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The BYPO layout: Trying to create a layout optimized fo French (and English) for Corne-style keyboards
  • That's actually a good point. I've read Optimot's design goals and I'm working on a new revision where é and à are moved to the base layer since they are more common than a lot of consonants.

  • Prototype homemade ergo split MkII
  • That was actually very similar to my first prototype but I went another direction.

  • The BYPO layout: Trying to create a layout optimized fo French (and English) for Corne-style keyboards

    Coming up with a new layout is HARD :D

    The main constraints of a Corne-style keyboard is that there are much less keys available than what's necessary to write any latin-script language besides English.

    One of the main design principles I had was to push all accented characters on an accent layer, breaking with Bépo where almost all of them are directly accessible (but need a full-size keyboard to work), despite some characters like é or à being much more common than Z or K for example.

    My main goal was to optimize for French first, English second. Home row is pretty good for both and based on the Bépo layout, except U which seems pretty useless in English. Top row is OK I guess. More skewed towards French, but still rather optimized for both. Bottom row is good for French despite keeping the ZXCV cluster, the right part is not great for English. W and K are pushed to slightly less accessible positions because they are basically never used in French. But they are relatively common in English. So IDK.

    15
    WipEout Pure/Pulse: Goteki 45 custom dyesub PBT keycaps
  • FX300 Angular. Basically the WipeOut Pure typeface.

  • Prototype homemade ergo split MkII
  • I always program my arrow keys to have PgUp/PgDn/Home/End, so technically they do two things 😅. I'm working on the layout and all of the layers are crammed already. I may have to abandon features tho, the way I see it I would need to free 8 keys on the function layer to make things work.

  • Prototype homemade ergo split MkII
  • Yeah but I really like having physical arrow keys 😅

    I've never been a fan of the vi-style keys.

  • Prototype homemade ergo split MkII

    Thanks to everyone here for the suggestions. Key pitch is now 19mm, I've removed the top row and added a second index column.

    I'm not really pleased with the arrow pad placement, but I haven't found any better place yet.

    I'm still working on the layout...

    10
    Why Personal Cloud Storage is so bad on Linux?
  • Yeah yeah, AOSP and all that. Despite, Android is made primarily by Google to push Google products and most apps depend on Google services. For all intents and purposes, Android is a first party OS for Google.

  • Why Personal Cloud Storage is so bad on Linux?
  • Google literally owns Android tho.

  • Figuring out ergonomics thanks to 3D printing
  • Ergogen

    No, good old TikerCAD and a lot of free time :D

  • People with completely custom non-english layouts, how do you program them?

    Especially on QMK/TMK, especially non-english ones.

    Do you mangle the QWERTY layout to fit your needs, especially when there is no correspondence between QWERTY and you language's layout or do you send directly Unicode characters?

    I'm working on a French, Bépo-inspired, completely custom layout with full access to diacritics and ligatures. The keyboard must be OS-agnostic as I'm using Linux at home and Windows at work, and should be completely compatible with the AZERTY layout as understood by the OS and need no install or configuration on the PC as work PCs are usually completely locked-down and don't allow input layout modification.

    Letters like é, è, à, ç, and ù are directly accessible on the AZERTY keyboard, so a bit of mangling should work (despite ù being used in a single word in the entire language but whatevs)

    My concerns are:

    • ê, ë and so on are pretty common but need a dead key to be typed. Not ideal. It might be possible with a macro, but Unicode might be more efficient.
    • æ and œ are completely absent from AZERTY and cannot even be directly typed on windows despite appearing on very common words like cœur or bœuf. They are hidden behind AltGr-A and AltGr-O in Linux tho. Unicode is a must.

    Thanks!

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    Figuring out ergonomics thanks to 3D printing
  • I have very large hands so it's mostly fine. Thanks for the standard spacing tho, I used 20mm because it was convenient 😅

  • Figuring out ergonomics thanks to 3D printing

    Rapid prototyping is an incredible tool nowadays. I started working on this concept a few hours ago, and I can already try out if it works. Turns out, it kinda works. I will lower the pinky rows and

    I love my printer!

    3
    What was the most illegal thing your workplace has done?
  • Funnily enough, they are. Some tech millionnaire invested in them just after I (and 90% of the IT staff) left.

