• 67 Posts
  • 666 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle

  • Generally yes, but what are called mainline Episcopalians are “in communion” with the Church of England, so they’re kinda sorta Anglican. If an observant Anglican were to want to attend church in the US, that’s who they would look up.

    Some red-state suburban churches broke off a few years back and are in communion with one of the churches in Africa that also broke off because they didn’t like the ladies and the gays and whatnot. Very classy of them all.









  • lack of commitment, rather than any law, was the key point.

    This is the rub. Can he officially? No. But then, he can’t officially rename the Department of Defense either. What they can do is go in arrears on payments and refuse to cooperate with allies or acknowledge that a given incident involves treaty obligations, and be extremely open about all of it. The only thing the law does is give the next guy cover to walk things back because it was never formal, but by then 99% of the damage will have been done.

    Just from a sheer nuts and bolts point of view, the foreign relations damage is going to take literally decades to undo, including at least 8 years of republican administrations that top out at George W Bush levels of fascist exceptionalism. No sane government would trust the US with long-term commitments otherwise.


  • I have a halfway decent woodworking setup, plus a 3D printer and a cheap laser, but metalworking is just not really an option. The space dedication, plus the oils and the fire hazards and the scraps/shavings/slivers/chaff/god-knows-what-else all being completely incompatible with sharing a space with the rest of it. Sigh, just not likely to happen until and unless I can get in with the makerspace mafia. I am thinking of trying to figure out designing for mills and using metal-bending workbenches in CAD, though, and sending more designs off to be fabbed.







  • I think a big thing is that good prebuilts are now readily available: hot swap, foam layers, PCB stabilizers, CNC aluminum cases, a mounting system more sophisticated than tray mount, decent firmware (often properly released QMK/VIA, but at least VIA), and fun features like lighting or encoders. A late as 2022, this would have been a wish list on an interest check for a $400+ kit; now it’s a baseline to charge three digits for a prebuilt MX board.

    There are still many group buys going on at the high end (geek hack basically exists as an IC/GB publishing platform at this point), and a lot of boards are available bare bones, but when a newbie comes along for a recommendation, no one has to feel bad recommending some pre-built that would make a Pok3r look like a joke as a value proposition.



  • I mean, it helped that I knew the designer, LOL.

    IIRC, there is one single bodge wire in there from where I did compromise the matrix, but I cannot stress how simplistic this PCB design was. It is holes for switches, holes for diodes, holes to string it over to the microcontroller dev board, and traces connecting them all. My second one is slightly more ambitious, allowing a couple of layout choices, Alps or MX, and has a designated spot to solder a specific MCU. That one requires two bodge wires because I screwed up the traces a little. If I do a third, I will know to make sure every trace is assigned to a “subnet” before I tell KiCAD to clean things up.


  • Very cool!! I think your bottom row may ultimately prove slightly more user friendly than mine, though I certainly got used to it. The ortholinear number row has proven to be a non-issue for me, though I have the “advantage” of not truly touch typing, and my hand-eye coordination therefore doesn’t have too much trouble with losing that 0.5u stagger.


  • DIY board. I designed a no-stabs matrix-only PCB (the Pi Pico MCU has to serve as the “daughterboard”). It’s FRL 1800 and is one of my personal favorites, though I’ve since replaced the black spacebars with a couple of BOW keys that reflect the hold-tap mapping I set up; I’ve also changed it from KMK to ZMK.

    Anyway, PCB orders usually have a minimum order of 5 pieces, so I snapped the numpad off of one and laser-cut a case of sorts, really just plates and spacers, and got “half-height” switches. My laser can sort of half-assedly dye-sub cheap PBT blanks, so I did a Timex Sinclair design. Later, I added feet, a 3D printed replacement one-piece spacer with a sidewall, and a MagSafe ring so it could be the keyboard for a Chrometab I converted to Debian.