I don't think I have an account on GitLab, so I'll just share this here and tag @Deimos.

It's not possible for me to log into Tildes on Firefox. I receive a "Page expired, reload and try again" error every time I try. It occurs in all cases, including:

• If I'm using a stale tab and if I open a new tab or refresh the page
• With browser extensions enabled and disabled
• In private browsing mode with no extensions enabled
• With Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on or off
• When I specifically add https://tildes.net as an exception in my tracking preferences
• When I'm not signed in or syncing data from another browser
• After I delete my Tildes password from my browser
• Even when I clear cookies/cache..

I have only tried this on Firefox desktop, but I found this Git issue from @Omnicrola describing the same problem for Firefox mobile. Some differences:

• My problem seems to happen every day of the week, not just Sundays.
• My problem does NOT resolve itself within 24 hours. I have to use a different browser like Cheome to log in.

Not experiencing this with any other website. Maybe the website/server/browser thinks I'm in a different timezone or something, as theorized in that thread, CSRF and all that, but I've been in the same place for a week or two now. If I go to Web Developer Tools I can see error messages like this:

Cookie “” has been rejected by user set permissions.

Cookie “session=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz12345; Max-Age=31536000; Path=/; expires=Wed, 19-Feb-2025 22:34:16 GMT; secure; HttpOnly” has been rejected by user set permissions.

Request to access cookies or storage on “https://tildes.net/login” was blocked because of custom cookie permission.

That links to this page which isn't very helpful because I've already tried that. It's possible that I have some other privacy configuration in Firefox that's screwing with Tildes, but I wouldn't know what. Wondering if anyone else has experienced this and gotten around it?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like ownership.worker, slang and copyright. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was observing.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Hey Tilderinos! I tried this on r/guitar and had no dice, so figured I'd give it a shot here. I was playing bass a few weeks ago transcribing a line meant for guitar and suddenly felt like, uh, learning guitar. So I picked up a Squier CV Jazzmaster off FBM and have been plucking away, really enjoying learning it. Thank you to ~UniquelyGeneric for the Justin Guitar rec, his stuff is great.

I'm aware Jazzmasters notorious for requiring a proper setup, and I don't really mind while I'm getting some form stuff down - but I have noticed there's a bit of a
hiss happening when I pluck on the harder side that I didn't notice while I was testing it out. I made a recording on my audio interface here. There's also a bit of a hum which changes with the pickup selection and goes down with the tone knob. Does this sound like a particular issue and does anyone have a good guide to troubleshooting or addressing it? Not the worst thing if I adjust the volume right, but if I can pull it apart and fix it myself then hey. Thanks!

GMs: do you have any gaps in the worldbuilding of your setting that you're looking for help filling? Post them here!

In case it wasn't already clear, I need help as well. My setting is a near-future hybrid of Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, in 5e. There are two major gaps. First, in my setting North America has fractured into a handful of nations - but the middle part split into a radioactive wasteland and a loose coalition of city states. What locations might be concealed in the wasteland? (A fallout vault-like society living in the NORAD mountains of Colorado?) Which city states would have survived and what would their character be?

I also need ideas for more megacorporate factions.

Here is the work in progress for the setting, if you're interested.

Help me and I promise I'll help you!

Second superhero movie Nolan's Batman Begins from 2005.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

How familiar are you Batman - comicbook, animated series, other movies - and how does this compare? Have you seen the other movies in Nolan's Batman trilogy and does this stand up against the rest?

The rest of the schedule for February is:

• 26th: Gangs of New York

"I mean, pain is the ultimate driving force of life itself. Why do we sleep? Because we're tired. Why do we eat? Because we're hungry. Why do we talk to people? Because we fear isolation, etc. Just like in the movie Trainspotting (1996), where heroin users drown out the pain of existence with substances. Does that mean if someone becomes overly focused on anything, they feel a stronger dissatisfaction with life? And could this be used against us? Like this quote from the book Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig:

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

This is Album of the Week #21 ~ This week's album is Bruno Pernadas - Those Who Throw Objects at the Crocodiles Will Be Asked to Retrieve Them

Year of Release: 2016
Genre(s): Progressive Pop/Art Pop
Country: Portugal
Length: 53 minutes
RYM | Listen!

