Blog

T Handle Wire Puller

2026-06-21T15:54:42Z

I’ve been fighting not having a proper pick/hook in my toolbox for a long time. This fathers day weekend my son pulled out an old box of rc plane supplies from my days trying to build planes like flight test. Inside there was a pack of piano wire.

Rules-8

Need a tool make a tool.

He had pulled this out while I had the soldering iron hot plucking away at a keeb build that I’ve had sitting idle on the workbench for a long time. The dream of having several identical working builds at the same time is very close to fruition, I just need some more work on the clone.

Posts tagged: keeb

I was struggling to pull wires through traces of 3d prints. You see I was once a mechanical engineer, not electrical, so 3d modeling is my hammer that I can turn into a tool for any solution, and I’ve just not put the time into learning pcb design. Someday maybe. I always just take some scrap copper make a little look and twist it around until I can get it close enough to pull with some tweezers.

As he has this box out and I see the piano wire, its the perfect stiff wire to use for the job. only its so thick it doesn’t even fit down inside the traces. But after a bit of filing bending a hook and handle its proving to be a useful tool in the handwired keyboard toolbelt.

T Handle Wire Puller, with just the right hook on the end, and filed down just thin enough to slip in and grab wire.

Notice I gave the hook a bit of paint, Not only does this make it easier to find, but it signifies, this is my tool, its not just a random bit of wire, its something that someone put some time and care into.

T Handle Wire Puller in Action, sliding in to grab some fresh copper.

Its working great so far with zero signs of benging, the piano wire is really hard to get bent in and out of shape unlike the soft copper wire I was using out of convenience.

Keys.waylonwalker.com

2026-06-20T20:17:10Z

Today I got sick of my go to online keyboard tester not supporting holds and fighting an issue with holds on one of my boards, I vibed out a replacement. I did a bit of work with it to get it how I wanted. gpt5.4 still likes to make lots of cards and build readable sites with a reasonable width for reading, not full page apps.

keyboard tester

A keyboard tester that works for me, how I like it

keys.waylonwalker.com

The main feature is to be able to see when alt+key or shift+key is pressed, the keyboard tester was not able to do this.

73e71d2d-eaf9-4a0a-9e04-0039a1df0b26.mp4

Here is a video of me using it.

I tend to use keyboard tester a lot as I build a lot of weird keyboards so I suspect this one to get a lot of use and may grow over time, but for now it works good enough for me.

I can already think of a whole list of features like supporting keycodes for js, pygame, zmk, qmk. But for now I’m just building what I need and not overcomplicating it.

Malicious Aur Packages Jun 2026

2026-06-16T20:27:26Z

Recent Arch linux vulnerabilities are a good reminder of a few things.

AUR is not the official package repo
The AUR is community driven
AUR packages are not always safe

The first thing I’m doing to stop myself from running any aur updates automatically is removing any arch helper.

sudo pacman -Rns yay paru paru-bin

Currently the reported vulnerabilities are supply chain attacks limited to the aur, keep your arch system up do date, BUT do not update packages from the AUR right now. In fact I’m auditing my aur usage and removing anything I have not used in awhile.

Here is a nice script I’m using to walk through my packages and get rid of things I installed and probably don’t need anymore.

pacman -Qemq |
  fzf -m --preview '
    echo "== package =="
    pacman -Qi {} 2>/dev/null
    echo
    echo "== required by =="
    pacman -Qi {} 2>/dev/null | grep "Required By"
  ' |
  xargs -r -o sudo pacman -Rns

Supply chain attacks are getting real scary in 2026, maybe we should listen to Ginger Bill a bit closer.

Prompt Seagulls

2026-06-16T08:16:58Z

I was listening to @syntaxfm this morning and @wesbos said at 328s “The prompt seagulls are driving me nutty”. 100% hard agree Wes. Now I didnt just come off of a conference where they dropped fable 5. I’ve not logged into twitter in months, but I see it around work.

prompt-seagulls