There are biting midges, and I presume they’re very annoying, but most don’t bite and they’re all different from mosquitoes.

For the Epomaker, not bad at all. You can either futz with your privacy settings to let it work in a Chromium based browser, or simply download the contained VIA app. I dual boot, so I haven’t tried to install or run software from RK or Redragon or any of the other brands still using proprietary software. It might work, but honestly I am just not sure. If you do have to dig up a Windows PC, any changes you make should be stored on the keyboard itself and will be persistent across reboots. On the plus side, it isn’t so much the driver you have to be woriied about. It is just USB HID. The onyl issue is whetyher you’ll be able to remap keys and adjust lighting without resorting to whatever Fn+Key combos Royal Kludge builds in.

As I mentioned, Epomaker are no saints, and stories of their poor customer support are numerous. Buy from a third-party retailer (Amazon works well if you can stomach it) with a generous return policy and assume you’ll need to make a final decision by the time the return window closes. Beyond that, they just commission factories to do a run of a given board and re-badge it. Sometimes no one else does the same board, sometimes several someones do. They’re a glorified White Label, but that has the benefit that sometimes the hardware itself is quite nice.

For the switches, the same basic types still exist as with Cherry, but that market has exploded since their patent ran out. There’s still clicky (self explanatory), linear (smooth action on press), and tactile (a bump of some sort that requires extra pressure to overcome, but not intentionally noisy). There are also still multiple weights. The original Cherrys and clones are still around as a baseline: Red = Light-medium Linear; Brown = light-med Tactile; Blue = medium clicky. Heavier versions of each are Black, Clear, and Green, respectively. If the name of the switch is any more complicated than that (e.g. “Epomaker Wisteria,” or “Holy Panda” or the like), you need to parse the listing to see if it’s the type of switch you’d like. Switches also frequently come lubed from the factory these days, which can be nice for Linears and Tactiles.

I haven’t tried that board, but yeah, your options in that range are limited. I might consider instead the Epomaker Split65. You lose the macro keys but gain a knob and VIA. Neither RK nor Epomaker are particularly good citizens when it comes to respecting the QMK open source license, but the actual usability of the Epomaker on VIA is going to be better, and sometimes they contribute their firmware back. Low-end closed-source Keyboard software is generally quite bad.

Actual typing quality could be a deciding factor. To that end, I’ll happily let others weigh in. Worth noting to make sure you get switches you like, which may mean getting replacements. The RK seems to have “fast linears” (so early actuation point and often a fairly light spring) or Browns (tactile, and generally no better than “okay”), while the Epomaker has somewhat light linears (45g) or very light linears (45g).

I haven’t really thought about anything remotely in spitting distance of sim racing since I was playing XBox One Forza games (mostly the Horizon one that is set in the Riviera-ish region) with a Thrustmaster TMX (I think?) clamped to a Home Depot Fliptop table.

This looks really cool. May I assume the Moza drive unit was the priciest component?

I wonder if this has to do with actual growth of the faith, or consolidating in light of shrinking temple attendance, which is different from and more exclusive than church attendance . Western Europe in particular can’t be fertile proselytizing ground these days.

Oh, and my personal experience is a couple of decades out of date by now, but ExMo here. Happy to field questions. I’m no fan of the church, but I try to be somewhat even handed when discussing with folks.

My groom’s cake at my wedding was Tux.

I’m not even particularly hard core, lol. I still dual boot my desktop because of CAD, and I have to look up most console commands more complex than cd and cp and apt, but I’ve been using Linux off and on for over twenty years.

It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”

Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.

Even the AI generated animated eagle at the bottom of the page is like, “WTF is this? Why are you even looking at this bullshit? This is all a terrible idea.”

Thanks, Richard.

I learned to shoot at Boy Scout camp when I was about 13. We shot .22 long rifle and 20 gauge shotguns. Many of my friends hunted (never appealed to me) and learned even earlier.

I would just about bet Meshy AI gave a “non-manifold” model. 3-D models that are intended to be digital assets can have that issue, and I would suspect it’s easier for an AI to produce them versus properly manifold objects ready to be made solid.

There are ways to fix them though, and Meshy even has their own suggestions (Blender and Meshlab).

Gee, I wonder which political party they belong to…

More than a dozen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and hundreds of municipal officials have been arrested in recent months for alleged corruption…

Yup, there we go.

