#it's not like I'm setting anything to a key that my wired keyboard has but my built-in keyboard doesn't

[shower-racoon]

guess who just hardlocked her Terraria world! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[gayahithwen]

I brought my old mechanical HP keyboard with me when I moved to the US and married my wife, over ten years ago. Haven't been back since (because financials). The keyboard was already a few years old at the time, and it has held up admirably. But, it's finally starting to really break down. The numpad especially. Which sucks, because I actually do use the numpad with some frequency.

Anyway, I don't suppose anyone knows a reasonably cheap way to get a Swedish/Nordic keyboard in the US? Like, I literally just want a basic, wired, full-size, preferably mechanical (I like haptics) keyboard with all the keys in the places I'm used to, and I'm having no luck with my search skills. I don't need keys that light up or anything like that. Just the most basic kind of keyboard.

A while back I tried mailing HP to ask them if I could buy one straight from them (because, like I said, my current keyboard is HP and has held up for well over a decade, so I wanted to give them a chance), and they were like "but you don't live in Sweden, we only sell those in Sweden".

I've found some on Amazon, but then the pictures provided don't include Å Ä Ö, so I'm hesitant to order. Danish or Norwegian would be fine too, I can cope with seeing Æ and Ø instead, I know how to fix that with computer settings.

[thepowerisyouth]

The Universe Is Never Black & White, So Why Does Everyone Polarize their Beliefs?

One of the greatest questions that bugs me deeply--it keeps me up at night-- regards polarization. By this, I'm not referring only to political polarization, or even ideological polarization in general. I'm talking about everything being lumped into simple 'yes' or 'no', 'true' or 'false'.

I'm talking about anything and everything in the universe that's been confined to 2 binary 'poles'.

I will write a lot more about this topic later, so consider this an incomplete argument which seeks to set the mood for later posts about polarization.

This post will serve as a 'thought experiment' about expectations for 'simple tasks' to yield binary, expected results.

___________________________

Down to the smallest quantum mechanics of our universe, nothing happens in surety. We observe this effect follow us up to our more visible, tangible world through statistics.

"Expect the Unexpected" is a favorite cliche of mine that captures that simple fact.

It's really not hard to understand why nothing is so simple as a single cause, with a single effect. Just sitting here, typing away on the keyboard, I can name at least 10 things happening, in which each line contains many more steps in this process that I'm skipping:

My brain is somehow interpreting my consciousness, translating to hundreds, thousands-- who knows how many-- electrical signals that are basically just binary + cool hormones that act like quantum computers want to

After receiving neural commands, my muscles are mimicking movements which I've practiced over many years. However, I am using a different keyboard this morning so there is some very quick adjustments being made (by the brain I guess) from my most recent muscle memory to account for the smaller keys. I'm doing well-- not too many typos so far

When I click a click on the keyboard, a very small computer (like really small) inside the keyboard translates those mechanical actions--literally just physical forces acting down upon a sensor designed to sense that stuff-- and translating that into a standardized binary instruction.

Literal radio waves are sent, bouncing up and down through whatever obstacle course I set up for them, to reach a USB 'dongle' (love that term, won't stop using it) attached into my computer port.

Said USB 'dongle'-- I guess-- has an EVEN SMALLER silicon chip to interpret said 2.4 GHz signals and translate it for the computer

____________________

I'm skipping the many, many steps the computer takes at this point and moving forward to my home Wi-Fi.

I live in a valley, in a pretty rural area. The only internet available to me was T-Mobile's Home Internet plan, which is just a 'HotSpot' Tower. It works insanely well considering the marathon these poor protons are doing for me.

Now, for my purposes I actually broke the warranty on the router, and wired up a better antenna from outside, which is capable to sending and receiving 4G & 5G signals of the correct 'bands' which the Cell Tower nearest to me is a capable of handling.

('Bands' are just provider terms for different frequencies of radio waves.)

________________________

After my computer does whatever it wants with it, I do need to somehow communicate my desires to the internet servers which the rest of the world are connected to. This involves sending-- again-- binary signals through a wire this time, my Ethernet cable.