Excerpt from RYM review by user DoubleMissMatt:

But there's more in this melting pot of sound than jazz and pop, with touches of electronic music and sampledelia in the mix on tracks such as "Anywhere In Space Time". Building a groove off of analogue synths and a fuzzy chopped vocal sample gives this track a kaleidoscopic sound that reminds me a bit of the Avalanches' debut record. And this isn't exclusive just to this track, as there are a number of nostalgic lo-fi vocal samples that seem to be pulled from films/T.V shows from the 60's (forgive me if I'm wrong with that assumption) scattered across this album at the start/end of songs. That, alongside the two "poem" interludes breaking up the track list, give this album a film-like quality that adds to the wonder of the experience.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I’ve been looking for a good system for my friends and I to share TTRPG character sheets (primarily DnD) with one another.

We’re not interested in a full-digital VTT, but the ecosystem is pretty fragmented for charsheet-only apps (many immature and abandoned projects). Self-hosted webapp makes the most sense for our needs, but I’m open to suggestions for some other sync method that’s not PDF-based.

This seems like a viable candidate:

https://github.com/Orcpub/orcpub

…but I’d love to hear better options if anyone’s found em.

Intro

Whenever smaller keyboards come up online, I often see a lot of the same reactions/dismissals. I've found many of these to be foolish, but also that the community around such devices has its own barriers. It sometimes is represented from its most extreme aspects rather than someone with a more normal approach and use case.

So here is yet another pitch on why you might want to consider trying out some of the smaller keyboards out there, and the various advantages it can bring. This will probably be quite long, but I hope it at least is interesting.

Daily Drivers

Skills Required

I think the only real "skill" you must have to consider downsizing your keyboard is the ability to decently touch type without looking. If you're the sort of person who still hunts and pecks, no judgement, but this is not for you.

If you're someone who has to code, do data/numerical entry, or type a lot for work, then I encourage you to read on. Those are common barriers I hear thrown out, but in my experience are actually easier with a smaller keyboard.

Why?

The normal keyboard for most machines has a lot of dead/wasted space that could just be used better, and has some keys that are important or have grown more important in really poor positions.

Some main offenders

1. Capslock - How often do you use capslock? How often do you NEED capslock? If I can convince you of one thing to try out right now it's this, remap capslock (check out powertoys on windows) to left control. As it stands capslock is one of the easiest buttons to hit, and yet it if you moved it over next to Scroll lock you'd probably never mind. A large portion of my job is coding SQL and I never use it because that's what modern formatters are for. Please try remapping it(throw capslock on left control or some combo if you want).
2. Spacebar- Hear me out, as this might vary depending on how you type. Do you use one or both thumbs to hit your spacebar? If you're anything like me, you use one, and in my case it's the left thumb. This means that I've got a massive portion of my keyboard dedicated to one button, even though I'll never touch more than half of it (you'd be surprised how small you can make the space key and still hit it reliably). Now you might think that you don't need that space, but I'll dive into that more later.
3. The number row- More on this later, but my brief take on this is that humans are actually pretty bad at knowing exactly where the numbers are when they get away from the home row, and as anyone who's ever had to do lots of number entries know, the 10key/numpad is the way to go.
4. PgUp/PgDwn/Home/End/Delete- These 5 keys (and control and shift) are great for navigating/editing text/code/spreadsheets/webpages quickly, and could not be farther away from where you really need them to actually do that easily.
5. Arrow keys- A lot of people think it's fine that they're waaaaaay out there away from everything. I will be proposing an alternative given these are also critical to quick navigation.

How is smaller better then?

The core idea is simple. You can find the home row easily with the homing keys (j/f generally have a bump or some defining feature). You're probably excellent at hitting the keys in relation to that if they're 1 step away from the home row. The farther you are from that, the more likely you'll need to look, and the longer it'll take you to press the key even if you don't. So where possible, it's ideal to try and use space more efficiently to keep the keys you actually need to use near this position.

But how are you going to fit all those keys anywhere near the home row?

My Keymap

As an example, to help explain moving forward, here is the keymap for my mercutio 40.

You'll want to save that json, and then upload it at qmk configurator, which will make it much easier to explore. If you've never looked at this before it can seem insane, but I promise you it's pretty tame ignoring some edge case stuff.

If you don't feel like going through the hassle here's screenshots from the site with descriptions of each layer.

Mostly the same as below but i did fix some missing info below so sorry about that. I'm also leaving the descriptions of my "gaming" layers 4/5/6 in the imgur only because I think that's out of scope for this).

The magic of programable layers and context.

Space is an interesting key. It's a key only ever really tap, never hold (outside of games, more on that later). So, why not double it up, and make it do something different when you hold it?

Well in this case, tapping any of my 3 space buttons gives you a space like anyone would expect, but if you hold either of the left 2, it "shifts" you to layer 1 (base layer is 0), and holding the right one, shifts you to layer 2.

