For reference, I have next to zero knowledge of building electronics. I've replaced the joysticks on two Nintendo joycons (which I actually found pretty fun), and that's it. I also have no experience with 3D printing or designing specific products.

I am also sick of touch screen keyboards on phones, do not like any of of the phones that do have keys or the Clicks phone case (why is it on the BOTTOM—), and currently have a lot of free time.

So my question to you: how would I go about designing my own slide out case with its own keyboard?

Because that is my ideal solution at this point. And in fact, it turns out someone DID make a 3D printed "slider terminal" this year. Except it's for the Note 10 (I have a Galaxy S9), and seems to be used as a full-fledged replacement for a desktop experience with a trackpad. That's neat and will probably appeal to a lot of people here, but personally, I just need physical keys.

Along with the keyboard used for that terminal, I also found this other tiny keyboard which doesn't have the trackpad and is about the same dimensions as my Galaxy S9. Actually I found that first and was trying to figure out if there were any cases that could store and pop that out. The biggest issue is that it would cover my camera except maybe when it's slid out, but screw it, I want a damn physical keyboard.

I do have access to 3D printers (yay public libraries!) and I'm willing to learn Blender in order to make this thing. I just need advice on where to begin and how to tackle this. In particular, I have no clue how to go about the slide out part. I feel like I should be able to figure out how to make a case that fits the dimensions of my phone and the keyboard fairly easily, but no idea where to begin with researching the sliding component.

Besides that, I also know that I'm not alone here in my frustrations with phone keyboards, so I'm hoping we can pool together ideas on how to do this. As far as I can tell there's not really a "one size fits all" solution that would work for all phones (well, except perhaps a foldable case instead of slide-out), but maybe we can at least share decent starting points for people to design their own. For instance, the slider terminal uses a keyboard that came with a remote, and it would never have occurred to me that could be used for this sort of project. And there are a lot of potential workarounds for the camera placements, so Person A may have an idea that doesn't work well for them, but does work better for Person B than their own original idea.

So yeah. Advice, ideas and general brainstorming are welcome!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Started a new job today and got a mac as a dev machine. I won't do technical onboarding until later in the week, so I haven't seen what the dev tools are like, but today I was driving myself crazy just trying to do basic things like copy, paste, screenshot, change windows.

At the last job, we had ubuntu machines, so I was able to use gnome extensions to mostly replicate the same general layout, menus, and shortcut keys as Windows. Primarily, this allowed me to keep the same "muscle memory". Since the ubuntu gnome desktop is nothing special from a UX point of view, there didn't seem to be a downside. But I understand that the Mac experience is very curated, so I'm thinking I should lean into learning it.

So my questions are: what are your mac pro tips and things that speed up your work? And for others who have made this transition, what did you learn to do the "mac way" and what did you tweak?

I have a computer that is not quite powerful enough to run my flight simulators, but which is still quite capable. I tried to sell it for close to what I bought it for, after using it maybe 50 hours, but the stink of "used" was on it, so I only got low ball offers for the system as a whole. Selling the individual components would be better but take substantially more effort. Instead, after finding an absurdly good 64 GB RAM deal ($150 for DDR4, in early December, crazy), I decided to use it to educate myself on some work-adjacent science simulation capabilities, putting it at home to avoid the feeling like I'm doing work (and also so I can install nonsense on it if I want).

I settled on Pop! OS, after finding out it has the best NVIDIA GPU support of the .deb Linux family, and installed 22.04 on it last month. After a standard "oops I messed something up on a new-to-me Linux distro, might as well wipe it," I reset the bios to see if it fixed things, then loaded 24.04 on a live USB and ran the update at POST.

24.04 made some very big changes to Pop! OS, which I won't list, other than one that puzzles me. After installing, I ran Geekbench 6 to benchmark it, and I found out my system CPU performance was about 33% down from the prior benchmark. I rationalized this as being due to no XMP being on, and tried to enter BIOS on boot...but Pop24 refused to enter BIOS, and my motherboard didn't even POST? But it would load into Pop24 without issue? So I was stuck without a way to tune my system. I eventually removed the SSD, hard wiped it on a separate device, and reinstalled Pop22, whereafter I was able to enter BIOS and enable XMP. Performance was restored, and even better than ever.

My question...why is Pop24 different? I tried to disable fastboot. I tried to have it use systemctl to reboot into settings. I tried everything I could find online. The best guess I have is something to do with UEFI? But I have no clue. I'm not really a computer guy, I just futz around, and I don't know what I'm doing.

A little white lie that got bigger than you anticipated.
A hobby you got a little too into.
The sunk costs of something irreversible in your life.

Whatever it is, you're "in to deep" on it and think fondly of surfacing (whether that's possible for your situation or not).

Share what it is, how it came to be that way, and what's next for you.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

not sure if this is the appropriate sub group for this question or if its even allowed but figured I'd try.

I am curious the demographics of tildes users. You can be as specific as you feel comfortable.

I am in a dude in my 30s in Canada who works in software development.

Happy New Year everyone! For January, Tildes Book Club will be reading Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bissen. It's short at 167 pages. I'm looking forward to discussing with everyone who participates. Lurkers, you are absolutely welcome to read along and follow the discussion at the end of the month.

We have books lined up monthly through September. I haven't read most of the books and I'm excited to see how the discussion goes.

I'm being brief because I'm not trying to stir up trouble.

Is it common for threads here to be locked without a reason given? In cases where it's not obvious, can we ask or is that grounds for being moderated?

For full transparency, I'm not asking about a topic I was part of, but was following and surprised to see locked.

Important: This will be a noisy topic. If you do not wish to see it in your feed, please use the Ignore feature to hide it!

Tip: If the large number of comments are cluttering up the topic and you just want to see the main giveaway posts, click Collapse Replies at the top of the comments.

🎵 It's the most wonderful time of the year 🎵

This is our annual holiday game giveaway topic. Spread some goodwill and holiday cheer with others!

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

So, here on tildes we can link to users with an @, as in @user, or we can link to a group using a ~, as in ~tildes, but we've never had a way to link to a tag. Long ago I proposed using an octothorpe for that, as in #tag, but it's never been implemented.

Yesterday I noticed there's a somewhat easy way, just use: [tag](/?tag=tag). It's not as easy as #tag, but it's easier than what I used to do, which was go to the front page in a new tab, right click on any tag, copy link, go back to my draft in the other tab, paste it, edit the tag, surround it in brackets, etc.

Not revolutionary, I know, but "slash questionmark tag = whatever_tag" is a much easier shorthand.

I love the tagging system here, and feel it's underutilized. It's really helpful for providing context by linking other topics that have been posted here before. Thanks to the tireless work of several tildeans, especially @mycketforvirrad, who will not be named, this site is fantastic for digging up previous related topics.

That's all, folks!