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history which may or may not be relevant to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocat
A name I’ve seen in connection with this issue is Obtainium. From a cursory look, it appears this just streamlines checking for and getting apk’s from GitHub release pages and other project-specific sources, rather than adding any trust. So maybe it just greases the slippery slope :)
Security guidelines for mobile phones, and therefore policies enforced by large organizations (think Bring-Your-Own-Device), are likely to say that one may only install apps from the platform-provided official source, such as the Play Store for Android or the Apple App Store for iOS. You might say it’s an institutionalized form of “put[ting] too much trust in claims of authority.” Or you might say that it’s a formal cession of the job of establishing software trustworthiness to the platform vendors, at the mere expense of agency for users on those platforms.
People are not taught how to verify the authenticity and legitimacy of software
Rant: Mobile computing as we know it is founded on the rounding off of the rough corner of user agency, in order to reduce the amount users need to know in order to be successful, and to provide the assurances other players need, such as device vendors, employers, banks, advertisers, governments, and copyright holders. See The Coming War on General Computation, Cory Doctorow, 2011. Within such a framework, the user is not a trustworthy party, so the user’s opinion of authenticity and legitimacy, however well informed, doesn’t matter.
1·2 months agoI got a Keeb.io kit and soldered it myself, and then I’ve handwired a Dactyl Manuform and (halfway) a Splaytyl. I love how many people can build you a 3d-printed keyboard these days, but I’m already equipped and experienced to do it all myself.
I’ve been using a tshort dactyl manuform 4x6 for 5 years now, having never planned to use it for even 1 year. I only commonly use the two innermost thumb keys; I didn’t think I would like the thumb cluster from watching a video of someone typing on it, and I indeed don’t like the thumb cluster. The switches are Kailh Brown; one of them started to stutter and I replaced it with … a TTC Brown or some such.
I’ve printed, but not finished, a Splaytyl. I think it’s going to feel nice, but it’s only 4x5, and I’m nervous about not having Tab and Enter on the base layer.
Colemak DH represent!
Yeah, I did one for my Dactyl Manuform and just oversized it by a couple millimeters and stuck Amazon bubbly envelopes on the inside. The bottom of each half is flat, the same shape, and rubberized, so the covers just go over the top, I clap the bottoms together (tee hee?), and chunk the whole thing in a lunch bag that barely fits. It stays together without slipping and without any attachment between the two cover halves. Janky but it’s worked for years.
I 3d-printed a hard box for my Fourier. https://gitlab.com/jaredjennings/fourier-box. (wince, there is no photo nor even an STL in that repository.) I wanted it to fit in my backpack with a laptop and books, so it holds the two halves side by side, not stacked. I had to print it in two pieces and friction-weld them together. That sounds fancy, but it just means you take a piece of filament, put it in a Dremel chuck, and draw on your model. Wherever you push down, the friction makes the end of the filament melt. Then I put on some Sci-Grip 4 (dichloromethane), which further solvent-welded the joint.
If you wanted to make one like this for your cepstrum, you’d need to do it in more pieces because that’s larger than a Fourier. Your case would end up to be the size of a laptop. You might not want that.
They are made (I think) to be implementable - even, to give implementors some flexibility. Then everybody goes and buys a tool to do it, and not that well. I thought 15 years ago that security configuration was a (voluminous) subset of system configuration and system administration, ripe for automation and rigorous documentation - not something to pay a different vendor for. But the market says otherwise. When you can split some work across a whole team, or even into a separate company, instead of glomming it into one job, that’s worth money to businesspeople.
There are many ways to be more selective about from whom to accept email. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and various blacklists are among them. They are supposed to make life harder for spammers. But they have also made running a mail server something that few dare to try anymore. Setup is not easy, but getting blacklisted is, and it causes silent delivery failure, and takes days of work to fix.
As a result, most of the email is run by Microsoft and Google. But that didn’t stop phishers. They just go after people at smaller companies where security isn’t as tight yet, and then they’ve got valid Microsoft accounts to send from. Liars and Outliers by Schneier is about this sort of dynamic.
As for PKI: If I may assume you to be, or have been, affiliated with an armed service – Whose property is your CAC? And why did you use a pseudonym to make this post? (I mean to be pithy, not sarcastic.) I think Liars and Outliers by Schneier is all about this sort of thing - but I didn’t get much of it read before it was due back at the library.
