Hail Mary question here, in case someone somewhere knows something:

In the late 90s, I lived in the UK in Hampshire. One weekend, I went to a local computer show in Portsmouth or Southampton. You know, a few tables in a community center with people selling all kinds of computer bits.

A small UK company had a booth there and sold a really interesting keyboard. It might have been the manufacturer, or a local importer. I don't remember. But the keyboard had a UK layout. I bought one.

The keyboard was a folding full-size beige 102-key mechanical keyboard with a chunky coiled cable and an AT interface. It was built like a tank and had really good clicky switches. Basically imagine a slightly lighter model-M sawed in two with a mechanical hinge in the middle, allowing the keyboard to fold in two, with the keys on the inside facing each other.

It was a great keyboard, and while it didn't fold into a particularly compact package and wasn't light by any stretch of the imagination, it fit great in a small suitcase and protected itself naturally by sandwiching the keys in the middle. And it folded with a loud, satisfying clunk 🙂

I loved that keyboard, but I lost it in a move 20 years ago. I've been trying to find out who made it and what it was for years, but I was never able to find anything at all. The only hits that come up when I search for folding mechanical keyboards are those awful miniature battery-powered bluetooth keyboards for cellphones.

Does anybody know what that keyboard might have been?

I'm not a true mechanical keyboard enthusiast. I mean I like a good keyboard for typing code, so I rolled with model-Ms in the 80s and 90s, then some expensive Cherry keyboard I only recently retired because it was utterly spent (and it was PS/2), and now I happily use a Wooting Two HE.

I'm so glad the mechanical gaming keyboard scene has developed so much: it means there's a plethora of really excellent keyboards for the rest of us who don't play games.

But something utterly baffles me: why are high-quality keyboards getting smaller?

There's a lot more keyboards without the numpad and the block of middle keys - whatever they're called - or with the middle keys reduced or squashed up awkwardly on the side, than full-size plain old 102- or 104-key layout keyboards. What's wrong with the numpad? Isn't more keys generally better?

Back in the days, I bought the original Happy Hacking keyboard because it kind of made sense to maneuver around in our server room with a small keyboard that took up less space. Typing on it drove me up the wall but it was convenient to carry. And I guess it was also good option for going to LAN parties with a smaller backpack. But other than that, for a keyboard that never leaves your desk, I don't get it.

Are there other advantages to smaller keyboards? Genuine question! I'm not dumping on smaller keyboards: to each his own and if you're happy with yours, more power to you. I'd just like to know why you prefer smaller.

I'm considering buying an EV to replace my aging diesel. I live in a very cold country where temperatures regularly dip below -30C in the winter.

I understand that EVs lose range in cold temperatures and that they need heating to use and charge without damage.

My question is this: if I plan on not using my car for several weeks, can I leave it unplugged and/or tell it to stop managing the batteries' temperature to save energy and not damage the batteries?

I'm okay with spending half a day preheating it when I plan on using it again regularly, but I don't want it to draw current all the time for nothing when I'm away on long missions.

For some reason, I can't seem to find out if it's safe to keep a fully unpowered EV in the cold for a long time...

For example this post visible from lemmy.sdf.org is nowhere to be seen on the corresponding thread on lemmy.ml.

So I downloaded Futo Voice Input: this thing is the best piece of software I've tried in a very long time. It work fabulously well, it works offline, it's open-source, it gives Google the finger... What's not to love eh?

So I went to pay for it - because frankly, $10 for all that is cheap. But lo, I have to pay through... Google Play.

...

Really? Come on...

This is a piece of software specifically designed to help me escape the Google surveillance collective and the only way you found to get a reward for your efforts is to ask me to open a Google account to pay you?

I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this...) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.

I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka "reCAPTCHA" that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don't select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous "rolling captchas" that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.

When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don't select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.

Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.

I've been experimenting with this informally for months now and it's quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.

It's really disgusting...

Louis repairs a marital aid.

Hey everybody,

I installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on an old cellphone I had lying around. It works fine, apart from an odd problem: when I connect the phone to my computer by USB, the "Charging this device via USB" notification appears but all the USB preference options are greyed out.

Data transfer works however: if I go into System > Developer options > Default USB configuration, set it to Data Transfer, unplug the USB cable and plug it back in, the options are still greyed out, but File Transfer is selected and the drive appears on the PC. So it's not the cable, and my ports or plugs don't need cleaning.

It's very inconvenient to have to enable and disable this in the Developer options each time I want to transfer a file, and I most certainly don't want to leave Data tranfer enabled all the time.

I've been looking for a solution everywhere, and it seems plenty of people have the same problem with a lot of different phones, but nobody has a solution.

Anybody knows what might be going on here? Any adb shell command I could issue to reenable what might be disabled?

So I'm in the bus, happily browsing Lemmy in Jerboa. I clicked on a Reddit link in a Lemmy post that silently opened the Reddit app without my noticing (cuz I was paying attention to my bus stop). The subreddit had this grey theme going on, so overall the Reddit client kinda looked like Jerboa.

I kept on browsing, but then I thought "That's odd, my Reddit comments show up in Jerboa... Does it aggregate? That's slick. But how does it know my Reddit creds?"

Kept on browsing some more... Wow! They even thought of making the karma points look red. Jerboa is really slick!

And then I went to my home, the UI turned bright red again and I had a "Oh..." moment... Tap twice on the square button, back to Jerboa.

That was an oddly mind-bending 20 seconds.

So I went down the list of PeerTube clients in F-Droid, and the only two that let me pick my instance / login are TubeLab and P2Play. They look nice but there's a problem: they don't understand login with 2FA, and I don't really want to drop 2FA as I always use the extra security whenever it's available.

Any other Android client you're aware of that would work for me?

In the meantime, I'll open a feature request for those two apps.

EDIT:

Uuh nevermind, I answered my own question: when I went to open an issue with TubeLab, the repo says it's now part of FediLab - which, inconveniently, doesn't come up when you search for PeerTube in F-Droid.

I installed FediLab, and lo and behold... 2FA!

And with that, voila: I'm logged in:

Brilliant!

I have never bought anything from Purism but I have considered it. Now though, I have my doubts.

Purism is a scam

Any thoughts? Have you dealt with that company or their products? Are they legit?

I've tried Lemoa: it's truly atrocious to put it mildly. Besides, I couldn't compile it on my GTK3 distro, there is no .deb, and using Flatpak means wasting hundreds of megabytes for what should be a simple, lightweight client. If I want to waste RAM, my browser is already running so I might as well use the web app from my instance.

I've tried Lemonade: the Python code doesn't run (again, GTK4 dependencies), and the Flatpak doesn't even display anything.

Liftoff is Flutter. No thanks...

NeonModem isn't complete.

Servitor is command line. I love the command line, but that's just the wrong environment for this.

Is there really nothing on Linux?