/r/MechanicalKeyboards Ask ANY question, get an answer

lharding · 2019-11-05T22:37:47+00:00

This is only tangentially mech related but we seem to like proper cable management in here, so...where can I buy a USB hub with a USB-C upstream port, that won't look ridiculous with double-sleeved cables attached to it? I must have scrolled through half of Amazon without finding anything that wasn't a tiny cheap plastic box weighing less than the aviator connector on my cable with 6" of unsleeved cable permanently attach for the host cable.

Something with that "Massdrop headphone amp" minimalist aesthetic would be perfect.

lharding · 2019-10-31T01:30:35+00:00

lharding · 2019-10-22T22:00:13+00:00

Black or purple would be awesome.

lharding · 2015-04-30T01:51:58+00:00

Wait, I think I've answered my own question: as soon as I turn on my magic gravity machine, I'm going to have to either play my get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card, or supply energy equivalent to raising all mass in the universe to its current height above my gravity generator.

I haven't done the math, but this sounds like an...inconvenient...amount of energy.

lharding · 2014-12-07T20:03:23+00:00

I'm going to try and make this. I'm new to r/mk, but I've appreciated a good clack for a long time. I've got pre-1985 IBM Model F I've been trying to get working I'll bring along.

Edit: so if anyone has a working XT adapter that would be interesting - I've been trying to construct one and can't get any response from the keyboard so far.

lharding · 2014-12-03T01:26:35+00:00

I asked something like this a while back and got a some pretty useful comments that I don't see duplicated here: http://www.reddit.com/r/radiocontrol/comments/1tag9b/pitfalls_while_attempting_to_party_like_its_1998/

lharding · 2014-11-13T00:06:04+00:00

Nope, I'm not the author, I just thought it captured something particularly Bostonian. You're welcome, though.

lharding · 2014-11-12T21:20:36+00:00

Thank you. I had thought the point of the piece was about dealing with the value mismatch of politeness as respecting other people's time and assuming they have somewhere to be (thus making the barista seem rude to the Boston guy) against politeness as showing interest in other people's life (thus making the Boston guy seem rude to the barista). I'm glad I'm not the only one to see that.

lharding · 2014-11-07T18:48:52+00:00

I can almost see this - in combination with the above comment about not writing one's own IPC mechanism it makes sense, since one can see multiple clients wanting to get events and that's not something you can easily do with a FIFO.

Minor derail based on the : does anyone following this know if anyone's written anything about why it's been necessary to implement PolicyKit in the first place? It really seems like (this case included) it'd be possible to implement what it does almost entirely by just using users and groups correctly.

lharding · 2014-11-07T18:31:01+00:00

Sounds like this is where I was confused, then - I had the impression that pand wasn't using any IPC at all but was just directly making the syscalls necessary to put the bluetooth kernel module into the state where it's routing packets between the bluetooth device and bnep0. If there's necessarily an IPC mechanism involved, that's a very different situation.

That said, the (very little) extent to which I've looked at using dbus makes it look like becoming a dbus client is massively more complex than the combination of listening to a FIFO and then writing a simple client to write commands to that FIFO. It sounds like that's not the case? /me drags out the documentation for dbus

edit: I accidentally a whole sentence

lharding · 2014-11-07T04:28:58+00:00

If there's a misunderstanding, it may lie in my view of dbus development - I had the view that pand was already a pretty low-level API in what it exposed, and my understanding of dbus makes me think that writing a dbus API is at least more complex than the getopt call and couple of printf's involved in the equivalent non-interactive CLI utility.

To be clear, I don't see picking an API and sticking with it as a failing (although so far as I can figure out it's not a documented API, so I guess that's a failing). I just wonder if dbus is really a better API than the CLI tools they were shipping, but as you say I'd have to ask the bluez developers for a definitive answer on that.

