I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

I (still) don't own an EV for various reasons, but I'm still interested. One question that keeps popping up in my mind is this one:

Where I live way up north, many people drive EVs - mostly Teslas apparently. A solid third of the parking lot at work is filled with EVs. The one thing that always strikes me when I leave work around the same time as everybody else is the sheer amount of noise of all those Teslas warming up their batteries before their owners come out to drive home make in the winter: it's like dozens of heating cannons running at the same time.

Each time, I wonder how much juice is used just to prime the battery before use vs. actual miles traveled.

If you leave in a cold country, have you worked out how much energy you burn simply keeping the battery alive in the winter? Is your EV still more energy efficient than an ICE in the winter for your particular use pattern?

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor.

And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away.

Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

Hey everybody,

I'm following up on this post. I've brought myself up to speed with free-as-in-libre CAD software - which was easy, since I have years of experience in CAD - and now I'm learning Blender, as I said I would 🙂

So I've followed a few tutorials. But as always, I've found them useful only up to a point, because I need to do stuff myself to remember. Also, I need to do something useful to me otherwise I get bored. Sorry that's just how I work.

So now I'm modeling the enclosure of one the devices I work on professionally. Nothing super complicated: it's a 100-ish x 60-ish x 30-ish aluminum enclosure with a raised lip at the front, a bezel, some cooling fins on top, 4 triangular pockets at the back for screws and filleted edges all around.

So far I've modeled most of what's square, and the triangular holes. I figured I'd look into the finer details and the filets later (and if I started out wrong, I can always start over, no problem).

My questions are these:

• Most of my difficulties seem to come from trying to replicate the dimensions of features accurately. I want this model to be exact to within 0.1 mm, but essentially Blender seems to be making it excrutiatingly difficult every step of the way.

  I'm slowly discovering tools and developing a workflow to make my life easier, but more or less 80% of what I do is calculating the absolute position of individual vertices and making edges and faces out of them. Because however hard I look at the tools available, I can't seem to find any that I could use in any way to make it easier to dimension things or position them with respect to other things. It's really, REALLY tedious.

  I'm fairly certain half of the problem is that Blender isn't a good tool for what I'm trying to do, and I'm sure if I keep at it, I'll find cleverer ways to achieve what I want (and like I said, the process of figuring this out itself IS my way of learning, so I'm not complaining).

  Still, I'm roughly 15 hours into this and I reckon I'm modeling at 1/10th the speed I would with a traditional parametric CAD software. In other words, what would be a quick one-hour job in SolidWorks takes me 10 hours in Blender.

  Does it get easier? 🙂

• Speaking of parametric modeling: is there any way to make Blender parametric? It reminds me furiously of AutoCAD 25 years ago: I add more and more features to my model, I refine it, and I dread the moment someone will walk into my office and tell me "It's nice, but this dimension here is wrong" - and bad luck, it's one of the main dimensions and I have to spend half a day redoing everything, where a parametric modeler would let me change the dimension and would recalculate all the other dependent features.

  Is there any way to "record" the building steps I do in Blender and replay them on intermediate meshes that I could go back to and modify?

  Although mind you, I'm asking this but I have a feeling I'm approaching Blender entirely the wrong way here as well...

• Finally, a colleague of mine uses this gizmo in SolidWorks / Windows. He swears by it. I've been using a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball for decades, but sadly Blender turns out to be exceptionally awkward to use with that trackball. No matter how hard I try to get used to clicking the wheel button to spin the 3D view, it's just really uncomfortable and it's driving me up the wall.

  So I think I'd like to get one of those 3DConnexion devices and give it a whirl. But before I crack out the credit card, does anybody know if it works in Blender in Linux? I know it works in Blender because the manual says so, but I'm not too sure about Linux - and if it does work, how well it works.

Hopefully a new class of drugs to tackle phantom pain is on the horizon.

I'm playing with OpenSCAD, which is a text-based parametric 3D modeler. It comes with its own built-in editor, but you can also open the source file in your favorite editor and when the file is saved, OpenSCAD recompiles and re-renders the model.

I know it's nothing particularly novel, but it's kind of awesome to type :w and see the 3D object immediately show what you just typed. There's even a degree of rendering control from within the editor: for example to highlight a feature, like an subtracted volume, simply type # in front of the corresponding operation, :w and hey-presto, the feature appears in the model.

And sure enough, there is OpenSCAD syntax highlighing for vim. How cool is that!

If someone had told me 40 years ago that I'd be doing 3D modeling in VI one day, I would never have believed it 🙂

Hello everybody,

I’d like to get into Blender, with a view to possibly do CAD with it because I see it’s now - at least partially - a thing.

I used to work professionally with SolidWorks in 2008. Then I changed jobs entirely. But I’ve always liked doing CAD: I love making complex working mechanical models that move accurately.

I’ve also always wanted to do animations - something SolidWorks could do back then, but not very easily. I tried to get into Blender many years ago, but it was… let’s say a steep learning curve, to be kind.

Fast-forward to today:

My company bought a Prusa 3D printer. That thing is fascinating. 3D printing is also something I’ve wanted to get into for years, and this too seems to have matured into a really good, mostly trouble-free technology.

And then I watched a really interesting video yesterday from one of my favorite Youtuber, Animagraffs, in which he shows in details how he uses Blender to create his marvellous animations. In his video, Blender looks sooo much better and so much more stable and complete than what I tried years ago.

Finally, I’m almost exclusively a Linux user. I could swallow - barely - the cost of a SolidWorks license, but I’ve always hated to have to use Windows to use SolidWorks. That’s mostly what kept me off of using it again since I changed jobs.

After all those years, it seems like all those technologies have matured enough that a reasonably clever but not exceptionally bright dude like me can actually hope to create animations, model printable parts and possibly do 2008-level parametric CAD in Blender.

And so I think it’s time I finally invest the time to learn Blender. I feel it’s one of the essential generic skills a well-rounded computer user should possess, like editing photos, audio or videos, and it seems like I could build on Blender skills to finally get into 3D printing and do CAD again, all in my favorite OS. And even if I can’t do CAD with it yet, it seems that it’s not too far off.

How woud you recommend I go about learning how to use Blender? I don’t want to do complicated things, just learn the basics properly and build solid foundations.

I created this post on !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml: if you go directly to the instance, it shows twice as many comments, and a lot more upvotes than on the SDF view.

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.