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QMK on Custom Keyboards

Pascal Getreuer writes on building custom keyboards ("hand-wired") with QMK as firmware: You can have mouse control, more Shift keys ("layers"), built-in unicode characters, and 50 words of auto correction for your favorite mistakes.

Inflatable Skate Ramp

Surfer Today and Dose report on inflatable skate ramps by Evolution Ramps that are portable and flex on impact. A velcro-attached top layer provides a rollable surface e.g. from HDPE. The high air pressure needed presumes some drop stitch variant, as used in SUP, wingfoil and bodyboards. Loosely related, S-wing fins seem a fun surfing variant.

Open Source Hardware: Ploopy Adept Trackball

Hackaday reports on the Ploopy Adept Trackball, which runs QMK so you can modify the behaviour on the firmware level; and all specs for 3d printing the parts are GPL on github. Costs 80€. See also my input devices.

Wave Surf Game: Barton Lynch Pro Surfing

Surfer today reports on wave surf games and in particular the beta stage Barton Lynch Pro Surfing (2022) [steam] by Bungarra, unfortunately Windows only. Previously, the best wave surf game was Kelly Slater Pro Surfer (2003) [review] [abandon], again Windows only.

Ergonomic Bluetooth Keyboard: Glove80

Daniel de Kok reviews the Glove80 keyboard from MoErgo having a "key well" or bowl similar to the Kinesis keyboards, while being lower and more adapted to each finger. Costs about 500€. Similar keyboards without key wells are SplitKB Kyria and Keyboardio Model 100. Hackaday also has coverage. See also my input devices list.

Electric Skateboard Motors

Dax Montilla on the motors that can go onto skateboard trucks: Integrated hub motors with reduced wheel thickness are silent and can be pushed; belt-drive motors with good torque have moving parts near the ground; enclosed direct drive motors with good torque have fixed parts near the ground; sealed gear drive motors with good torque are loud and expensive. Also use dual motors (per truck) whenever possible. See also my skate part shortlist.

Android: Banking Apps under GrapheneOS

Having an Android phone without Google is challenging when many banking apps rely on GMS. The Pixel-only GrapheneOS has better banking support than LineageOS, and comes with a banking apps compatibility list. See also my Pocket PC and Android details.

Simplified JavaScript Libraries: Un[sf]uck JS

Ycombinator points to a list of JavaScript libraries that allow gradual enhancement of websites, instead of the all-in approach that classical frameworks require. Among them: alpine.js (12KB), htmx (10KB), mithril (10KB) for single-page apps, and the slightly bigger unpoly (50KB).

Klor: Split Keyboard with Trackball

Ycombinator links to the Klor ergonomic keyboard, which includes a track ball under each thumb. The chassis is 3d printable, and all plans are open source (GPLv3). See also my input devices article.

Neal Agarwal: Space Elevator Game

Flowing data and notebookcheck [de] report on the space elevator mini game by Neal Agarwal, where you can scroll up from the ground to the Karman line at 100km to see who is there, passing the troposphere, the stratosphere at 10km, the mesosphere (aka ignorosphere) at 50km, and the thermosphere at 80km. See also my space weather article.

Anime VFX by Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) has become quite good at style transfer, so when there is an abundance of stylistically similar anime frames to learn from, inpainting green-screen background with appropriate visual effects (VFX) becomes feasible, as a Corridor Digital before/after video demonstrates.

Wolfram explains ChatGPT

Stephen Wolfram outlines the basics of ChatGPT, a machine learning algorithm that creates text from a writing prompt: Word by word, with learned probabilities and a perturbation factor to avoid repetition, it always generates the next word from the previous. Related: GPT with numpy (Python), llama.cpp via ycombi.

Unicode: Shape Catcher aka Character Recognition

Ycombinator reports on Shapecatcher, where you can draw a unicode character and have candidates identified by optical character recognition (OCR), one of the earliest examples of machine learning (ML) used by post offices world wide. Somewhat font-sensitive though, and only a subset of characters is included, e.g. Kanji are missing.

Cable Capabilities: USB-C

Hackaday and All about Circuits report on the capabilities [pdf] of id-chipped USB-C cables and their 24 pins: 4 ground (GND) and 4 power (Vbus) pins for power delivery (PD) with minimum 3A*20V=60W, 4 USB2 data (D) and 8 USB3 data (SS), 2 configuration channels (CC) of which CC2 may be replaced by Vconn to power the id chip, and 2 side-band use (SBU) for video or ethernet in alternate mode.

Keyboard with Trackball: Batreeq

Hackaday, kbd.news and Reddit report on a custom keyboard with built-in trackball, the Batreeq by AlSaMoMo. The trackball and scroll ring are probably connected to the PCB (keyboard controller) via USB hub. Would be nice if Contour design built something similar with their Roller Mouse, a cylindrical trackball alternative. See also my input devices list.

Keyboard Timings

Ycombinator points to a Wooting article on keyboard latency aka reaction time: Key press time (10ms according to Dan Luu), micro controller unit (MCU) scan rate (1-8ms) and debounce time (1-5ms), USB poll time (1-8ms), and OS keyboard event time (highly variable). See also my input devices list.