This lands at the T-Mobile Hotspot Router, which interprets those signals into ones which, I presume, are desired by the Cell Signal Tower nearest to me. As in they are radio wavelengths of a certain frequency, which somehow contain binary instructions

After the Router has translated and sent the signals through the 'Quad Coax Cable' I have run to the outside, the antenna broadcasts radio waves. These radio waves then fight through hell or high water for me to arrive about 1 mile away at T-Mobile's cell tower

I honestly have even less clue what happen after that. I would assume that's what all the infrastructure like phone lines are for, so those signals are sent down there, then passed around until it hits the right 'server' that Tumblr.com has used.

I'm sure I missed something, but at this point I believe my typed character on the keyboard has been successfully sent to the internet. Well, technically the computer stuff would all happen at the per-key level, while the WiFi stuff is probably done in 'bulk requests' every sentence or two.

_____________________________________

If you didn't read all that (more than a quick skim)-- good for you. It was exhausting to write, and exhausting I'm sure to read. I'm sure it was even more exhausting for all the poor little Protons I harnessed to do my bidding this morning.

To conclude, I just want to say that someone who types on their keyboard might expect things to work just as planned, but there's multitudes of things that could 'go wrong' and result in a delay to the expected character appearing on the screen.

[taperwolf]

Thrift store find, and a project:

Got this Alesis QX25 MIDI controller in as-is condition for $12. The most obvious problems when I got it were that the fader cap and one rotary encoder knob were missing, and one of the black keys was broken. In addition, there were solfege stickers on the keys, implying the previous owner was pretty young; that impression was backed up when I opened it to find maybe half a container of assorted glitter inside.

The fader cap I haven't come up with yet, and I've put a temporary knob on the encoder — the one at the far right — and I was able to partially disassemble the keybed and glue the key back together. (I'm using Gorilla Glue's superglue formulation, which is supposed to be better than usual cyanoacrylates at bonding plastics; if this doesn't hold, I know where to order replacements.) From a quick once over, the current status is that some of the tact switches are broken somehow — the ones, at least, for octave up and transpose down don't work. I've only given those the most cursory inspection, so I don't know if it's the switches themselves or something in the wiring; I'll have to see if my big box of tact switches has anything I can swap in for them.

But the "project" part is the part that has me enthused. Unlike a lot of more recent MIDI controllers, this one has both a USB jack for connecting to a computer and a 5-pin DIN jack for traditional MIDI instruments. It's also got a lot of spare room inside the case. So I'm looking at taking an Arduino or a Teensy and some little digital-to-analog converters and adding the ability to output CV and gate signals for modular synthesizers. Basically the Arduino will listen to the MIDI signal and interpret that; the minimal feature set is a single note off channel 1, just the CV and gate corresponding to the most recently struck key, but may expand to multiple notes and/or handling the drum pads as their own gate/trigger outs, and probably an extra CV out that can follow the mod wheel or pitch bend.

I'm debating which DACs to use. I have some lying around — the spoils of a time when Linear, Analog Devices, and Maxim were separate companies, and they, Microchip, and Texas Instruments would give out free samples if you had a plausible-sounding company name — but a lot of them aren't particularly well-suited for this. I want to run everything off the existing 5V supply — either a wall wart or USB — and not need elaborate external analog circuits to do things. I'm looking at the MCP4811, a single-channel 10-bit device, which has the advantage of an internal voltage reference at 2.048V, and a ×2 output, for a full range of 0V-4.096V that's very reliable even when run off a unreliable 5V power supply, like the keyboard's USB power input.

(In an ideal world, I'd have a perfect 1v reference, and a precision adder, so that the full precision of the part, all the bits, could be applied to just the 0-1V range, and then I could add single volts as needed to specify the octave. If we're calling 0V C0, then with the 10-bit setup over the 4.096V spread, you have to use value 396 to get G1, and you're imperceptibly sharp; with ten bits over a single volt, you'd use value 597 and add an extra volt and you'd be... slightly closer but flat this time. So the ideal world can fuck itself, and I'll see how the thing I actually have works.)