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.

Oh well, best of luck at Mayo!

I’m 45, and I agree with both of you. There seems to be a bimodal thing with lots of folks who are still young enough to think that screaming THE TRUTH™ to everyone they encounter will be what fixes the world, but a very large chunk of active posters who actually want to communicate seem to be a bit older. My personal theory is that the API exodus left year gathered in a lot of people who had seen previous social media sites (e.g. Digg) blow themselves up, and that by definition will skew older.

I mean, it’s unironically worth a try if you can try it risk-free. The munchies are a real thing, and many people find marijuana helps with nausea, though some find the opposite. Personally, though, smoking made me paranoid (I’m still VERY sure those two guys in Amsterdam were laughing at me, but wife is convinced otherwise), and edibles made me sleepy, not that edibles would be much of an option for you.

All that said, the only real medical advice is to keep getting medical advice. You’re clearly not dealing with something normal, so keep an eye on it for your and your family’s sake, but if it’s not killing you, then maybe you just ride this thing out. I’m of a similar age, and while I don’t have anything nearly as dramatic, dealing with the lifestyle changes forced by aging is just sort of our lot in life now.

Hang in there, FlyingSquid@lemmy.world. Rooting for you.

G2 is less sweet. Hell, that’s a whole market segment at this point, so maybe there’s something that hits your palate better. Pickle juice is probably still around somewhere too.

For the shakes, maybe look up various protein smoothie recipes if you get sick of Ensure. You can add milk or water to get the protein powder to a consistency you prefer.

Last night, I watched ‘The Conners’

There’s yer problem right there, buddy.

More seriously though, I don’t think any sitcom is obliged to be “educational.” If most of the audience laughed and didn’t find the narrative out of step with the tone of the show or the characterizations to be distractingly broad compared to earlier seasons/episodes, then it was a “good” episode of The Connors.

Now you tell me, do the Connors usually try to do the right thing and learn lessons, or are they kind of a bowdlerized “Shameless” now? I do not plan to watch enough to find out for myself.

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.

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.

At my rather beginner level, designing single parts for a 3D printer or laser engraver, it behaves almost exactly like most other parametric-history CAD apps in the broad concepts. The devil is just in the details, really. Shortcuts are different, terminology is different, Certain QoL and UI elements are either missing or somewhere else. The workbench model is not unique, but some of the kruft that has built up around FreeCAD’s benches and the defaults (better in recent versions if you look at the start screen) can make a new user “nope out” if they have other options. I guess assemblies in particular remain a fragmented area and lag behind the commercial packages, and I can say for certain that it still requires “good design practices” in a way that some of the commercial apps manage around, toponaming the biggest among them.

If all the negatives kill your workflow to the point that you want to pay for commercial software or live with the limitations (current and potential) of their free tiers, then that’s absolutely understandable. Commercially, it’s doubly so, and with addition of the “business reality” that there’s also no one to blame or sue if FreeCAD is not working for you. Hell, I don’t use it for all my stuff either, as I find no-history modeling still mostly works for what I’m doing and I have some free or cheap options in that space that are decent, but I can see the appeal as I’m starting to make things that could benefit from tweaks after the fact. What I get frustrated by is claims that FreeCAD “is no good” or “will never be useful”. I call BS. It’s already good and useful for many use cases, and anyway the number of free parametric CAD suites that do not restrict your use of your designs is exactly ONE. Otherwise, you’re looking at an absolute minimum of $300 a year to subscribe and hope that Shapr3D’s new history functionality doesn’t break, and that neither they nor Alibre gets gobbled up.

You’re obviously trying to be thoughtful, and to a certain extent this is entirely subjective. If you, as any decent person would, think there are lines that you do not cross and that you treat service professionals with respect, then where is the line? You definitely don’t throw shit on the floor intentionally, but you also don’t offer to help cook, which you might at a family dinner. Every non-shitty person person will land somewhere in between, though hopefully a good ways away from throwing shit on the floor.

I think you’re just running into a situation where your line is in a different place than other folks’, to the point where you’re a little out of step with the level of “help with the chores” that most people expect at a sit-down restaurant. If you continue to treat staff with respect, thank them for their help, and (if culturally appropriate/economically necessary) tip generously, then you don’t have to feel bad. My wife waited tables and tended bar for many years, and it’s not the specific tasks that are part of the job that ever made it feel degrading, it was people treating her shabbily and acting superior. No one expects you to clear the table when you’re out; just don’t act like you’re too good to.

It’s getting better, and it’s critical that it do so, if for no other reason than to raise the floor that commercial offerings have to surpass to retain small-to-medium customers. I haven’t committed to it, but I’m rooting for it and following it closely.

White filament and a sharp pocket knife hide many sins, but thanks. It came out quite okay, and the cheap hardboard from Home Depot cuts very nicely with even a cheap laser.

It’s actually not secured yet. I included a couple of hexagonal openings in the long legs of the print that should accommodate a heated brass standoff just about right; it’ll be very similar to your alignment pins. I used the idea on my last keyboard and it worked well. The gap will be closed a bit more after securing the screws from the bottom plate. It will be nowhere near “perfect,” and but the end result should be a bit cleaner than this in-progress state. I am fairly pleased how decorative grooves draw the eye away from the seam a bit, but I’m not really trying to hide that it is 3D printed, and that in two pieces.

Tree supports and careful use of an exacto knife could also make it work. Post processing can be a bit much sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be the enemy either.

The best I can find around here in north Texas are pre packaged raw peanuts, so they’re kinda old and super dry. They still boil up fine, but it takes for-fucking-ever. I’ve found that salt and Adobo seasoning gives them a nice mellow garlic flavor that works really well for me. Canned Cajun style are good too, though there are more squishies than I’d prefer.

Yup. They’re basically beans that were raised as tubers and think they’re tree nuts.

Then you boil them in a brine and they become redneck oysters.

If you live somewhere with a “food hall” place, that might capture the vibe of a bar in the sense that it’s communal and built around eating and drinking, but is more flexible than a coffee shop and more open ended than a restaurant. Those who still partake can do so, so you might see people drinking, but it won’t have that mild absurdity some folks can feel hanging out in a bar while not drinking.