squeedles · HackerLangs

That looks really nice! I haven't spent much time with split keyboards, particularly the extreme ergo things like that but I am very tempted!

squeedles

5 days agodiscuss

Yea, generally you have full size/108 key boards, tenkeyless (no numpad but other layout unchanged), then 75%/65%/60% which all condense the function row and arrow key block to varying degrees. TFA depicted an extremely condensed (and split) keyboard without even a number row. No idea what to call that.

squeedles

5 days agodiscuss

65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.

Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.

squeedles

9 days agodiscuss

Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.

They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.

Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.

squeedles

18 days agodiscuss

Color is magnificent and I can't believe we've lost so much joy on our relentless march to hyper-optimized profit. I recently read another article about how everything has gotten more monochrome, will try to find it again.

In scanning some slides from the 1970s, I was struck by the colors of the pants! Bright! Stripes! Fun! I sew shirts and gravitate towards bright prints, and everything tends to stand out because clothing in general doesn't seem as varied today.

EDIT - Found many articles along the same lines, some even with the same images. This isn't the original one that I was thinking about, but it is equivalent

https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color

squeedles

last monthdiscuss

Was excited to hear that they have a lower power rad-hard snapdragon system going into the new missions! The RAD 750 is basically a 30-year old IBM RS-6000. Very well known, but has been the goto CPU for way longer than I thought it would be.

squeedles

last monthdiscuss

When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.

EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...

squeedles

last monthdiscuss

Almost forgot the OG Bungie hit Pathways Into Darkness! I keep that on my Basilisk env too for the occasional hit of nostalgia.

squeedles

last monthdiscuss

I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.

And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!

It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!

squeedles

last monthdiscuss

I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.

I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

Every corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then.

The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

Are you talking about the Jellyfin server? It is quite an active project. Last release was 10.11.8 about a month ago, and github says that there have been 1049 commits to master since then.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.11.8

The clients are even more active

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

FYI, getting hardware acceleration for Intel working with Jellyfin is pretty straightforward. The key thing is that you have to put the server acct into the render group, then pass through the dri device. I also pass through the video group, but I don't think that is strictly necessary. NVIDIA seems a bit different but I can't speak to that. Docker compose file looks something like the following (uids and gids may vary)

  services:
    jellyfin:
      container_name: jellyfin
      image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
      pull_policy: always
      user: "1007:1003"  # jellyfin / jellyfin
      group_add:
        - "44"   # video
        - "992"   # render
      network_mode: bridge
      ports:
        - 8096:8096
        - 8920:8920
      volumes:
        [ ... config, cache, and content ... ] 
      devices:
        - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.

It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.

A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.

Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.

I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.

I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.

I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.

Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.

squeedles

2 months agodiscuss

I large part, the sticker trend is so that people can distinguish one gray rounded slab from another. It is the reaction, not the cause.

squeedles

3 months agodiscuss

Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.

squeedles

3 months agodiscuss

Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.

On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View

squeedles

4 months agodiscuss

Shut up and take my money!

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