Yup. I also liked this, but I’m trying hard not to just quote the whole thing back, because it’s all good.

Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own. I can’t think of a better argument for a humanities requirement than a billionaire being asked “how do we know what is real?” and responding with “cryptographic signatures.”

For the layout, KLE is the old standby and is used by several other tools. You can then import THAT into a plate generator, the one HERE by ai03 (fairly well known designer in the small world of keyboard people) is probably the best and most reliable. That will let you generate DXF files for your cutter. At it’s simplest, a switch plate, a bottom plate, and some standard brass standoffs are enough to make the physical structure. Once you have the dimensions, though, it’s not TOO hard to design a 3D printed case or a more sophisticated set of slices to go on your laser (LibreCAD, Inkscape, or even direct in Lightburn IIRC), and acrylic stack cases are very much a thing, though not so much in vogue as commercial products anymore. The board in this post started as a completely Masonite build, because my little 5W diode could cut it reasonably well. It was only in the last week or so that I took it apart and replaced the laser-cut standoff spacers with a 3D printed version with a sidewall to make it look slightly more like a finished keyboard.

For wiring, I sort of play in the kiddie pool. Most of my boards are hand-wires, and there as many tweaks to the formula as there are makers, but THIS older set of posts from Matt3o (another well known designer) is as good as any for the basics. I find Raspberry Pi Picos and other RP2040 clones easier to work with, but YMMV and the concepts are the same. I have done two PCBs. Both of them are just traces and through-holes. The first one just has a spot to run wire to a Pi Pico or other dev board. The other adds a few spots for indicator LEDs and actually crams in a spot for Pi Pico compatible board, which means it’s easier to keep my firmware on hand. For firmware, KMK is in interpreted python and is very easy to set up, but QMK and its tweaked versions for the VIA and VIAL graphical remapping software are more sophisticated and extensible.

I had to learn KiCAD well enough to muddle through (and the second PCB does have a few errors, but not enough that I had to scrap them, thank goodness). More clever people than I, actually design proper PCBs with the microcontroller and necessary components included during fabrication, and there are custom keyboards all over github with KiCAD files to look through (the “GH60” is the classic example). There are even plugins to take a schematic view in KiCAD (the line diagrams of circuits) and populate the actual physically-representative footprints based on KLE data. There are also customized libraries of keyboard-switch footprints that are a little nicer than the ones built into KiCAD (though there ARE usable ones built in).

The keyboard is one I designed myself. It doesn’t use any stabilizers, the extra parts needed to make long keys press evenly. I did this by, well, not using any long keys. Otherwise, I did as much as I could to keep it pretty mainstream, unless you touch type lots of numerical digits or need your arrow keys in the traditional shape.

It has a bigger brother with a numpad, but I had to order 5 PCBs, so for this one I simply snapped off the numpad and used a wire to bridge the one broken connection. It’s fairly low profile, using the narrowest height I could cram everything into and using switches that are reduced height above the “plate” but are otherwise normal mechanical keyboard switches. I got blank low-profile keycaps and designed my own legends and used a laser engraver (instead of an iron or press) on Cricut’s infusible ink markers. They photograph better than IRL, but they did come out pretty well. There is a Raspberry Pi Pico wired to the circuit board and running custom firmware (KMK). The rest is made of painted Masonite hardboard and 3D prints.

If you wanna know you can type in about:support into the firefox address bar and check if HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING says available. Cool stuff either way tho, thanks for sharing :)

Ahh, well in that case, it appears not, at least for this distro. “Runtime | unavailable | Force disabled by gfxinfo”

That’s the beauty here. I don’t HAVE to write anything, so it’s not technically a failure if I don’t, and either way I got to do something amusing and pointless with a piece of technology!

I’m not sure, but there’s also the Postmarket Arch-based distro that has a more polished website, and its page for this class of devices says 3D acceleration is generally working. Whether that extends to video decoding in the browser, I am not sure. I guess I could pull up some videos and see if they play well, LOL. “Jailbreaking” tablets and getting an OS someone else worked out how to install onto them is towards the edge of my technical skillset, TBH.

If you would like my thoughts on the Shakespeare authorship question or why The Last Jedi is unfairly maligned, I can help you out all day, however.

My thinking is that I tend to do better reading on an e-reader, maybe I’ll do better writing on an e-writer? If not, it’s Linux on a tablet, LOL.

I use a keyboard with an inbuilt trackpoint.

What are you using? “Tex” mechanical board, old Model M with trackpoint, one of those standalone Thinkpad keyboards?

The bliss theme, complete with activation notice, is very nifty, LOL.

LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.

This may not go how they think it will. As an aside, for the moment at least, this is only for AI used/procured by the federal government.

IMHO no version of Tetris will ever top the OG green-n-gray Game Boy version, which was also over the top Russian kitschy. The music still loves rent free in my head, and the patterns in lieu of colors define the blocks for me.

My N810 was my single favorite piece of industrial design in a mobile device. Not perfect, and use cases moved on (to say nothing of the internals), but it was so unique and thoughtful and intricate without feeling overly fragile.

I preferred Mepis. 😊

If anyone hasn’t played it, Endless Sky is a lot of fun, a top-down space trading simulator/shooter. In particular the “fun value” on low-end hardware is really good, and it handles casual session play pretty well as long as you don’t get involved in a long run or big battle when you can’t spare a few minutes.

Great, but I don’t think that graph is showing any particular spike, just a nice and gentle upward trend in share. The article also overlooks that there is a certain element of Windows and MacOS computers being replaced by tablets and phones, while Linux is already an enthusiast choice on the desktop, meaning it will be insulated somewhat and gain market share through attrition.

On the plus side, Steam and Proton and maturing DEs/distros and enshittification of Windows certainly make Linux a much more viable “normie” option than it’s ever been. We’re a far cry from the CD-ROM of Red Hat that came with my “Intro to Linux” book in 1999 but couldn’t use my Winmodem or printer and really preferred to run XWindows in grayscale.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Little one can be Tails and play coop.

This. I’d say it’s perfect for people who don’t want to tinker at all, and it’s excellent for experts who either know or will enjoy learning how to make its containerization/sandboxing/whatever approaches work out. “Tinkering” is the specific doughnut hole where it is a problem. I replaced it with Tuxedo OS because I was frustrated with trying to set up the toolset for the QMK keyboard firmware, and it turned out there’s a whole layer of things you have to do to make it work, and some of the simpler ones simply break the immutability. A few other tools I wanted to use were running into similar hurdles.

NOw, it’s not that I beleive any of this stuff was a showstopper for everyone; I have too much confidence in the community for that. I am just old and dumb and while I love using Linux, I don’t necessarily want Linux itself to be my hobby. Now all that said, my Minecraft and Starfield installs were working really well on Bazzite, and I haven’t done any gaming in recent weeks so I hope they’ll be as good on Tuxedo.

We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.

I just wiped Bazzite in favor of Tuxedo OS. I liked Bazzite a lot until I wanted to do the faintest wisp of development (setting up a new DIY keyboard with QMK). At that point I realized I’m in a very specific doughnut hole where I will occasionally want to do things that are still not mindlessly simple on an immutable distro, but I’m still untutored enough to need the walkthroughs that never include how to properly layer or sandbox stuff without just fucking up the very immutability that made it a good idea in the first place.

Shame though, as it was dead easy to install and use for basic productivity and especially games. A person with different needs and/or more skill would do very well with it. In the meantime, Tuxedo seems like a good snap-free Kubuntu alternative, and I’ve been floating around in KDE-running Debian derivatives (off and on) for decades.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.