Posts about Computers

The Lenovo IdeaPad 5 has a CoPilot where it should have a Control Key. The key simulates a combination of keys, so normal ways of mapping the key (udev/hwdb.d on Debian) do not work. keyd can hook the key, though, and present another virtual keyboard device.

There are inexpensive USB adapters that allow plugging a CW key or Iambic paddle into the computer for use with vBand or other games. The adapter presents as a keyboard, and the paddles show up as additional Left and Right Ctrl keys. If you are running keyd on the machine, its default behavior of mapping Right Ctrl to be Left Ctrl (which I guess lots of people find useful) will interfere and cause both sides of the paddle to trigger the same dit or dah. Fortunately, we can undo this broken behavior to get the key working again.

Create /etc/keyd/default.conf:

Restart keyd: systemctl restart keyd

After the mappings have been applied, you can be observe it with evtest. You’ll also see the key working in vBand.

I wouldn’t have needed keyd if it wasn’t for needing to remap the useless CoPilot key.

I’ve had Gemini CLI installed on my workstation since August 2025.

Originally, it would default to use the gemini-2.5-pro model and your "access" to that would run out for the day, and it would switch to using gemini-2.5-flash. I found the flash model to be adequate for the way I’d use it to do Clojure and ClojureScript, so most the time I’d override it to just use flash from the beginning. I thought I could kick over to pro if I found a problem for which I’d need more power.

Eventually, Gemini CLI started switching back and forth between models more intelligently, so it didn’t burn through your limited access to pro, so I no longer override it with 3.0 models.

The AI agent by itself has read lots of documentation, and it’s pretty good at Googling the answers to questions and picking something to try. (I often get a bit of analysis paralysis when trying to choose a library.) It can be surprisingly good at translating sample usage of some JavaScript library it finds into a simple bit of ClojureScript.

In my experience, it’s sometimes bad at matching parentheses, so I just fix them myself. Recently, it may be getting better, and some Clojure MCP projects can cleanup parentheses automatically.

I only ask it to do small tasks, and I closely review and test the code it generates. When it looks good, I commit and push the code, but I know I can always easily go back to a previous working version when the AI goes off the rails. I don’t have to worry too much about it getting too confused or destroying something. I tell it to forget what we were doing, /clear the context, or just restart the agent completely, and recover my known good state from git.

I find that even if it fails to complete a task, I at least learn a little from what it did, and often have an initial direction or two to explore.

It’s pretty good at keeping my momentum when working and keeping me from spinning my wheels, like pairing with another programmer.

The machines are behind a firewall and running on a read-only overlay filesystem for resiliency, so I had the machines periodically pull the event images from the website, and I can change out the images on the website any time.

This was all done with desktop autostart scripts and cron for quite some time, but eventually, we needed more control.

We wanted to have different sets of images and to be able to choose them. For a show, we may want to only show the logo, while other times might call for all the normal advertisements.

The machines have no keyboards or mice, so they needed to be controlled by a web browser. I also don’t know if they’ll start up on the same IP addresses, so I needed a bit of Javascript in a static place to have the browser search and find running slide servers.

The service on each machine now runs as a babashka script that starts upon automatic login. It pulls new images from the website and from a Google Drive, periodically refreshes them, and starts Eye of Mate (eom) to run the slide show.

The babashka script also starts a small web server on http-kit to let us to choose image sets and to trigger a refresh of the images. http-kit is provided by default in babashka.

The SRCC website is a static site built with Hugo, so I add all the events to it via an image or 2 and some YAML. It’s hard to train another normal person to do this stuff, so the responsibility fell exclusively on me. I scripted it up with some bash, but that’s still only accessible to me.

Finally, I’ve been coding all Clojure code for the past couple weeks, and I’ve started playing with Gemini CLI to see what it can do with some Clojure code.

I now have a web form available to allow others to create events for the website, and it interacts with git for publishing to the Hugo site.

The service is deployed on my normal Linux servers as a container run by podman kube play and systemd quadlet.

I can direct Gemini to make changes or add features, and I review the code, ask for corrections or just make updates myself. It’s kind of like pair programming with someone who’s really good at Googling answers and jumping to some (mostly) useful conclusions. Having the AI agent has helped maintain some momentum and saved me jumping down some deep rabbit holes before I needed. I’m asking it for small changes and iterating, not trying to get it to do everything in one shot.

Gemini’s CLI interface makes it easy to switch to another project directory and let it try some stuff on lots of my projects recently.

I had also played with Claude CLI for a day, but Gemini’s free tier is proving capable enough for me so far.