For the layout, KLE is the old standby and is used by several other tools. You can then import THAT into a plate generator, the one HERE by ai03 (fairly well known designer in the small world of keyboard people) is probably the best and most reliable. That will let you generate DXF files for your cutter. At it’s simplest, a switch plate, a bottom plate, and some standard brass standoffs are enough to make the physical structure. Once you have the dimensions, though, it’s not TOO hard to design a 3D printed case or a more sophisticated set of slices to go on your laser (LibreCAD, Inkscape, or even direct in Lightburn IIRC), and acrylic stack cases are very much a thing, though not so much in vogue as commercial products anymore. The board in this post started as a completely Masonite build, because my little 5W diode could cut it reasonably well. It was only in the last week or so that I took it apart and replaced the laser-cut standoff spacers with a 3D printed version with a sidewall to make it look slightly more like a finished keyboard.

For wiring, I sort of play in the kiddie pool. Most of my boards are hand-wires, and there as many tweaks to the formula as there are makers, but THIS older set of posts from Matt3o (another well known designer) is as good as any for the basics. I find Raspberry Pi Picos and other RP2040 clones easier to work with, but YMMV and the concepts are the same. I have done two PCBs. Both of them are just traces and through-holes. The first one just has a spot to run wire to a Pi Pico or other dev board. The other adds a few spots for indicator LEDs and actually crams in a spot for Pi Pico compatible board, which means it’s easier to keep my firmware on hand. For firmware, KMK is in interpreted python and is very easy to set up, but QMK and its tweaked versions for the VIA and VIAL graphical remapping software are more sophisticated and extensible.

I had to learn KiCAD well enough to muddle through (and the second PCB does have a few errors, but not enough that I had to scrap them, thank goodness). More clever people than I, actually design proper PCBs with the microcontroller and necessary components included during fabrication, and there are custom keyboards all over github with KiCAD files to look through (the “GH60” is the classic example). There are even plugins to take a schematic view in KiCAD (the line diagrams of circuits) and populate the actual physically-representative footprints based on KLE data. There are also customized libraries of keyboard-switch footprints that are a little nicer than the ones built into KiCAD (though there ARE usable ones built in).

The keyboard is one I designed myself. It doesn’t use any stabilizers, the extra parts needed to make long keys press evenly. I did this by, well, not using any long keys. Otherwise, I did as much as I could to keep it pretty mainstream, unless you touch type lots of numerical digits or need your arrow keys in the traditional shape.

It has a bigger brother with a numpad, but I had to order 5 PCBs, so for this one I simply snapped off the numpad and used a wire to bridge the one broken connection. It’s fairly low profile, using the narrowest height I could cram everything into and using switches that are reduced height above the “plate” but are otherwise normal mechanical keyboard switches. I got blank low-profile keycaps and designed my own legends and used a laser engraver (instead of an iron or press) on Cricut’s infusible ink markers. They photograph better than IRL, but they did come out pretty well. There is a Raspberry Pi Pico wired to the circuit board and running custom firmware (KMK). The rest is made of painted Masonite hardboard and 3D prints.

If you wanna know you can type in about:support into the firefox address bar and check if HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING says available. Cool stuff either way tho, thanks for sharing :)

Ahh, well in that case, it appears not, at least for this distro. “Runtime | unavailable | Force disabled by gfxinfo”

That’s the beauty here. I don’t HAVE to write anything, so it’s not technically a failure if I don’t, and either way I got to do something amusing and pointless with a piece of technology!

I’m not sure, but there’s also the Postmarket Arch-based distro that has a more polished website, and its page for this class of devices says 3D acceleration is generally working. Whether that extends to video decoding in the browser, I am not sure. I guess I could pull up some videos and see if they play well, LOL. “Jailbreaking” tablets and getting an OS someone else worked out how to install onto them is towards the edge of my technical skillset, TBH.

If you would like my thoughts on the Shakespeare authorship question or why The Last Jedi is unfairly maligned, I can help you out all day, however.

My thinking is that I tend to do better reading on an e-reader, maybe I’ll do better writing on an e-writer? If not, it’s Linux on a tablet, LOL.

The short version is simply that the Romans exported their state religion to areas they conquered, but they didn’t try to completely obliterate place names and existing culture in most places. This temple fell into disrepair and was covered by other rubble before it would have been taken over as a church or mosque, and the sheer size of the complex it was part of meant it wasn’t fully harvested for building material. It was excavated around 1900.

Also, lucky you! Today, you get to learn about Roman public religion and quasi-official syncretism!