I put shifts in quotes because it's just like the shift key. If you hit 7 on your keyboard, you get a 7. If you hold shift and hit 7, you get &. This is the same concept, and just keep the layers organized in a way that makes sense, keeps it very easy to know what layer what key you want is on.

The Detailed Layers

The shorter version

If you don't want to read all of that, the basic idea is that your average person can type on the keyboard with minimal explanation. If they forget where a key is, the other 3 layers all follow rules to help guide them. One layer for navigation and keys that don't actually output characters (home/end/delete/esc/et) and one layer for the rest of the keys that output characters, namely the numbers, which are then also your numpad and ALWAYS under your right hand, centered and ready to go. The final layer is, mainly, for the function keys, still following the numpad from the previous so you can again easily figure out where the button you want is.

What does this gain you?

In the end the main benefits i've found are easier navigation, as I essentially now have a navigation layer with every key i could want on it, and much faster access to numbers. I still do data entry and lots of numbers, and having the numpad always one keyhold away is awesome.

On top of that it's just nice to not have to move my hands so much to type, and to get so much of my desk space back.

I type just as fast as I do on a normal keyboard for basic text, as there's almost no difference, and I type faster doing code/editing text because my numbers, brackets, and navigation keys are all closer at hand and in such a way I don't need to look or even move my hand from the home row to hit them.

So is it just all upsides?

On the typing side, honestly yeah. I've seen a lot of excuses like "well i prefer a numpad" or "how do you type numbers" which I've tried to address in this post.

The only issue i've run into is gaming, where I already really solved most of my problems as shown in the extra layers in the imgur gallery, and think it might even be better for gaming vs the normal layouts.

The only remaining hassle is roguelike games such as stone soup or caves of qud, which LOVE to assign every fucking key a use so there's no easy way to remap things and I have to actually add another layer JUST so i can hit the numpad numbers because I need them to navigate....

BUT unfortunately, you might actually want to acquire one of these keyboards, and that's where stuff gets a little tricky.

Programmability

All the upsides I just mentioned assume you can actually program the keyboard. Thankfully this has gotten much much easier with both Via and ZMK making the process very simple. QMK is doable, but difficulty wise it shared a lot of similarities with trying to get the perfect modded run of Fallout New Vegas going with about 20-40 mods. If you are not more comfortable in the tech world, I recommend ONLY boards that support via software. I believe these days anything that supports QMK supports VIA, but it's worth checking on the via website to make sure the board you're about to get works.

Some assembly required

The mercutio and the discipline I built myself after ordering the parts. They're through hole soldering and were some of the first soldering I'd ever done on my own outside of a quick kit I bought off amazon to practice. It is actually not that hard BUT you need the equipment. It's not horribly expensive to get but it's not cheap either. I do really enjoy just throwing on music and putting these together, but I totally understand that you might just want to, you know, buy the fucking thing already built.

Thankfully many sites offer build services (or you can find them on etsey) which charge a fee to assemble it for you. This is what i've done with every corne i've ordered because it is NOT through hole soldering and I don't have the guts for it, and even still they've all had some eventual issues (although again, i carry mine with me in a very unprotected state because i'm insane so some of that is on me).

Made of money

Especially if you're paying for the aforementioned build services, these things can get into the 200-400 range FAST, which is a lot for a keyboard. There are some cheaper options out there, and the Mercutio was only $70ish before switches(not bad) and keycaps (range from dirt cheap to ungodly expensive).

Still I would not recommend ANY of these for a first time buyer. My first smaller board was a 60% mechanical and those range from $70-100 these days from what i'm seeing.

Take my money....please?

Sometimes you just won't be able to find or buy the board you want in the way you want. There are lots of interesting boards i've seen over the years, but they're either very expensive or only open for a limited time. I had a working cornish zen that died on me. I'd love to replace it. I cannot as they currently don't sell them. Will they make more? Dunno. I hope they do.

Recommendations

I DO NOT recommend diving in head first and suggest starting with something simple like a 60 or 65, probably keychron, as they're a decent budget brand. You might want to go even cheaper with just a 60% off of amazon that isn't even programmable just to see if you outright hate it, but I do think that getting something you can start to tweak as you begin to understand what you want helps adoption.

Final Thoughts

I hope this gave some of you the push to look into all this. I'm glad I dipped my toe in it, less glad about the absurd amount of money i've spent on it (dear god keycaps), and really glad about the moment where I thought "huh i really just don't need all these keys" and pulled some out. I hope I can convince a few others give it a shot and hopefully see the same results. No dvorak or home row modifiers and weird triple tap macros. Just some layers and common sense.

I do still, if nothing else, highly recommend switching left control to caps lock.