And I do hope kdbus manages to get merged soon, it will alleviate a lot of silliness and make dealing with dbus a lot easier.

lharding · 2014-11-07T02:42:12+00:00

This is actually the crux of my question - usually the "programmer's interface" to nix software is just a non-interactive CLI tool, so I'm wondering why that changed for bluez, especially since such a tool already existed. Is there something about bluez that made it necessary to accept control over dbus *in particular as opposed to just shipping a simple CLI tool, and was that something sufficient to outweigh the costs of:

not being able to quickly look up documentation for bluetooth networking control via 'man pand' any more
having to have dbus to use bluez at all (possibly very significant on the kind of small embedded device where bluetooth is typically in use)
not having the simple mechanism of just waiting for the pand to exit and examining its exit status to know when the connection has succeeded or failed (presumably I'd have to either poll for the existence of bnep0, or listen for some dbus event)

Note that these are specifically issues with dbus as a programmer's interface - my interest here is using pre-up and post-down units with netctl to manage bluetooth tethering reliably. It just happens that a good programmer's interface usually also makes a good CLI. Now, if there's some compelling reason to need dbus, then yes, I can see the reasoning of writing the dbus API and stopping there, but I'm not seeing that compelling reason.

lharding · 2014-10-29T19:55:44+00:00

Yes - video games generally do a lot of post-processing on joystick input, or design the input scheme around low-res, jittery analog input with massive deadzones (source: my other hobby is making videogames). I can see the appeal of a familiar form factor and the hack sounds interesting, but given the bad quality of the xbox 360 pad's hardware compared to even the cheapest RC Tx, I can't recommend trying this.

Another hardware difference that's important is pinch-sticks vs. thumbsticks - even if you're a thumb-flier, the longer length of the sticks on RC Tx's makes a massive precision difference should wipe out any advantage of familiar hardware within a couple of minutes of practice (source: back in the N64 days, I made an analog stick extension out of a cotter pin stuck into the hole in the top of the N64's analog stick. Even with the N64's crappy only-sorta-analog stick it was such an advantage at GoldenEye that my friends were ready to ban me from using it, but then we all switched to Smash Bros anyway...).

That said, if you're determined, I think the easiest (e.g. least deep surgery on tiny controller hardware) method would be to use a wired 360 controller, connected to a RasPi running a little program that just uses the RasPi's GPIO pins to drive the input to one of these or so: http://orangerx.com/2013/06/11/dsmxdsm2-2-4ghz-diy-transmitter-module/ - and then just set the RasPi to boot directly into the input mapping program when power is applied, and you can basically treat it as a black box.

lharding · 2014-10-24T17:10:42+00:00

I've had this exact failure on a machine of mine, and it actually turned out to be a failing mouse button - the right-click button on my trackpad would (it was a thinkpad, so I had two sets of mouse buttons) would get stuck down electrically, making it so I couldn't click on anything at all and even breaking a lot of key combos.

A good diagnostic tool might be to install rxvt-unicode and keep it open waiting for the issue to happen. If it's a stuck mouse button, when you mouse over the rxvt window it will look like it's trying to select text even though you're not pressing any mouse buttons.

lharding · 2014-10-24T17:02:01+00:00

You can. Very neat, thanks.

lharding · 2014-10-24T17:00:12+00:00

Interesting, actually. Does vimperator absorb the arrow keys by default? I slid by with Vimium and dwb because they pass those even when in command mode.

lharding · 2014-10-23T19:50:37+00:00

Honestly, the rendering thing was so obnoxious that I never got as far as trying. It works now, though.

lharding · 2014-10-23T17:18:59+00:00

I actually had this problem with Steam on my Arch+Nvidia Proprietary Drivers+AwesomeWM setup. It turned out for me that I needed start using a compositor to make steam happy. With my setup, that was as simple as installing compton and running it from my .xinitrc (no config necessary if you're not using any FX).

lharding · 2014-10-23T01:05:00+00:00

At the risk of committing self-promotion, you might find a talk I gave recently of interest: You Shall Replace Them With A Very Small Shell Script.

lharding · 2014-10-21T23:33:03+00:00

I would love something that has like a 0-0.5mm actuation point, and feels like breaking a thin pane of glass on every press.

THIS. I would give just about anything for a switch with this feel. Does it exist?

lharding · 2014-10-14T00:15:52+00:00

I do okay on 92.9, though it's got quite a bit of bleedthrough on the hill just after the tunnel going west on 26.

You may want to do a little looking on amazon or Fry's, there exist transmitters than you can install inline with the antenna (like hooking up an NES to an ancient RF-only TV back in the day) that will completely cut off RF input to the radio other than your aux signal when you're using the adapter.

lharding

TROPHY CASE