Dallas, I’ve never had an issue. Houston, I got all kinds of zits and pilling and was thinking about getting or making a filament dryer before we moved. Both can be pretty humid, but the difference between 60% and 90% is significant.

Well, keycaps potentially got added to the list of things to design, but otherwise the basics are the same. There would just be an adjustment to the 2-D “plate” files you’d need to use, and you’d run into the complications from a printer build plate sooner (depending on printer and keyboard size). You might not need to go a full 20-25% though. Just 5 or 10 might be enough and then you could maybe still get away with “normal” keycaps. Different shape families of keycaps have different names, and the XDA (sold by every random reseller on Amazon) or ISA (made for one specifix brand, XVX) both have pretty large top surfaces that would help with making your fingertips comfortable and blunting the aesthetic hit of altering a dimension we’re subtly used to.

I arrived when the API protest hit (rip kbin.social). I think I’m one of the few active Lemmings who’s also still somewhat active on Reddit. However, I was always pretty mindful of how I set up Reddit, only browsed my subscribed subs, and unsubscribed from almost all the big defaults. I have since unsubscribed from (I think) all of the defaults, but I still go there to see AskHistorians, keyboard, sports, and local subs.

None of those things have a really active flow of news and discussion here, and by and large I think I’m still mostly reading comments from real redditors. To be quite honest it’s not bad. However, the bigger communities there are well and truly cooked, and the vibe here for general interest and shitposts is much more my speed. It’s not as easy to find people whose interests exactly align, but people here are cool and interesting.

Ultimately, I accept that even “Small-Reddit” like I’m using is on borrowed time and will likely be dead internet before disappearing completely. When that happens, I’ll be a little sad but I won’t be surprised. I don’t feel like it’s quite there yet, however, and until I’m ready to cut all the toxic tech-bro owned companies out of my life, singling out Reddit when I still find some value in it felt like cutting off my nose to spite my face.

For handwiring, Joe Scotto’s videos on Youtube are excellent. For something a little more old school, but maybe more accessible theoretically, Matt3o’s walkthrough from the before-COVID times is still viable.

If you want to design a PCB, KiCAD is quite usable now, and there are plugins for keyboard switch footprints and to take Keyboard Layout Editor data and place them perfectly. For me, with no EE background whatsoever, the biggest mental hurdle was understanding the design paradigm “electrical schematic first, physical layout next”. I’ve been content to leave my PCB level at the point of making the entire keyboard PCB dumb and leaving the brains of the thing to a cheap and replaceable Raspberry Pi Pico (I like the clones that use USB-C). Physically, they’re basically larger versions of this tutorial from adafruit, though I use more standard keyboard firmwares. The other benefit of a PCB is that the minimum order most places is five, so with a couple of design choices (e.g. include mounting holes and rounded corners) and some PCB standoffs, you can have two usable builds with no case at all, and a spare PCB.

We have enema bottles full of mineral oil that I use to grease hinges and wheels.

Also the preferred food-safe finish for wooden cutting boards and butcher blocks!

Electronics wise, this is absolutely an intro project if you do the PCBs how I did and leave a space to mount a Raspberry Pi Pico or similar. Then your PCB is basically structural support for some wiring and diodes, and all the actual electrical engineering is contained in a $5 dev board.

Generally the skills you need are a bit broad, but not deep at all, which suits my flighty mindset perfectly. A bit of investigating keyboard design rabbit holes (there are a surprising number of robust web tools for getting the alignment stuff for the keys), a bit of 3D printing, including assembling builds that are bigger than a build plate, a bit of CAD, a bit of PCB design (but again, ONLY a bit… there are pre-designed layout footprints for the microcontroller boards and for keyboard switches), and a bit of soldering, but generally of big and robust through-hole contacts that are hard to completely destroy.

I’m curious as to which part would be oversized? The number of keys? The spacing between them? The keycaps themselves? Any one of them would complicate things in its own way, but not ridiculously so, and potentially pretty trivially. If you’re interested in following it up, making a macro-pad or numpad is a common first project, since the concepts are identical and the end result is still useful, but the investment and commitment are low if you screw it up or decide not to move on to anything bigger.

So not launch a 90 kg projectile 300 meters? Pity.

I’ve made a bunch of completely custom mechanical keyboards with my 3D prinnter and laser engraver, a few with PCBs that hold a Microcontroller dev board like a Pi Pico or Arduino, but for more of them, I hand-wired the switches directly to the microcontroller. My biggest and smallest.

Even in Star Wars, the one he claims to like more, he sort of broke the fuzzy-time that Hyperspace travel seemed to take.

