I made a split, even posted it here on c/emk, but at this point I am just too old, yes, too old to begin the training. I had no motivation to actually learn to type on the thing, but rather just wanted to make more keyboards.

This is the first one I’ve seen that made me (briefly) reconsider. Nice work!

Our house will get about 90 seconds or so of totality, so I am really stoked that I get to see it but don’t have to make it a whole thing. Only thing I haven’t decided is if I’m going to try to muscle in on my kid’s elementary school events or grab her after lunch.

If it just had three buttons, it’d be perfect. As it is, I’m using the Orbit Fusion as my couch mouse, with the “Forward” button remapped to left-click, which lets me rest my hand similar to how I would on the “classic” Orbit.

I have an Orbit Fusion for the couch. I looked at the Elecoms, but I just really like the scrollring. In my perfect world there’d be a god-damned three-button orbit with scrollring, but in the meantime remapping the Fusion’s “Forward” button lets me use it with similar ergonomics. I notice the stiction, but it’s a very minor little aspect of using the trackball, and it’s not distracting enough for me to feel like I need to replace the bearings. I did do the “rub some nose oil on it” thing and that helped some.

There are a few DIY designs floating around that use BTUs, and some have certainly made their way into ergo keyboards, but I don’t know of a commercial product that uses them.

The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user’s Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.

1. “End Users’ files, designs, models… (collectively, “Content”).”
2. “All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document.”
3. “If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service.”
4. “For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User… Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.”

The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a “Customer” and an “End User,” so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC’s license compliance folks don’t interpret things that way, though.

The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they’re doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn’t have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.

I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is… umm, a lot.

The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler’s.

FreeCAD is on its way, it’s attracting a little more money and attention, and I’m using it more and more, but I often still feel like I’m fighting it.

If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.

Linux wise, there’s just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.

I may have done a longer writeup than anybody needed the other day.

I’m amazed that we could design something that flew at all, given Mars’s atmosphere is something like 1/150th of Earth’s, but the gravity is closer to 1/3. I’m sure many people know this, but one of the bigger bits of scientific fudging in Andy Weir’s The Martian is that a windstorm would fuck up their base like that.

Ted Lasso was on point in this matter.

Space: Above & Beyond

I was enjoying the hell out of that show until they ran out of money and decided that since they were “Marines” they didn’t have to fly their ships anymore.

That was the classic “Oh Fuck! No Budget! Time travel to LA!” move. See also, Picard, season two, though I wonder if that was more to do with the cast not wanting to deal with sci-fi shit.

Somewhere in the corner, Joseph Smith is scribbling furiously…

I get that OP is almost more thinking of people’s “comfort food” works that serve that need for them personally, but Becky Chambers is very specifically writing to inspire that kind of feeling from the get-go. Life can get hard, bad things can happen, but good things too, and people (including pan-sexual bird aliens) are just living in the future the same way they do now and most of them are trying to be decent.

So I’m not using it much, because as it turns out I may like tinkering and making more than I like typing practice. My parallel project was an ultra-budget mod (like sub $50 total) of the cheapest hotswap 1800 I could find.

So that said, the upper thumbs (or lower indexes, as you say, LOL) are definitely not as convenient, but also not problematic with careful key mapping. Currently they have the arrow keys (with the other four nav keys on the second layer), the layer toggle, and the delete (as opposed to backspace). none of those should be particularly necessary for “proper” typing. Then, like I said, if it doesn’t quite come together, there are plenty of keys to spare if I wanted to cover over some of them with POS keycaps and then remap. KMK is the real rockstar here. hold down escape while plugging it in and it turns into a flash drive with one relevant python file to edit.

I like the new, sweary, bantering, characters,

Seriously. They are a breath of fresh air in a show that, while good, is not great due in part to how self-serious it can be. Bel and his husband are not “fun” exactly, but they are recognizably human as well, which makes them good POV characters.

I haven’t read the books, though I understand they’re almost unfilmable at any kind of reasonable budget and Asimov’s character work was kind of beside the point. Sounds like a faithful adaptation would be… inaccessible. There’s always a spectrum on these things, but I reckon this skews way more towards Sci-Fantasy space opera than the books did. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I do feel sympathy for those readers who dare to hope their beloved property will be the exception. Seems the only thing you can really do is pull an Expanse: write it as pot-boiling space opera to begin with, so your actual sci-fi ideas can be slipped in without scaring the suits too badly.

