kamen

Boardsource Lulu. Built with Gateron Silent Ink Black and MT3 Susuwatari.

It has been my most used daily board for the past year and a bit more. First split, first ortho, first custom build for me. Coming from a 75% board with traditional stagger there was some adjustment mainly due to the ortho nature (but otherwise I was already using IJKL as arrows on the 75% board for example). First couple of days I was typing at 9 WPM (down from my then usual 90-ish), I needed a week to get back up to around 70-80 (fortunately I was between jobs then, so it wasn’t critical).

In terms of layout I think this is the perfect amount of thumb keys that’s manageable for me (on the bottom left I have Super/Win, Alt, MO(1) and Space, and Ctrl is to the left of A). I have another board with more keys there and they’re not all that useful. I think however that I could do with a few more keys in the inner columns - on this board in particular if I want to use rotary encoders, I have to sacrifice the keys in the inner column, and those keys are useful for brackets and also for some primary letters in my native language (Bulgarian - it has 30 letters in the alphabet). I’ve tried home row mods, but I don’t think I can rely on those as the sole way to access a mod. I personally couldn’t do without the number row even though I have a num block on a layer - so 60-ish percent is fine for me for most things.

I’m pretty happy with the build quality. One thing I don’t like is the plastic bottom - if you don’t tighten it properly it rattles a bit, and every time I go about tightening it I’m afraid I might crack it.

I really like the MT3 profile keycaps - they basically hug your fingers in such a way that it’s pretty hard to get lost on the layout, and it also encourages proper ten finger technique. As for the switches - I get why people generally recommend lighter ones for split boards - I find those a tad too heavy. Also in stock form they’re not fully quiet and have some mush to them (I guess it’s inherent to this kind of silent MX switch). I might do a spring swap and lube at some point, or maybe swap the switches entirely (since I have another board that I lug to the office, this one doesn’t really need to be quiet any more).

Another board that I’m looking forward to is the ai03 Altair - it solves most of my gripes with the Lulu in that the case is fully aluminium and that the layout has a few more keys in the inner columns. As an added bonus the halves connect using USB-C, not TRRS. The only thing I don’t really like is that it has neither a display nor indicator LEDs - so managing multiple layers would be a bit harder unless I find a way to add a LED somewhere. I have the Dark Grey on preorder and I’m probably putting MTNU Graphite keycaps (or perhaps something like MT3 Darkness) on it.

All the boards I currently rotate between (3 at this time) have factory soldered hotswap sockets. I haven’t done much soldering myself, none on keyboards in particular. For PCBs that come assembled or unassembled I prefer to pay a bit more for assembled because it’s generally not a huge difference. Unfortunately some don’t offer that option.

I have a solderable PCB of one of the first custom boards I got a few years back and I still haven’t gotten to building it - I couldn’t commit to a specific switch, the PCB doesn’t support soldering hotswap sockets, and adding millmax ones seemed too much of a hassle. Moreover at one point they announced they’ll supply hotswap PCBs, so I’m probably going that route.

Yes.

Some laptops now have physical privacy shutters for that - and for those that don’t, you can get one that you can stick on top.

Saving a picture and posting it somewhere.

I see people making screenshots of their whole phone’s screen and posting them just to show a picture. In reality, maybe 90% of the time, if you see a picture on the screen of your phone, you can save that picture, with no pointless information around it, no black bars and so on. Even if that’s not possible, Android for example has been doing something from the recent apps screen that lets you extract a picture from an app’s screen - and that’s arguably even easier than doing a screenshot.

Electricity police, this fella right here…

Sketchy indeed. I’ve seen this as well, and the redeeming thing about it is that you’re locked out after 3 unsuccessful login attempts - so no matter how easy bruteforcing would be, there’s a safety catch dealing with it.

That Canadian tech guy. The channel has some good content, but that whole drama with the ex-employees, even without knowing the whole story, stinks of a toxic workplace, and I don’t want to support that. Plenty of other good tech-related content that I still follow - Level One Techs, Gamers Nexus, Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, JayzTwoCents.

Fro Knows Photo - used to have some good content years ago when I watched it, but started becoming more and more annoying, with clickbait thumbnails on almost every video.

SMoD - a good source for getting to know new/unknown bands in the doom/stoner/sludge metal realms, but unsubbed after the scandal.

Besides the water cooling that’s already mentioned, those could be used for example for routing an internal device out and into the I/O of the motherboard. An example would be some fan/RGB controllers that are meant to be somewhere inside the case, but are terminated with a standard USB A plug (and very few motherboards have that as an internal connector). Another example is a mini display that you could put inside the case that would need to interface with the GPU (so you’d need to route a DP or HDMI cable out of the case and into the back of the GPU).

Also be mindful that a lot of online reviews might be sponsored, thus biased. I personally do look for reviews (ideally at least 2-3 different ones), but also for opinions of users on forums and other social media.

It’d be interesting to see that answered scientifically.

Jazz JackRabbit on MS-DOS on my dad’s computer.

Same.

I have the equivalent of RAID 5 too, but mind the usual “RAID is not a backup” - if you deliberately delete something (or something goes wrong with an app managing your media), hardware redundancy won’t save you in any way; it only helps if the data is intact and you want to remedy a hardware failure.

I only back up my music collection because I put extra effort into organising and tagging everything, plus some of it is rips of CDs not available anywhere. As for movies and TV shows, I only back up configurations and catalogues of the relevant apps, the contents themselves are 1) too big to be feasible to back up and 2) 99% of the time available to re-download.

I hope this is real; and if it is, I hope there are more teachers like this.

Can I counteract that with “then maybe you should release finished products at the initial public release date”?

We need to talk about the ducks.

Wow, that’s pretty terrible. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen data caps on home Internet (edit: there were some a while ago, but those were basically cellular-at-home for places that are hard to reach with copper or optic fibre); must’ve been early 2000s. Right now I get 600 Mbps d/400 Mbps u at home and 10 Mbps d/u cellular (no data cap) for a total of under 30 EUR/mo.

This hobby in a nutshell.