They were never explicit about travel times (and fair enough, Star Wars is what it is), but clearly in ANH they had time to come down from the adrenaline-dump of escaping the Imperials at Tattooine and settle in, such that Chewy was playing board games with the passengers and Ben thought it was going to be leisurely enough to kick off history lessons and lightsaber drills. Everything about that screams hours-long flight at an absolute minimum, and to my mind more like a few days on a tramp steamer. JJ turned it into “HERP DERP INSTANT LOLZ! The implied passage of time is BORRRRRING!”

George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he’d been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.

Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like “how many movies,” or “who’s the central core to the narrative” or “exactly WTF are Whills” can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I’ve made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it’s his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it’s your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn’t understand his own creation.

Yeah, people (including me at the time of APIpocalypse) thought a lift and shift of many communities from reddit made sense, when what we needed was general communities that would eventually poop out niche ones when their posts started to become distracting in the general community’s feed.

ROTJ was the first movie I recall having seen in a theatre; I loved it, and I still have a very soft spot for it. I can slough off criticisms of Ewoks without completely disagreeing that they were the beginning of the end and a backslide from ESB. I think I’m on the other side of the same cohort as Simon Pegg. He would have been 7 when ANH (aka just Star Wars) came out, and would only have been 13 when ROTJ came out. Unless you got into your teen ennui and “cooler than thou” mindset a bit early, 13 is still young enough to take it in with no judgment. Add another 16 years of livin’, and George pushing things even a bit farther, and yeah, JarJar is not getting the same leeway.

I haven’t tried the webcam, but everything else, including WiFi, worked out of the box for me. The KDE version uses modern Plasma and is not a distro that moves hell and high water to get something working on a potato, but overall it is designed with middle-old machines like these in mind.

I’m sure a million other distros will work as well or better, but I do like MX, and it made me smile to see a child of the Mepis LiveCDs I used 20 years ago is still around.

I’m using MX Linux (KDE) on an Early 2015 Macbook Air with a replaced battery. It’s my backup/travel laptop, but so far I like it quite a bit. No dual boot for me either. Nothing officially supported by the machine is getting updates, and even the newest OSX you can cram on there only has a year or so left, IIRC.

Raiders and Last Crusade.

Other jokes aside, it’s got a good Buck Rodgers/Flash Gordon vibe right now, though blunting the nose a touch might be prudent. What did you end deciding on joining the fins?

I see you’re flaring the end.

Smart.

Maybe still blunt the tip a wee bit.

Yes, I’ve lived in the DFW area for over twenty years. It’s home, for better or (lately) for worse. Still, I don’t think any place is hopeless, and even today in Texas there are four blue voters for every 5 red ones. We just need more Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Willie Nelson, and fewer of these Christofascist assholes.

They also don’t realize that there’s a reason Abbott had to spend millions of Wilkes and Dunn’s money to primary a bunch of Republicans in the boonies. Those Friday Night Lights rural school districts, the ones that provide any sense of place, any average-paying jobs, and any excuse to go ahead and raise your kids in BFE, those are the first ones that will get ground into nothingness by the path envisioned for vouchers and ending recapture, which the rich suburban districts want.

Of course, that frees up more land for datacenters and fracking, so…

This is pretty much it.

The 2021 freeze still looms large in people’s minds, so while the grid actually has seemed to be hanging on better in Summer and Winter, things that threaten the still-isolated power supply draw attention. Then, Oracle/OpenAI set the precedent with Stargate in Abilene that you just stand these things up in the middle of nowhere because of cheap land and easy regulatory capture of the local politicians. The evolution of municipal governance in Texas also meant that the metro areas have fairly small core cities densely surrounded by independent municipalities, which often means that the tech companies can push that model into somewhat more densely packed areas, though it’s still often the exurbs (though not always… stupid Dallas city government). That means it’s the reddest parts of the state that are seeing them spring up and fuck the residents’ personal quality of life badly enough that they actually complain. There’s a big emphasis on the “M” part of NIMBY for them (because isn’t there always?) but the fact remains that no one else in the state has a big enough “BY.”

Very few of these people are ready to bail on single-party state government because they still buy the line that everything is regulatory hell and woke BS anywhere but God’s Own Property Texas, but if they see the state completely ignore them the one time they politely ask the republicans to not fuck them quite so roughly, then it’s going to be easier to stay home during the midterms. This is particularly problematic in a year when the Dems found a candidate with a pulse but who likes the Bible and looks like a Republican, and the Republicans are stuck with their primary voters’ pick, an asshole who is as corrupt as Trump but lacks even that weird sheen of “I’m your asshole” that Trump gives off to his base. Also, and this is shallow, when you’re the party that tries to project strength and vitality, having a ticket that consists of a droopy-eyed slug and a paraplegic in a wheelchair is something you have to figure out how to downplay.

Worst part of it is that they’re probably still gonna win. A little part of me hopes this is the year, but mostly I’m just hoping it’s close enough to drag out the spending and fuck the GOP’s budget in Maine and elsewhere.