In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

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.

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.

Oh yeah. I remember this. You learn lessons and then apply them to build a pinball system, at least in the sequel, creatively named The New Way Things Work. I spent years on all kinds of edutainment software made by these guys.

I genuinely believe that our generation got some kind of golden age for interactive educational stuff. DK/GSK were releasing banger after banger, I believe I’d still enjoy these as an adult! The virtual museums just speak to me, conceptually. I don’t know what similar stuff came after, but all the software I see young kids interacting with now is ad riddled digital nonsense sludge. Even the stuff that should be more than just entertainment.

All those old DK CDs should be available on the Internet Archive, by the way. Just need to finally get around to setting up a damn Windows XP VM and I’ll be looking through a lot of these with fresh adult eyes.

Minus the sus stuff that used to show up when anyone googled “Reddit”.

Seriously, how were we ever okay with one of the site’s flagship communities revolving around perving on children. I even remember thinking it wasn’t that bad because “hey I’m not the one using that subreddit” but wtf