• 5 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I actually disagree there. Might be showing why I don’t work in high end product design lol, but I think as a pro model you can go a little crazy on the weight. You can probably save some thickness from under the camera bump somehow if you redistribute whatever can be displaced from under there, which would be easier in a thicker phone. Like any PCB that doesn’t need to be directly under the optoelectronics could be redesigned to go around some of the camera stuff, which would eat into the battery. But that wouldn’t be a problem when the whole thing is a mm or two thicker. 220g is probably not crazy. 250g would be pushing it. 300g would be unreasonable unless they have some real high tech stuff in there to show for it, like some kind of force touch or possibly a 3.5mm headphone connector.

    The thing is heavy. I have a heavy case on it as well, go figure. I must admit though, in the past I used to drop my phone on my face. Now I make the split second effort to dodge if I drop it. But the weight makes it feel premium. Sure, the dad test is psychological, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

    I think switching the back from all-glass to something else would help drop the weight slightly, but at this rate it’s just that there’s so much in these phones. Between the battery, the slabs of glass, the complicated cameras, you’d think fitting a headphone connector wouldn’t be so hard.














  • Might be a bit on the Zoomery side of cultural conversation compared to the rest of this thread, but the duo Her’s were tragically killed in a road accident while on tour in the US. They made songs that were cheesy but still emotionally resonant, which is a hard balance to hit.

    Their music would blow up even more online in the years following their death, I know there was a lot of of TikTok buzz around them during the pandemic, when a bunch of bedroom pop artists were gaining a ton of traction. While I hate that platform, it can be pretty good for promoting music naturally when people aren’t gaming the system (which they’re doing all the time - fuck TikTok). I think some of their famous songs are still considered TikTok clichés, but I wouldn’t really know.

    I didn’t even know they were dead until this year.

    There’s always this conspiracy of labels preferring to promote artists who are dead because they can pocket more money from dead artists, and I think about that when one of their songs pop up.


  • That’s true, but now you have to remember which server is legit. One benefit of a centralized service is that you have centralized verification, which at one time was a point in Twitter’s favor.

    I’m not very well versed in cryptography, but if I understand the certification system for websites, different sites apply to a certificate provider, of which there are multiple. Maybe something like this is possible for the Fediverse? Where a user or community or instance can be “verified” by one or more trusted verification “agencies” or whatever.



  • 96% is the best layout. All the convenience of not having a bunch of dead space between your arrows and nav cluster, with all of the convenience of having a numpad with all the nav keys your heart can want. Yes I want Home and End right there on the first layer, I’d have to go mad not to.

    You only need to choose one key to sacrifice, and I happily tucked Insert one layer under Delete. Print Screen is non-negotiable.

    I’m always so surprised to see how unpopular 96% is.



  • I’m replying to you because I’m building off your comment, but this is for the newbies in the thread

    Yep, the profile thing is really important, the majority of keycap sets have profiles (ie. the shape of the cap is different on each row of the keyboard, for comfort). That’s why some sets have several of the same key (a function key, for example), so you can drop that in where you want it.

    In the case of GMK Dots, you could probably get away with not thinking too hard about profiles, since the keys have identical legends, you should have enough keys in the right profile to build a board.

    My build uses MT3 keycaps (MT3 Extended designed by Biip and sold by Drop) for example, which have very aggressive sculpted shapes. I had to make sure that I could get the correct profile for the keys I wanted. For example, I wanted Home and End keys on my top row (96% layout), and most keycap sets will only include an End key for the row below that (and for the row below that one, annoyingly enough). But the set I was getting also had a numpad addon ( which I did want) that had extra nav keys (Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, etc) for the top row. Which makes sense, the numpad addon will primarily be used by people working on a similar concept as me.

    Mismatching profiles feels really bad, it’ll look and feel like driving on three tires and a bare rim. No thanks. Avoid that at all costs.


  • Basically keyboards are built of different parts. There are many articles, and I’m sure the old site has good resources.

    Typically you choose the case (which is the physical keyboard exterior except for the buttons), which typically comes with the brains (PCB) of the keyboard. Things like layout and size are chosen by choosing the right case.

    You choose your switches, which are the actual buttons that get pushed when you press keys. Each key is an individual switch, there are many types.

    The plastic thing you touch when you press a key is a keycap, keycaps can get super expensive super quick for the nice designer stuff, but that does apply to everything else to be fair. There are different colors and materials of keycaps, different shapes (you know how old computers have very 3D keycaps while MacBooks have super super flat keycaps?), and even different manufacturing processes that affect how long the design will last etc (if you’ve seen a cheap RGB keyboard at a modern net cafe if those exist where you are, you’ll notice some keys peeling and stuff, that won’t happen with the keyboard in OP’s photo).

    Some keys are big (like the spacebar or shift keys) and they need a small mechanism to keep them easy to press, those are called stabilizers. They sometimes come included with cases, but people like choosing nice ones and lubricating them.

    There are more secondary parts available, such as novelty keycaps, or sound deadening foam, or brass weights, batteries for Bluetooth boards, etc.

    One word of warning is that this hobby gets very expensive very fast. So you’re free to go with a standard decent keyboard if it satisfies you. Unlike other hobbies, building your own keyboard is much more expensive than just buying a prebuilt thing. But building your own feels nice, and being able to program it to do exactly what you need your keyboard to do is really easy.


  • I just hate how “toxic cesspool” is the default. I was just watching a short video on YouTube about the US city of Baltimore, a place I heard about from an old family friend who studied at Hopkins many years ago.

    The video was about the city’s decline, with the primary cause (according to the video) being the hollowing out of the manufacturing and logistics industries. The channel, Forgotten Places, doesn’t strike me as one that toxic people would be flooding to (those channels exist).

    Can you guess what every other comment is about? Hint: it’s not the abandonment of productive industry. A small number of comments name more historical industrial employers that have left the city, but by far the comments with the most upvotes are “we all know we can’t discuss what happened to Baltimore 😉😉😉😉😉”



  • The guy’s name was David. In the game, you’re chasing after an inventor who crossed different parts of the world, building giant pinball games on fields. You’re following in his footsteps, fixing the pinball games that have fallen into disarray using the lessons you learned.

    Googling a little, it seems like that was a different game called Pinball Science, also by David Macaulay. So I definitely had both, probably got them both around the same time. I vaguely remember the setting for TNWTW being an island with different buildings with different themes of things to discover.

    Those disks were super hard to get where I was, too. I live in Lebanon. My parents moved heaven and earth to get me quality entertainment, and the older I get the more I realize how much effort they put into making me a cultured kid.

    Now I really need to spin up a VM! I also want to waltz around Beaumaris Castle in Encarta, and check out all the stuff in Encarta that I didn’t know to appreciate when I was a kid.