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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • For me, video is rarely the form that I want to consume any content in. It’s also very obnoxious if I’m on a slow data link (e.g. on a slower or saturated cell phone link).

    However, sometimes it’s the only form that something is available in. For major news items, you can usually get a text-form article, but that isn’t all content. I submitted a link to a YouTube video of a Michael Kofman interview the other day talking about military aid to a Ukraine community. I also typed up a transcript, but it was something like an hour and a half, and I don’t know if that’s a reasonable bar to expect people to meet.

    I think that some of this isn’t that people actually want video, but that YouTube has an easy way to monetize video for content creators. I don’t think that there’s actually a good equivalent for independent creators of text, sadly-enough.

    And there are a few times that I do want video.

    And there may be some other people that prefer video.

    Video doesn’t actually hurt me much at this point, but it would kind of be nice to have a way to filter it out for people who don’t want it. Moving all video to another community seems like overkill, though. Think it might be better to have some mechanism added to Threadiverse clients to permit content filtering rules; I think that probably a better way to meet everyone’s wants. It’d also be nice if there were some way to clearly indicate that a link is video content, so that I can tell prior to clicking on it.




  • You can still get a few phones with built-in headphones jacks. They tend to be lower-end and small.

    I was just looking at phones with very long battery life yesterday, and I noticed that the phone currently at the top of the list I was looking at, a high-end, large, gaming phone, also had a headphones jack. The article also commented on how unusual that was.

    Think it was an Asus ROG something-or-other.

    kagis

    https://rog.asus.com/us/phones/rog-phone-8-pro/

    An Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro.

    That’s new and current. Midrange-and-up phones with audio jacks aren’t common, but they are out there.

    Honestly, I’d just get a USB C audio interface with pass-through PD so that you can still charge with it plugged in and just leave that plugged into your headphones if you want to use 1/8th inch headphones. It’s slightly more to carry around, but not that much more.

    Plus, the last smartphone I had with a built-in audio DAC would spill noise into the headphones output when charging. Very annoying. Needed better power circuitry. I don’t know if any given USB C audio interface avoids the issue, but if it’s built into the phone, there’s a limited amount you can do about it. If it’s external, you can swap it, and there’s the hope that their less-limited space constraints meant that they put in better power supply circuitry.




  • I also have the back propped up like you mentioned with the built in lifts

    Ah hah!

    Yeah, there are some ergo keyboards that have that “reverse tilt” built in. They’re aimed more at being easier on the wrist than at trying to permit for long nails, but they do exist.

    e.g.:

    https://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/

    I also have carpel tunnel

    That’d be an argument for a keyboard, like, a mechanical one where you don’t bottom out the keys on press, and then training yourself to not bottom them out, which is a big argument mechanical keyboard fans have for theirs versus rubber dome keyboards. And you need a fair bit of key travel for that, yeah. Hmm.


  • Hmm. Interesting.

    If you don’t mind me asking, could you describe what alternate keycaps were used? Like, taller keycaps in the front, shorter in the back? Like, I still think that the amount of keytravel would be a negative, but maybe the issue is that the long nails descend into the keyboard given the normal position of a hand typing, and basically changing the angle improves that.

    If that’s the case, I’m wondering whether maybe it’d be possible to change the angle of the keyboard as a whole. Like, either use an external keyboard propped up differently, tilting away from the user, or a laptop with the front part of the base shimmed up to tilt away from the user.


  • Hmm. That’s an interesting problem to have.

    On one hand, I can’t suggest a great alternative, but man, silicone keys…I guess if they work for the author.

    Stenotypists – people who have to professionally do very high-speed text entry – do use these dinky specialized keyboards that IIRC from a Japanese-language one – I think that there were multiple Japanese layouts – can only have a home row or something. I think that they use chording or something. I don’t know if that might address it, but learning one would be a huge change. Also, I have no idea what keys they can output…given that they’re highly-optimized for text entry, they might not be able to do weird symbols.

    goes looking

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

    A steno machine, stenotype machine, shorthand machine, stenograph or steno writer is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. In order to pass the United States Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively.[1] Some stenographers can reach up to 375 words per minute, according to the website of the California Official Court Reporters Association (COCRA).[2]

    Hmm.

    Looking at the key layout there, and here:

    https://stenokeyboards.com/

    …it looks like English-language stenotype keyboards don’t just use a single row, but rather two or more rows. So that’s probably out.

    There’s apparently a second chording layout, the “palantype” layout, but that also doesn’t do only one key per finger:

    https://www.openstenoproject.org/palantype/tutorial/2016/08/21/learn-palantype.html

    There are dedicated chording keyboards that do use only one key per finger, though.

