other end on the top right and switching between files isn’t that easy anymore. I believe the multicolour Apple makes up for that inconvenience in style points.

There are no media keys so I’ve Karabiner-ed the PgUp and PgDn keys to work as media buttons (and a Complex Modification to convert them to volume keys on Shift-modifying). It will get better with time, I hope. The function key is still hardware-bound and doesn’t show up in the Karabiner-EventViewer. Will need to figure out something, or use CIY’s keyboard tool on a PC to switch that out to report some other keystroke.

This was my first time assembling a keyboard, so bent a couple of pins on a couple of switches. Most I’ve bent back since. I am guessing that won’t affect stuff in the long run as long as I don’t keep switching them around. (Laughs at own joke.)

I haven’t used this for work work yet. Not sure if going back to blue switches is something I’ll decide on yet. I miss the clickiness of them switches, though. The feedback was nice to have. These are creamy and feel effortless but that maybe why there are more spelling mistakes now than before. Like B said, I don’t usually have buyer’s remorse even in the face of light evidence.

Poppy’s hair has already found its way onto the board. I guess that means she’s accepted into the family now.