    We all thought he was going to be another whale that they would bleed dry. But he actually took over and changed a lot of things.

    So, for now, they still exist. I don't know how or at what cost, but they still exist. I wouldn't go back there for all the money in the world tho, I'm pretty sure the corporate culture is still toxic af.

  • What was the most illegal thing your workplace has done?
  • I used to work IT at a company that leased electronic stuff to the general public. Oh boy were they shitty. Keep in mind, this is in a Western European country where employees and customers have actual rights.

    There was a general policy of harassment and intimidation. Sexual harassment obviously. The female staff was constantly "ranked", outfits were loudly commented. By management.

    Sometimes you manager came next to you at 6:25PM. You've already been doing free overtime by then but utterly stupid management means sudden, unpredictable and hard deadlines. He would lit up a cigarette in your face and keep you until 10PM. Sometimes the deadline was so short and "important" people had to work until 5AM. For free (well, pizzas). And show up the next morning at 10 (instead of 9, woo).

    Managers kept threatening you to cancel your holidays the day before leaving if you didn't do this and that. Sometimes people had to connect from their vacations to do stuff because they were "critical" for something.

    Money was a funny thing. We were constantly paid late. Sometimes more than 2 weeks late. Everyone who wasn't an employee wasn't paid at all. Not the rent, not the building staff (the toilets were FILTHY), not the contractors who remodeled the floor when we moved in, not the suppliers and especially not the IT contractors. I came in on day and found that I lost my entire team because their employers has never been paid.

    One day, they lost a major investor because they lent money to purchase stuff to lease, not burning it in massive management salaries. As a collateral, the investor left with the customer database. So they were back to square one. So, as a get-new-customers-quick tactic, they created dozens of too-good-to-be-true promotions, like giving out electric scooters for new subscriptions and the like. With of course zero intention of honoring them out, since there was no money.

    I could go on and on. Everyday there was new, shitty, borderline illegal stuff going on.

  • Flatpak vs Snap vs Native Packages
  • From a technical point of view:

    • Appimages are like MacOS .app programs. You download a random executable from a random website, that contains everything it needs to run. It's the antithesis of the Linux way. Great for portability, awful for everything else. There are no automatic updates unless the developer explicitly bothers to implement them.
    • Snaps are like docker containers. Each snap also contains everything it needs to run, but at least there is a centralized update system.
    • Flatpaks are like another package manager layered over your OS. It manages its own dependency system isolated from your main dependency management. It updates its stuff pretty much like apt/dnf/pacman.
    • Native are managed through your distro's package manager, obviously.

    From a feature/version point of view:

    • If you have a bleeding edge or quickly moving distro, native packages are fine if you want/need up to date software. Arch users shouldn't need Flatpaks for example. The downside is that those packages are made by the distro's maintainers so can be anywhere from untested pre-release software (happened in Manjaro) to extremely outdated (like in Debian oldstable).
    • Flatpaks/Snaps/Appimages are more and more maintained and packaged by their developers. It's great for them as you only need to package once, all bug reports are on versions you control, and you don't need to depend on a distro's maintainer time and will to push updates to users. For stable distros users, this is theoretically the best of both worlds: a stable, tested OS with up to date user facing applications.

    From a philosophical point of view:

    • Appimages and Flatpaks are fully FOSS. Flathub is the dominant ways of distributing Flatpaks but anyone can create a competitor.
    • Snaps are distributed through Canonical's Snap Store, which is not FOSS and is vulnerable to Canonical's corporate meddling.

    My personal preference:

    • Flatpaks for GUI apps, native for CLI tools
    • Appimages as a last resort if it's the only way to get a specific app.
    • Snaps never.
  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • Ancillary Justice is so good!

  • What are some good hobbies/interests for someone in their mid thirties to pick up?
  • Do you like beer? Is is legal to home brew in your country? If both are yes, brew beer.

    It's easy, it's delicious, it gets cheap quickly especially compared to most microbreweries, you'll always have a brew to share with friends without having to run to the store.

    Always brew with friends. You can drink beer and have fun on brew days. It's much easier when there are 2-3 people around to lift stuff. You can delegate responsibilities. Share the cost of ingredients and the resulting beer. You can even "associate" and buy the hardware together. Trust me, you will never run out of volunteers.

