There are a lot of keyboards out there inspired by the Space Cadet. You can probably spend a while picking one out. There are even some original ones still in circulation.

In this case I think you need an MIT Space Cadet keyboard (try web search), not a model F.

Added: OMG. https://www.techspot.com/news/106659-massive-173-mechanical-keyboard-tribute-classic-space-cadet.html

Added: somewhere around here I have an old Gateway keyboard that is a knockoff of an IBM Model M, I believe. If I can find it and if you want to cover the shipping cost, I can send it to you. I expect it either has an old school IBM PC plug, or maybe PS/2, but anyway older than USB. Getting it connected to a modern computer would require an adapter that might be hard to find by now. Like the model F, it is big and heavy enough that using it portably would be impractical, but I guess practicality isn’t everything.

Modern batteries = sealed inside the device and not replaceable, so you have to throw the device away when the battery craps out? No thanks.

That keyboard (even the “space saving” version) is huge and weighs a ton and doesn’t blend with the idea of a portable system. If you want to use it at home and it’s worth the expenditure to you, then fine. If I were tight on funds and wanted to homebrew a laptop I’d probably start with a cheap keyboard, with the idea of upgrading later.

I think nowadays, laptops don’t need built in keyboards for the most part. It’s ok to use a completely external keyboard. I’ve been using a Logitech K400 (wireless keyboard with USB dongle and built in trackpad) with my laptop ever since the laptop’s own keyboard broke, and it’s been fine. The K400 is a fairly crappy keyboard but it’s cheap, and it’s one of the few that I could still find with a built in trackpad. Those were once popular but now have gotten rare. I don’t know why. Depending on your power and portability requirements, you might be better off departing quite a bit from the traditional laptop form factor.

I’m not convinced at all that an ARM processor will be as FOSS-friendly as an x86. For example, I believe the Raspberry Pi still depends on binary blobs. I have no idea about RISC-V but I think the available boards cost more and have lower performance than ARM boards or maybe even x86.

I’ve been content to run Debian on older Thinkpads. If I were really determined I’d use Coreboot (or whatever the current ideologically correct fork is called), which does work on some Thinkpads. But I haven’t bothered.

The land of gallon thing is ridiculous imho.

You mean the pint’s a pound poem? It’s not even right, you know. A pint of water weighs about 1.04 lb.

That thing about the queen and the princes etc. is silly and just gets in the way. Don’t those people have anything better to do?

I wasn’t aware of much defederation from .ml. I came here from .world because .world was defederating from too many other instances. I think what we really need is a new client that connects to multiple instances and does its own tracking of read articles and stuff like that. The Lemmy federation model was well intended, but I would say it has failed. Even at the popular instances, the fediverse is fragmented, which wasn’t supposed to happen.

I would say look for a SIP carrier in Europe rather than someplace that makes you use a special app. Here in the US, twilio.com, voip.ms, and I think jmp.chat are popular. IDK about Europe or whether any of those operate there. I know you can get .au inbound numbers from Twilio but placing calls from there might be harder. What about getting an outbound VOIP service and phone number that’s actually in Oz? You’d then be connecting with a SIP client from Europe which could result in janky audio, but it’s something to try.

Google gets lots of your email either way, since many of your correspondents will be on gmail. I’ve been getting domains mostly from porkbun.com which offers free whois privacy. namesilo.com has it too.

Wait, FOURTEEN? I thought you were going to say 19 or something like that. Either way just be honest, you’re taken, there’s too much age difference, and (apparently) she’s not your type. She should meet up with someone her own age.

Don’t ever write any really private data to the SSD in cleartext. Use an encrypted file system. “Erase” by throwing away the key. That said, for modern fast SSD’s the performance overhead of the encryption might be a problem. For the old SATA SSD in my laptop, I don’t notice it.

“Why are we running from the police, Daddy?”

“Because we use Emacs, son. They use vim.”

–old Slashdot T-shirt

" In this blog, Jennifer Veitch and Manuel Spitschan introduce the Light for Public Health Initiative - an international effort to translate scientific knowledge on light and health into practical guidance. With growing evidence of how light affects our physiology and well-being, this initiative aims to make healthy lighting a public health priority. "

This looks fairly interesting. Wish the summary was included with the post.

Sometimes some pasta sauce if I have some. I had a bag of tomato powder a while back and used that, but it wasn’t so great. A 6 oz can of tomato paste works pretty well except it feels stupid to open the little tiny can and spoon the paste out.

Corn and beans, 3 ingredients. 1 cup dried beans (around 50 cents), 1 can of TJ cut corn (89 cents), 1.5 cups water. Pressure cook the beans and water for 30 minutes. Release pressure or wait for it to drop by itself depending on how impatient you are. Stir in the corn.

Before you stirred in the corn, the just-cooked beans were boiling hot, but since the corn was at room temperature, the whole mix now is nice and warm but not scalding, so you can eat it right away. Nourishing (natural protein combination), low sodium, vegan, tasty, cheap, hard to beat.

This is called a WLCSP package and the size is dictated mostly by the number of pins. There have been some for ages with 16 pins (4x4 grid), but this one is half the size at 2x4 pins, so cool. You need pretty advanced PCB fab to use them. But yes, if you go on youtube or do a web search, you can find examples of people hand soldering this type of package.

This part has 16k of flash and 1k of ram, so comparable to the lower end TI MSP430 processors, and maybe midrange by 8-bit MCU standards. It might be comparable to the ATmega parts on the earlier Arduino boards. The later (ATMega328) Arduinos have 32K flash and 2.5K ram, which is still in the same general class.

ISC=international science council, whatever that is.

Thanks. What’s wrong with the old domain, hexbear.net ?