You might find embedded systems development more up your alley. The hardware is always broken in some way and you often have to get very creative to work around those deficiencies. Especially when there's an ASIC involved.
You'll get to experience a whole different class of aneurysms ;-)
I use KUL Se-87. I forget which keys are in it, but I wish the springs were a little heavier. Maybe I just need to learn to type more gently. I use it on mac, windows, and linux all the time (via a kvm switch).
My finger joints are all messed up from decades of typing on computer keyboards.
> A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film just looks "real"
And what of larger formats? Where do you get your 4"x5" digital back, or 8"x10"? Maybe you can do it with a scanning back, but it's hardly equivalent.
I got custom progressive lenses made with a 'computer' prescription. This has my eyes relaxed when looking at my normal screen viewing distance (approximately arm's length) but gives me more magnification when looking down, e.g. at the keyboard or anything on my desk. This has worked well for me.
> I want things I can use in Makefiles and properly script, that are available in my distro of choice and that generally work in the same fashion as the tool chains I’m used to.
You can use the assembler, linker and other tools that come with mplabx in a traditional tool chain, with Makefiles, scripts, and your editor of choice.
Sorry I can't provide links. But I work for a large tech company, currently qualifying SSDs for a new project. We ran into serious bugs with drives from a particular well-known SSD manufacturer (certain workloads cause drives to become unresponsive until power is cycled) and were able to demand detailed root cause analysis. In at least two cases they uncovered new bugs in code that had been inserted purely to improve the numbers for 4k random writes on certain benchmarks. These are consumer drives, not enterprise, and are current production.
I had it done about 3 years ago so I could drive or use a camera without glasses. It lets me buy el-cheapo reading glasses & sunglasses (previously needed prescription), so I can have as many pairs as I want. (I'm over 50, and Lasik does nothing for accomodation).
My night vision is actually better than before. This is because I had to wear glasses before, and if they weren't prefectly clean, I would see halos & streaks. I had difficulty keeping my glasses clean.
There was one minor unexpected side effect. I do some work with lasers & optics, and since the surgery, a laser focussed to a tiny spot looks to me like a cluster of spots, which is an annoyance.
So lots of benefits, and no real complaints. However, looking back on the experience, I'm shocked at myself for doing it, and taking the risk that I could end up with serious vision defects. I was lucky that I had a good result, but my attitude has changed since then. I doubt I would make the same choice now.
I put zero effort into making code compile right the first time. The compiler (gcc) is much faster at finding errors than I am. Where I do put effort is into making sure the algorithm is correct, something the compiler is not so good at.
You'll get to experience a whole different class of aneurysms ;-)