King Charles III said his thoughts and prayers were with the family of the young victim, and he saluted the courage of emergency workers, Buckingham Palace said.

“King Charles III” still sounds so weird to me. The last story I ran across with his name in it was about either Ireland or Scotland, I can’t remember which, and it took me longer than I care to admit to realize it wasn’t some sly Jacobite comment.

A fox of the same species was found in a much older grave in another part of Argentina nearly a decade ago. It may also have been a pet but its diet was not analysed.

As usual, it’s more the article (and especially the headline) than the science. Here is the Abstract of the study.

It’s much more about the specific burial and the inferences that can be reasonably drawn about South America before the introduction of dogs from the north 5k years ago. It references multiple burials with non-dog canids from across time periods in S.A., including at least one from about 4k years ago, as well as many other remains scattered in with human burials. It seems to build on existing theorizing that pre-Columbian practices might have changed more slowly than post. Then there are the statistical arguments. If you occasionally find a fox in human burials, based on the number of human burials you didn’t find, you can feel pretty confident that there were more foxes buried with humans.

I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.

Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.

This all feels a lot like any low- or mid-range CAD suite that gets acquired by Autodesk, Siemens, or PTC. Promise enough to avoid a revolt, but start eroding with the next release.

The educational licensing for lock-in is also par for the course. It can be done well (Rhino 3D is legendary for letting small-shop designers use their cheap edu license forever, even commercially), but generally it’s just there to maintain the supply of baby drafters and get subscriptions from employers.

First, war is always a tragedy. Always. It is to be avoided until the reasonably plausible alternative is worse for human suffering. People who ignore this are asses (not saying you are one of them).

Second, as long as it stays conventional and China stays on the sidelines, then yes of course NATO destroys the Russian military, or at least keeps it hemmed into existing Russian territory. That’s been true for 30 years.

Third, those are VERY big ‘ifs’.

Yes, but it’s a little unusual that one orca was hunting alone, and the shark was a large juvenile. The scientists think that the ecological mess that has resulted in the killer whales pushing out all but the boldest teenager great white sharks could mean that the sharks are going somewhere else, possibly where humans fish or swim or where the local wildlife is not ready for the sharks.

Wake me when they REALLY get back to their roots.

Girl on the right probably killed a Spanish swordsmith back in the day.

When you’re trying to get into DPs, the outside can be slippery and the screw part can be tight! Very dangerous for the workplace.

I thought I had NSFW turned off… 🤣

My very first “design” was cord wrangler that fit the exact number of things I needed to charge and was the exact thickness for my no-name pressboard nightstand with a gap that matched an opening in the back. It was exactly what I needed.

Well shoot, now I need to make a COWABUNGA novelty keycap.

Pigeon sweat.

All those firmwares work fine, or even better, over USB. Of course, there’s also the option to simply buy a kit. No idea if these people are legit, but the tech itself looks simple enough, a circuit board with contacts that let the linkage make a connection.

I am not quite sure I’d be ready to recommend it, but your more adventurous patrons may want to experiment. These keycaps are PBT, a cousin of polyester. They are not particularly pleasant smelling when heated or especially when burned, but they’re not as unhealthy as ABS (the other common plastic for keycaps) and certainly not as bad as the straight up poison gas that comes from PVC. I use a basic 5W blue diode laser, coat the keycap with an “infusible ink” pen from Cricut (most of their infusible products are polyester-based), put it in an alignment jig, then laser a raster image “low and slow.” My particular laser seems to do best when I do two or three passes at 2% power and 45mm/minute. The idea is to heat it roughly in line with the crafting heat presses without letting the heat spread and color in areas beyond the beam. I experimented with actually burning or engraving, and that sort of works, but (1) it’s stinky, and (2) the ash wipes away and you’re left with a mostly colorless letter-shaped indentation. The “dye sub” technique produces barely any fumes at all. There are a few people on youtube who’ve tried similar techniques, and quite a few who have used different heat or dye sources.

Aesthetically, the process was only marginally successful, though I’m optimistic about the longevity, at least compared to other low-end manufacturing techniques. I’ve been using a similar set of home-lasered keycaps for about a month with little to no wear. My jig was not as good on that set, AND I tried to center the keycap legends, meaning every fraction of a millimeter was painfully obvious. These legends didn’t end up exactly where I might have liked either, but they’re all off by the exact amount (about 1mm), so being consistent, the alignment isn’t too bad.

It should be doable. The way these things are wired, you wouldn’t use a common. You’d instead wire a matrix with diodes to avoid ghost presses. The firmware on the arduino or RPi microcontrollers will constantly scan for keypresses. So much would depend on the exact mechanism of your typewriter, but you could find a place where a keycap moves parts in close enough proximity to make your own switches, or if some part of the mechanism presses straight down, you could just have that actuate mechanical keyboard switches.

For wireless, you’d probably want ZMK. QMK is the most famous, but ZMK supports more wireless MCUs. I use KMK, a firmware where everything is human-readable python. I understand it has some wireless support, but I’ve never looked into it.

I thought a tombstone or a boogieboard. 🤣

More seriously, things get weird when you want to go no-stabilizers but don’t want to buy a custom set of blank keycaps. This one only uses the 1.25u to 1.75u keys from a standard TKL or full size.

Doing it on the keyboard could very easily work, but I have a laser-cut jig that holds twenty-six 1u keycaps, and has one open-ended spot for anything up to maybe 3u. I considered 3D-printing the jig, but 30 minutes on the laser made more sense than 5 hours on the printer.

This plastic didn’t love my “Infusible ink” pens, so the legends are duller than the last time I did this, but the jig helped a lot with alignment, as did adjusting my ambitions and expectations. Much less disappointing to land 1mm off when you can pretend you wanted it there all along, and that is much easier to do with corner legends versus centered. :-)

Thanks. Kind of a 2004 Apple and Logitech thing going. Probably need another couple of years before it’s in vogue. white filament on the printer though, so white keyboard it is.

putting another tab button on the numpad

Horizontal spreadsheet data entry, my friend. it’s probably one of the less crazy parts of this layout! Of course, ten minutes on the laser and/or 5 in the software, and I can make it any key you need. Programmable keyboards are a godsend when you’re winging it on the layout.

I am currently typing on my one and only red-switch board, and I am mis-hitting keys like a mofo, and bottoming out even harder than normal. I don’t type anywhere near correctly, but I make up for it by typing enthusiastically, and whatever the category, my favorites are always heavy.