The show is fine, I guess. Its version of Psychohistory is basically magic; it’s a plot device rather than a complex idea to be dug into. The show is more interested in exploring themes of legacy and what it means to be family and what it means when “family” betrays you, alongside of some court intrigue soapiness. There’s a healthy dose of prestige-TV’s obsession with the “drama of paranoia” that’s not badly done, but I admit I’m kind of personally over it. Pointless secrets, poor communication, and obtuse scheming are as key to modern drama as they were to Seinfeld.

Anyway, the Gaal/Salvor/real(er) Harry plotline is still joyless and ponderous and the worst of the three despite being tasked with the heavy lifting of being presented as the “complete” one, but the other new characters actually bring some humanity and occasionally a hint of fun (is that allowed?). Poly, Constant, Hober, Bel, Glawen, Sareth, and Rue are all outshining the S1 cast, though Lee Pace finally gets to have some fun in E7.

Cross posting the writeup comment as well:

…wherein I endeavor to combine as many highly-questionable design, material, and build decisions as possible, while still ending at a usable keyboard.

• 4x14 matrix, ortho layout, and with a quick change in keymapping it could support an aggressive 1u pinky stagger. Frankly, that’s what I designed to to explore but… eh, maybe later. Similarly, a few POS keycaps could tweak the thumb cluster at the cost of a couple of keys (there are plenty to spare, LOL).
• RP2040-Zero clone running KMK firmware. I haven’t tried QMK, but like KMK a lot.
• One additional layer that remaps most of the keys.
• Hand-wired using lots of stuff, but mostly the diode legs and stranded wire from an old patch cable. We will not talk about the cold joints (seemingly none of any structural significance though) or the burnt-rosin mess that is hiding under the MCU.
• 3D printed plates and cases. Skeletonized bottom case because it was gonna take like an extra 12 hours to print each one otherwise. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Besides, I can revisit the wiring gore at any time now. For bonus points, zoom in to to see where I had bed leveling issues and figure out which of the four prints came when I started a new roll of white PLA from a different brand. 100% infill because solid plastic is best when you may have to enlarge holes, drill new ones, and generally coax a print into the shape you subsequently discover you needed all along.
• One failed experiment with using HDMI to link the sides. Eventually got all the rows and columns onto working pins, but there were ghost presses that got worse or better depending on the cord I used. Eventually just ripped it out and strung a hard line of spliced wires and heatshrink, with hot glue strain relief in holes that were intended to be covered by electronics and cable ties to hold 'em down. On the plus side, losing the large-ish HDMI breakout boards meant the tiny little Zero could fit under the case instead of up top. If there’s a next time, I’ll use two MCUs and a TRRS like a normal weirdo.
• Outemu Browns salvaged from a Filco-knockoff 104-key gamer board I used to use for work. I still love me some cheap boards, but I share an office with a nine year old, and she can deal with my clicky obsession on other boards (those other two are Box Navy and Outemu Dustproof Green, respectively).
• Literally the cheapest full set of uniform-height keys with legends, plus a few spares from some clone sets I already had. The white keys are from a $9.99 set of XDA keycaps that is about 70% staid and clean, and about 30% kawaii shiba inus. The aforementioned 9 year old likes those.
• Rubber feet from Daiso. Kinda slick. Might change them later.
• Mismatched screws because this fucker was gonna be done TODAY; no more shopping.

Somehow, the thing works perfectly.

The Good+Cheap pair from the “pick two” cliche gets overlooked. :-)

Beautiful work, btw. The people who want it will REALLY want it.

Put me in the “like it don’t love it” camp. It is very clearly Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to 90s trek, pulled some good ideas from that era’s writers, and has more heart than it seems in the first couple of episodes. Some of the character work is actually quite touching, and it seems like they’re having fun with the show, so it’s rarely a slog. Overall though, it is way too uneven to be great or even really good.

Seth is not a great actor, and several members of the cast are MUCH worse than him, like “low-end dinner theater” bad. The set design, costume, and prosthetics are pretty weak, and Seth’s sense of humor just doesn’t work for me, so in a context where he’s trying to find the right balance with a Star Trek show, it hits even more awkwardly. It’s also very specifically SETH MACFARLANE’S love letter to Star Trek, so there’s way too much emphasis on 1980-2000 American pop culture, and I say that as someone who’s only a few years younger than him. It’s distracting how narrow the set of references are in a show that traffics in them so liberally.

There’s also something just a bit off about the messaging of many of the more serious episodes, like Seth feels a need to come down on a definitive answer to the moral questions that come up. I dunno, I am having trouble recollecting specific scenes, but it’s a lingering feeling I have. I almost imagine 20-something Seth in a dorm room at RISD screaming at Picard that he should have just shot that Romulan!