    Go all grain from the start instead of going extract. Start with something simple with as few ingredients as possible like a stout or a pale ale to get the feel for it. Then brew more complicated but tried and true recipes. Then you can start and go crazy with your own recipes.

    And if anything goes off plan, RDWHAHB. Relax, don't worry, have a home brew. It's hard to make a truly exceptional beer, but if you follow most basic principles it's even harder to fuck up so badly that you brew something truly undrinkable.

  • What are some good hobbies/interests for someone in their mid thirties to pick up?
  • Film photography can still be pretty cheap compared to digital. Any prime 50mm-ish from the last 70 years will be at least decent to great, any manual camera from the last 50 years is will be good if working. A lot of East-Asian and Eastern European bodies and lenses from the 70'-90'don't hold much value but a lot are very competent workhorses. A lot of (especially Japanese) "basic" lenses like the SMC Taks, most Canons and Nikons have gotten very expensive tho because nowadays people can easily adapt them to any MILC for that "vintage" look.

    Go black and white, buy a bottle of Rodinal (or any clone) and a film tank. They will both last forever.

    Good b&w film like Ilford FP4+ is getting expensive tho, but you can still burn through 50 rolls before reaching the price of a decent, entry level cropped frame DSLR or MILC. Double or triple that if you want a full frame digital camera.

    Plus, a full manual setup is an amazing learning tool, and having only 36 shots per roll force you to stop and think before shooting anything.

    Only potential problem is that scanning negatives can be tricky without buying a film scanner.

  • A typical roasting day
  • Oh sorry for misunderstanding 😅

    I watched a lot of videos to understand the basic principles, read a lot of forums and blog posts about roasting and the gene in particular, completely fucked up my first 5 roasts, tried half a dozen "recipes" before finding something that works for me 😅

  • New pen tray

    Designed and 3D printed by me to fit an Ikea Alex drawer unit, my pens and Diamine inks.

    3
    A typical roasting day
  • Because why not? "it's gonna be a fun hobby", "my local roaster is too expensive, it will pay for itself in 3 years", "I wanna try beans I can't find at my local roaster's"...

  • Today I discovered Distrobox and it saved my day by letting me install an old-ass, unmaintained app that's only packaged for old Debian

    Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)

    I brew beer as a hobby. I've been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it's FOSS and super simple to use, and I'm too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It's been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial "piece of equipment" since I migrated to Fedora.

    Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.

    36
    WipEout Pure/Pulse: Goteki 45 custom dyesub PBT keycaps

    This post was originally posted on r/mk in 2023. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

    I have a "rare" layout. ISO French and all-1U bottom right cluster. For years I struggled to get decent keycaps. I could either make do with uniform height keycaps or get them printed. For years, there were very few alternatives. My previous keycap set was printed by MaxKeyboard, but they never felt very good. So when I heard that a small company (Goblin Tech Keys) made custom dyesub keycaps, I decided to give them a shot.

    !details

    The positives:

    • Custom PBT dyesub keycaps yay!
    • They're a very small team, and customer support is very personal
    • Printing quality is great
    • I spoke with them about my weird layout, they sent me a template file within minutes.
    • It took them less than a week to print and ship everything. I'm still waiting for my KAT GB from 2021.

    The negatives:

    • When I spoke to them about some of the bigger issues, they said they would send replacements but never did.

    What's not good but was probably my fault

    • Color accuracy probably would have been better if I used a CMYK colorspace instead of RGB.
    • Geometric backgrounds with lots of straight lines shared between keycaps should be avoided. Background alignment is a mess. Some backgrounds parts were moved or missing because they rework the template files. Legends alignment is fine.

    It took 3 working days to get here from Malaysia with DHL (seriously, fuck those thieving cunts at DHL tho).

    All in all, I still love my new keycaps :)

    Board : XD64

    Switches : Boba U4

    Keycaps : Dyesub PBT OEM Profile, design by me, printed by Goblin Tech Keys

    9
    They might not be Royals, but they feel fit for a king

    This post was originally posted on r/mk in 2020. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

    2
    Lelit PL41TEM: Adjusting my OPV was a game changer

    This post was originally posted on r/espresso in 2020. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

    For years, I struggled with my espresso machine (Lelit PL41TEM) ever since I got a naked portafilter. I tried everything, and I thing I learned a lot and tremendously improved my skills doing so: Weighing coffee, weighing shots, timing pulls, WDT, stockfleth, nutating tamp, NSEW tamp, playing with dose, grind, temperature, bean freshness...