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

    That has some examples of one-key-per-finger keyboards, like the BAT keyboard (well, that has three for the thumb, but given that you hit those with the side of the thumb, I assume that it’d be okay with long nails):

    https://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html

    The problem is that (a) the BAT is discontinued and (b) you really don’t want a one handed keyboard, which is what the BAT does…it’d be better to have a two handed chorded keyboard, or you’re taking half of your fingers out of the picture.

    EDIT: Here’s an open-source, two-handed chording keyboard, the Ialboard, based on the discontinued DataHand keyboard. I’m not sure that it’d work with very long nails in its current form – they might collide with the structure of the keyboard – but it’s 3d printed and I’m pretty sure that if the format doesn’t work as-is, a tweak to the 3d-printed keys would permit for arbitrarily long nails. Just need to create a space for 'em.

    Gonna need some serious keyboard re-learning, though.

    EDIT2: Here’s another two-handed chording keyboard with one input device per finger, the CharaChorder. It uses an analog D-pad under each finger. I think that it’d have space for long nails as-is. It does have separate arrow key and mouse control sticks, and I’m not sure if those, given the placement, would be an issue for long nails. I’d imagine that if one were determined to work around that with an external mouse device and – if you use arrow keys enough to need it; I rarely do – maybe some dedicated arrow key keyboard, though I’d think that having the arrow keys in vim-style hjkl-style layout might be preferable to the inverted-T layout that seems common. I don’t know whether the barrel connector’s positioning there would be an issue, though the positioning of that is obviously not critical to the keyboard, and I imagine that if it is an issue, with a bit of work, one could relocate it.

    EDIT3: It looks like there’s another DataHand-based 3D-printed keyboard besides the above-mentioned Ialboard, the Svalboard. Same argument as with the Ialboard – I’m not sure that it’d be usable with long nails as is, but I’m pretty sure that that design could be modified with approprately-different key shapes to permit long nails to extend through a gap. You can apparently buy the thing in kit form, 3D-print it, so I figure that if someone wants to make a “longnail” variant of a few of the 3D-printed parts, that’d probably be a pretty easy keyboard to start from.

    The downside is that I don’t think that – unlike the above CharaChorder – this comes with a travel carrying case, which might be important if you’re a laptop user. I guess it’d probably be possible to craft something with foam and a shell, but that’s not off-the-shelf any more.





  • Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

    I use emacs, and kind of had the same gut reaction, but they do address it and have a valid point in that the IDEs they’re talking about are “out of box” set up and require little learning to use in that mode.

    Like, you can use emacs and I’m sure vim as an IDE, but what you have is more a toolkit of parts for putting together your own IDE. That can be really nice, more flexible, but it’s also true that it isn’t an off-the-shelf, low-effort-to-pick-up solution.

    Emacs had some “premade IDE” project I recall that I tried and wasn’t that enthusiastic about.

    I don’t know vim enough to know what all the parts are. Nerdtree for file browsing? I dunno.

    With emacs, I use magit as a git frontend, a compilation buffer to jump to errors, projectile to know the project build command and auto-identify the build system used for a given project and search through project files, dired to browse the files, etags and some language server – think things have changed recently, but I haven’t been coding recently – to jump around the codebase. I have color syntax highlighting set up. I use .dir-locals.el to store per-project settings like that build command used by projectile. The gdb frontend to traverse code associated with lines in a stack trace on a running program. TRAMP to edit files on remote machines.

    But that stuff isn’t generally set up or obvious out of box. It takes time to learn.

    EDIT: The “premade IDE” I was thinking of for emacs is eide:

    https://software.hjuvi.fr.eu.org/eide/



  • It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.

    Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.

    My problem is that I don’t really want Google – a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining – logging and data-mining everything I watch.

    YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it’s not buying any kind of no-log service – in fact, it’s just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That’s not the service that I want to buy from Google.

    What I’d be willing to get from Google is a “no log” service.

    I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I’m fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data…but I want part of that service to be that they aren’t logging what I do and data-mining my data.

    I don’t like the model of “we don’t charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can”. I’m fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn’t what I want for myself.





  • To clarify: I meant how do I do it via API calls,

    If you mean at the X11 call level, I think that it’s a window hint, assuming that you’re talking about a borderless fullscreen window, and not true fullscreen (like, DGA or DGA2 or something, in which case you don’t have a fullscreen X11 window, but rather direct access to video memory).

    https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/ar01s05.html

    See _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN, ATOM

    If you’re using a widget toolkit like gtk or something and writing the program, it’ll probably have some higher-level fullscreen toggle function that’ll flip that on X11. Ditto for SDL.

    If you mean in a script or something, I’d maybe try looking at xprop(1) to set that hint.

    I’d also add, on the “user” front, that I don’t use F11 and I think that that every window manager or desktop environment that I’ve ever used provides some way to set a user-specified keystroke to toggle a window’s fullscreen state. I’ve set Windows-Enter to do that for decades, on every environment I’ve used.