Uh, I think the Glove80 uses Choc switches, right? For heavy tactile in Choc you would want Burnt Orange. Not sure whether that’s an option they provide or what.
Bastard Keyboards – I’ve talked with Quentin and he seems like a cool guy. He’s an innovator in the use of printed-circuit boards for keywell keyboards. That’s important because it makes keywell keyboards much easier and quicker to make, without the huge cost associated with polyimide flexible PCBs. He has high quality standards, too, in my limited experience of his products.
I agree that you should get a keywell keyboard. I haven’t read any specific reviews (I’m down the make-your-own rabbit hole instead), but I’ve seen some sentiment that the Glove80 is better than Kinesis’ offerings, and I believe it’s more programmable.
And about that last, if you “have to learn how to type again from scratch,” you should use a key layout that will work best for you. This may not be a layout that already exists! Colemak and all its variants, for example, put A and R under your left ring and pinky finger. You might want K and J there instead. Or if it’s easy to press the key your left ring and pinky are on, but hard to move them to a different key, you might be OK with A and R. Though Dvorak, for example, has left-handed and right-handed variants, I don’t think there are any predefined layouts for people who want to type more letters with their right hand than their left – or to be more likely to need to move fingers on their right hand more often than their left.
Carpalx is a body of work that lets you define the typing effort for each key, and finds an optimum key layout for you. I haven’t used it myself - Colemak DH is a sufficiently high local maximum of goodness for me and I haven’t gone down that hill to find a higher maximum yet. But the moment you’re in may afford you a unique opportunity.
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?typing_effort
If you do end up making one, or having one made, you might be interested in something like the Concertina.
I haven’t built a musical keyboard, but I’ve taken apart a home (electric) organ or two. I hear that one among the many options you have if a modern pipe organ is being made for you, is different strengths of magnets that initially impede your keypresses, like the pneumatic valves would if it weren’t electronically controlled; as well as different woods for your keys. There’s a channel on YouTube to which I’m subscribed where the guy is building his own tiny pipe organ (like, 30 pipes, the size of a large suitcase).
The hexagonal key layout mentioned by others, and also often seen on one side of an accordion, is one among several alternative musical keyboard layouts: the white and black keys are sort of a musical QWERTY. Not the best, but the largest installed base, the most likely for new people to learn, and the most likely to be attached to an arbitrary keyboard instrument you come upon.
I have a Folger Tech i3 2020, so named because its frame is made from 20x20mm aluminum extrusion. No bed levelling, no quiet steppers, no all metal hot end, five years old. I’ve added a part cooling fan whose nozzle I printed off Thingiverse, a janky ring of 24v LED lights, and a cheapo 0.6mm nozzle. Sometimes I have to print part of the first layer a couple of times and move the z end stop to get it right. It takes about 10 minutes every couple of months, so not a big deal.
I say this not to recommend this printer to you today, but to say that even if you don’t manage to get perfect prints out of the box, the fiddling it takes to get what you want is probably not that bad.
Besides keyboards, and an occasional toy car or something, I’ve printed a replacement shade for a little fluorescent kitchen light, an adapter to fit a lampshade that was on sale to a lamp that was on sale, a fancy toilet paper spool, and a custom wrench to try to remove my washing machine’s tub. Oh and brackets that hold my cell phone, so I can use my ergo keyboard to type at a terminal on my phone, broadcast my pirate signal, and hack into the Matrix, while riding the bus. :)
It took me a couple months to stop thinking about layers.
My first move toward ergonomics was a Keebio Fourier 40%. It had been a few months before that when I started using Colemak on my laptop keyboard; I did that using Windows keyboard settings, and I was taking notes in meetings, so whenever I couldn’t keep up, switching back to QWERTY was a hotkey away.
After switching to the Fourier, and iterating many times on the QMK settings, that was the month or two where I had to think through all the control keys, symbols, and function keys I was typing. I didn’t quit typing on other keyboards, although I typed on my Fourier as much as possible; and I have not ended up forgetting anything I learned before.
I’m now on the precipice of moving from a 4x6 Dactyl Manuform to a 4x5 Splaytyl (if I can find those dang parts and get the thing built!) and that’s too small to have things like Tab, Enter, or the backslash on the home layer. I’m nervous. I’ve tried making a 4x5 layout for the DM, but haven’t ended up sticking with it. I couldn’t really get used to keys that are physically there, not doing anything.