Yea, generally you have full size/108 key boards, tenkeyless (no numpad but other layout unchanged), then 75%/65%/60% which all condense the function row and arrow key block to varying degrees. TFA depicted an extremely condensed (and split) keyboard without even a number row. No idea what to call that.
65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.
Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.
The dactyl keyboard family with built in trackballs are way nicer than ones with built in track pads at least from my experience. My personal favorite so far has been a Charybdis from bastardkeyboards. Expensive but I don't need a mouse anymore for being productive.
Hah, 2 minutes before my remark. I feel like if anyone has 2+ ergomech keyboards, they should really try something with a pointing device. It's clear they don't mind having an expensive hobby :D
Yeah, 65% to 75% is great. It may be "boring", compared to the more exotic layouts, but I've tried a bunch and I like this more. The traditional rectangle is popular for a reason.
The main thing is... it's gotta have open-source firmware. After switching to something like QMK, I wouldn't want to go back. I customize stuff too deeply to go back... like 8 to 12 layers and a bunch of completely custom behavior. And for notebooks, remappers like Kanata help immensely.
Ideally it's nice to have a small touchpad under the space bar, like maybe 4 keys wide, retro style, meaning a high-DPI zero-force touchpad. But that's optional. With good firmware, I don't really need a mouse because MouseKeys and Warp do most of what I need.
The world has a lot of problems, but ... at least we've got a wide selection of awesome keyboards these days, to suit nearly every person's style and taste. Typing has never been better.
Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
> They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Color is magnificent and I can't believe we've lost so much joy on our relentless march to hyper-optimized profit. I recently read another article about how everything has gotten more monochrome, will try to find it again.
In scanning some slides from the 1970s, I was struck by the colors of the pants! Bright! Stripes! Fun! I sew shirts and gravitate towards bright prints, and everything tends to stand out because clothing in general doesn't seem as varied today.
EDIT - Found many articles along the same lines, some even with the same images. This isn't the original one that I was thinking about, but it is equivalent
Was excited to hear that they have a lower power rad-hard snapdragon system going into the new missions! The RAD 750 is basically a 30-year old IBM RS-6000. Very well known, but has been the goto CPU for way longer than I thought it would be.
Leveraging VxWorks you effectively have 3 different ways this software gets updated.
Hot Patch -> Do it live! where you modify the RAM with compiled code so that the changes persist until next reboot.
Cold Patch -> Same as a hot patch, except this time you actually copy the contents into non-volatile memory. VxWorks has a really slim profile and thus this helps keep the size manageable to continue doing science experiments.
Full Updated -> Basically a clean install gets burned in.
It turns out GNC is significantly easier than rendering a video game. You don't even need that fast of a control loop. Your bigger concern is legitimate real time processing over raw compute power.
Otherwise, we have shown, if you need power, send the astronaut up there with a laptop. Which is far easier to replace and upgrade as years advance.
When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.
I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.
I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...
A small frustration I have with playing old games is that the GOG/Steam version is always the PC original and the Mac versions almost always had far better sound and music and sometimes graphics.
You can run the Windows 95 version of the game (similar to the Mac version) on modern computers with this patch: https://sc2kfix.net/ . It's definitely disappointing that GOG doesn't distribute that version. Stuff like this is why I have to keep a CD drive around.
I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.
But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.
And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.
I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.
Marathon Trilogy. Ambrosia SW games. Spectre VR. My childhood was so flavourful. The one downside is that nobody on the playground were talking about the games I had access to.
I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.
And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!
It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!
> I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D
You recall wrong.
The only 3D SimCity game was the one released in 2013 that was simply titled "SimCity" but is frequently called "SimCity 2013" to differentiate it from the original classic.
In 3k you could rotate the camera to 3 (or 4?) different angles, but each was fixed isometric rendered. Meaning they did all assets in the game at multiple angles.
Every corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then.
The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"
I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.
It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.
A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.
FYI, getting hardware acceleration for Intel working with Jellyfin is pretty straightforward. The key thing is that you have to put the server acct into the render group, then pass through the dri device. I also pass through the video group, but I don't think that is strictly necessary. NVIDIA seems a bit different but I can't speak to that. Docker compose file looks something like the following (uids and gids may vary)
I had a jellyfin server on the same machine as my plex. I really tried to use both, the jellyfin experience was so much worse overall.
It had one technical feature that I valued (the ability to tone/color map dolby vision content for non dolby vision devices), but that was such a minimal feature for me (very little of my content is in the proprietary dolby vision colorspace).
I have a lifetime Plex Pass, but I'd gleefully dump it for open source if the experience were as good.
But as you say, it's not, and the lack of churn (only patch releases and one blog post this last 6 months) doesn't inspire me to think it's getting better nearly quick enough.
Are you talking about the Jellyfin server? It is quite an active project. Last release was 10.11.8 about a month ago, and github says that there have been 1049 commits to master since then.
> I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them
This is not and has never been required. If by remote access you mean actually streaming from the public Internet, their proxies are a low-bitrate fallback in case you can't connect directly - and it can be disabled altogether IIRC.
The solution I use for remote access is tailnet plus exit nodes. It also is probably more secure as the attack surface is wireguard + the tailscale control plane rather than an entire internet facing Plex server.
Remote access is provided through them. The content is not. The access is. We're far past the point of quibbling technicalities to defend your chosen celebrity-company
I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.
Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.
I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.
I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.
