WFH

Coming up with a new layout is HARD :D

The main constraints of a Corne-style keyboard is that there are much less keys available than what's necessary to write any latin-script language besides English.

One of the main design principles I had was to push all accented characters on an accent layer, breaking with Bépo where almost all of them are directly accessible (but need a full-size keyboard to work), despite some characters like é or à being much more common than Z or K for example.

My main goal was to optimize for French first, English second. Home row is pretty good for both and based on the Bépo layout, except U which seems pretty useless in English. Top row is OK I guess. More skewed towards French, but still rather optimized for both. Bottom row is good for French despite keeping the ZXCV cluster, the right part is not great for English. W and K are pushed to slightly less accessible positions because they are basically never used in French. But they are relatively common in English. So IDK.

Thanks to everyone here for the suggestions. Key pitch is now 19mm, I've removed the top row and added a second index column.

I'm not really pleased with the arrow pad placement, but I haven't found any better place yet.

I'm still working on the layout...

Especially on QMK/TMK, especially non-english ones.

Do you mangle the QWERTY layout to fit your needs, especially when there is no correspondence between QWERTY and you language's layout or do you send directly Unicode characters?

I'm working on a French, Bépo-inspired, completely custom layout with full access to diacritics and ligatures. The keyboard must be OS-agnostic as I'm using Linux at home and Windows at work, and should be completely compatible with the AZERTY layout as understood by the OS and need no install or configuration on the PC as work PCs are usually completely locked-down and don't allow input layout modification.

Letters like é, è, à, ç, and ù are directly accessible on the AZERTY keyboard, so a bit of mangling should work (despite ù being used in a single word in the entire language but whatevs)

My concerns are:

• ê, ë and so on are pretty common but need a dead key to be typed. Not ideal. It might be possible with a macro, but Unicode might be more efficient.
• æ and œ are completely absent from AZERTY and cannot even be directly typed on windows despite appearing on very common words like cœur or bœuf. They are hidden behind AltGr-A and AltGr-O in Linux tho. Unicode is a must.

Thanks!

Rapid prototyping is an incredible tool nowadays. I started working on this concept a few hours ago, and I can already try out if it works. Turns out, it kinda works. I will lower the pinky rows and

I love my printer!

Designed and 3D printed by me to fit an Ikea Alex drawer unit, my pens and Diamine inks.

Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)

I brew beer as a hobby. I've been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it's FOSS and super simple to use, and I'm too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It's been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial "piece of equipment" since I migrated to Fedora.

Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.

This post was originally posted on r/mk in 2023. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

I have a "rare" layout. ISO French and all-1U bottom right cluster. For years I struggled to get decent keycaps. I could either make do with uniform height keycaps or get them printed. For years, there were very few alternatives. My previous keycap set was printed by MaxKeyboard, but they never felt very good. So when I heard that a small company (Goblin Tech Keys) made custom dyesub keycaps, I decided to give them a shot.

The positives:

• Custom PBT dyesub keycaps yay!
• They're a very small team, and customer support is very personal
• Printing quality is great
• I spoke with them about my weird layout, they sent me a template file within minutes.
• It took them less than a week to print and ship everything. I'm still waiting for my KAT GB from 2021.

The negatives:

• When I spoke to them about some of the bigger issues, they said they would send replacements but never did.

What's not good but was probably my fault

• Color accuracy probably would have been better if I used a CMYK colorspace instead of RGB.
• Geometric backgrounds with lots of straight lines shared between keycaps should be avoided. Background alignment is a mess. Some backgrounds parts were moved or missing because they rework the template files. Legends alignment is fine.

It took 3 working days to get here from Malaysia with DHL (seriously, fuck those thieving cunts at DHL tho).

All in all, I still love my new keycaps :)

Board : XD64

Switches : Boba U4

Keycaps : Dyesub PBT OEM Profile, design by me, printed by Goblin Tech Keys

This post was originally posted on r/espresso in 2020. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

For years, I struggled with my espresso machine (Lelit PL41TEM) ever since I got a naked portafilter. I tried everything, and I thing I learned a lot and tremendously improved my skills doing so: Weighing coffee, weighing shots, timing pulls, WDT, stockfleth, nutating tamp, NSEW tamp, playing with dose, grind, temperature, bean freshness...

I had good shots, terrible shots, and once in a blue moon excellent shots. But I never achieved consistency. I always struggled with channeling, even with super fresh beans.

The single element that I couldn't control was the pressure. My machine was factory set at 13bars blind and I could only brew decent shots at 11 bars.

Thanks to this video featuring my exact machine and a few pushes from people here, I adjusted my OPV to 10 bars blind, 9 bars brewing. This has been a game changer. I still pull meh shots, but my constitency is now through the roof, and even "bad" shots are actually okay.

This post was originally posted on r/mk in 2020. I'm manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.

A fey days ago, I showed you the very first keyboard I (my parents) ever had. It's an IBM model M2 from 1989, that came with the family's first computer an IBM PS/1.

I bought a PS/2 adapter and plugged it in my computer. Obviously, it had the dreaded "two LEDs on and nothing works" issue.

Fortunately, thanks to u/zorberema_'s great guide, I knew what happened. The capacitors were dead and I needed to replace them.

Well... Crap. Notice the Apple keyboard that... er... at least works.

Opening it was actually easy-ish. I didn't remove all the keycaps, only the ones necessary to get to the plastic clips, so a few springs went flying around, it was messy, lesson learned. I even managed to only break a single clip. Also, mark the spaces where springs are not supposed to go. You'll thank me later. I spent an hour looking for a missing spring until I realized that I put one in an empty well.

New capacitors in

Notice how bad my soldering skills are. Pro-tip : If your friendly electronics sales-person gives you a surface mount cap to replace another surface mount cap, don't. These are not made to be soldered by unskilled humans. This 2.2uF was hell. Higher voltage is fine.

All the springs are back on

This part was long and stressful. I dropped the board once because I used crappy carboard boxes to prop the plate up, springs were flying around, it was terrifying. I don't know how I managed not to lose them all. Lear from my mistake, use phone boxes as a prop.

(photo missing, sorry, I was both excited and scared) The trick to close a Model M2 keyboard is to keep said springs form flying around. The best way was is to peel the grey felt-ish mat from the membrane and to position it (upside down, obviously) over the springs, carefully aligning the clip and screw holes. From now on you can carefully snap the lower case back on the plate and screw it back in.

Here it is, in all its springy glory!

Form the sparse guides I found over the web, people seemed to say that this was the absolute worst part in restoring this type of keyboard. It went actually pretty smooth. YMMV.

Putting caps back on and testing everything

You can now put all your keycaps back on, testing them one at a time. I was fortunate enough to get a fully working keyboard, the membrane was intact. If the keys do not click or if you have to mash the key to get it to register, remove the cap and position it again.

So here I am, ready to output a massive amount of decibels while working from home during lockdown.

Stay safe my friends, keep clacking and don't let the virus get you. ___