    I had good shots, terrible shots, and once in a blue moon excellent shots. But I never achieved consistency. I always struggled with channeling, even with super fresh beans.

    The single element that I couldn't control was the pressure. My machine was factory set at 13bars blind and I could only brew decent shots at 11 bars.

    Thanks to this video featuring my exact machine and a few pushes from people here, I adjusted my OPV to 10 bars blind, 9 bars brewing. This has been a game changer. I still pull meh shots, but my constitency is now through the roof, and even "bad" shots are actually okay.

    3
    The resurrection of an IBM Model M2 Keyboard (A "guide" with pictures)

    This post was originally posted on r/mk in 2020. I'm manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

    A fey days ago, I showed you the very first keyboard I (my parents) ever had. It's an IBM model M2 from 1989, that came with the family's first computer an IBM PS/1.

    I bought a PS/2 adapter and plugged it in my computer. Obviously, it had the dreaded "two LEDs on and nothing works" issue.

    Fortunately, thanks to u/zorberema_'s great guide, I knew what happened. The capacitors were dead and I needed to replace them.

    ! Well... Crap. Notice the Apple keyboard that... er... at least works.

    Opening it was actually easy-ish. I didn't remove all the keycaps, only the ones necessary to get to the plastic clips, so a few springs went flying around, it was messy, lesson learned. I even managed to only break a single clip. Also, mark the spaces where springs are not supposed to go. You'll thank me later. I spent an hour looking for a missing spring until I realized that I put one in an empty well.

    ! New capacitors in

    Notice how bad my soldering skills are. Pro-tip : If your friendly electronics sales-person gives you a surface mount cap to replace another surface mount cap, don't. These are not made to be soldered by unskilled humans. This 2.2uF was hell. Higher voltage is fine.

    ! All the springs are back on

    This part was long and stressful. I dropped the board once because I used crappy carboard boxes to prop the plate up, springs were flying around, it was terrifying. I don't know how I managed not to lose them all. Lear from my mistake, use phone boxes as a prop.

    (photo missing, sorry, I was both excited and scared) The trick to close a Model M2 keyboard is to keep said springs form flying around. The best way was is to peel the grey felt-ish mat from the membrane and to position it (upside down, obviously) over the springs, carefully aligning the clip and screw holes. From now on you can carefully snap the lower case back on the plate and screw it back in.

    ! Here it is, in all its springy glory!

    Form the sparse guides I found over the web, people seemed to say that this was the absolute worst part in restoring this type of keyboard. It went actually pretty smooth. YMMV.

    ! Putting caps back on and testing everything

    You can now put all your keycaps back on, testing them one at a time. I was fortunate enough to get a fully working keyboard, the membrane was intact. If the keys do not click or if you have to mash the key to get it to register, remove the cap and position it again.

    So here I am, ready to output a massive amount of decibels while working from home during lockdown.

    Stay safe my friends, keep clacking and don't let the virus get you. ___

    10
    Still having massive federation issues despite the upgrade?

    Most communities on other instances (especially lemmy.ml, but most other instances seem affected) seem still desperately empty and dead when viewed from here, despite vibrant activity as seen directly from there.

    Are there still big issues getting new and/or post lost during the version desynchronisation?

    3
    Are we defederated from Lemmy.ml or is there a massive sync issue?

    There are a lot of communities I follow there, especially the Mlem app updates.

    All the posts there as seen from here are stale and several days old. If I go to Lemmy.ml directly, there is a vibrant activity.

    What's going on?

    2
    FOSS Apple Music player Cider is EOL, what will you use?
    cider.sh Cider

    A new cross-platform Apple Music experience based on Vue.js written from scratch with performance in mind. 🚀

    The open source Apple Music player Cider is getting closed source and windows only.

    What do you/will you use as an alternative (besides Spotify)? Is there already an active fork?

    4
    Setup Sunday

    Can we make this a thing? I would love to see your setups ;)

    10
    WFH WFH @lemmy.world

    Alt account: @WFH@lemm.ee, used to interact in places where federation is still spotty on .world.

    Posts 19
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