BC TECH
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

Have you gotten tired of mechanical keyboards with all their physical feedback?

Have you considered... A completely flat keyboard?

 It's very flat
my favorite part is that since all buttons are the same shape and size, the spacebar is just 8 space buttons in a row
So why is it flat? Just because they hate good keyboards? Nope! it's for a reason...

Surprise! the plastic cover can be lifted up. The keyboard layout is on a piece of paper.
And it comes with a blank one so you can make your own.
And some of these buttons aren't just buttons. They're macros! From the MS-DOS era, clearly.
the feature I really wasn't expecting:
It has a BEEPER.
It beeps on every key press!
It also has four different connectors. Mine came with an adapter from the left connector to an AT/PS/2 cable.
I think the middle two might be host connectors (AT and PS/2): you can hook a regular keyboard up through them.
The rightmost one is RS-232 serial, most likely
And it turns out this thing is a Model KB3000
And they taped a piece of paper saying "get the utilities and manual from our website" on the back.
So it's by Logic Controls, apparently.
who are still around!
sadly the KB3000 is no longer on their site. TO THE WAYBACK MACHINE!
here we go.
The KB3000 Programmable Keypad!
Yep, I was right, you can daisy-chain other keyboards into it.
dang it.
if you want the DOS version you gotta ask for it.

WELL that info isn't on their page anymore... but I'm gonna ask.
Interestingly the manual says it can emulate an XT keyboard. Fancy.

The other thing is that apparently you can program it without connecting the serial: serial is fully optional. So it must use some kind of out-of-band PS/2 messages to program it.
emailed 'em.
As much as I want them to provide the files, I will be 0% surprised if they just reply "bruh it's 2020"
anyway while I have the progamming tool here and it's windows and should work fine on my windows PC... I think it's gonna need to talk to a real PS/2 port, not this USB adapter. So it's time to pull out a windows 95 machine with real PS/2
Eh, win98, close enough
XMODEM TIME
There we go. We can configurize all of this.
oh no, keyboard cat is missing!
Doesn't work. Shame.
@yngling located a download which includes the DOS utility, though. Lemme try that one:
https://t.co/op7ByWT9au
TEXT MODE
dang it
Maybe the PS/2 controller on this system is too weird? It's one of those funky ones that can magically do keyboard or mouse by autodetecting which one you plugged into it.
I'll have to grab a more generic computer and try it there.
But not right now. I've dug around in the back room enough already today, so I'll have to play with another keyboard.

Like this one!
It's just as flat.
And again, the buttons are written on paper. So you can make your own layouts!
And the one it comes with is double-sided, and the other side is AMAZING.
Have you ever wanted to type on alphabetical comic sans?
no? Fuck you, you're gonna.
It's got a feature very few (wired) keyboards have:
An on/off switch.
So this is an IntelliTools IntelliKeys USB. It does not appear as a USB keyboard! so yes, you do need to install the drivers.
It's also got TRS connectors on the side for switches
So unlike the good luck we had with Logic Controls... IntelliTools doesn't exist anymore. They were sold to AbleNet in 2014.
Although apparently they open sourced the drivers!
https://t.co/17fYshhPwu
Anyway, unlike the previous Flat Keyboard which was designed for industrial/retail automation reasons, this one is designed for accessibility reasons. You can design keyboards with specifically placed large buttons for easy use by people with limited motor skills
and that's what the "switches" connectors are about: you can hook up things like sip-and-puff device or foot pedals or whatever is needed.
hello world
typing on this is slow
also keep in mind that this keyboard is HUGE
Anyway let's open up the KB3000 and see what's in side.
Surprisingly little, for how incredibly heavy this keyboard is.
(the case is sheet metal!)
Bottom of the PCB
Flip it, and we've got 3 chips, two jumpers, and the beeper.
There's some missing parts: I think that's because this one has the serial port but doesn't actually support serial. That's an optional function, so those missing chips are probably serial-TTL chips
So that first chip is a MM74HC4066N. That's a quad analog switch. Maybe it's used to switch between the AT/PS/2 inputs and the microcontroller?
Well that's interesting.
This is a RAMTRON FM24C16, a 2 kilobyte FRAM.
FRAM is ferroelectric RAM, it's non-volatile storage, but acts much like a RAM chip for simplicity.
2K is about how much storage is needed to store the keyboard layout.
And the big chip is an Atmel AT87F51.
As you probably guessed already... that's a 8051.
It's got 4 kilobytes of flash storage for code, and 128 bytes of RAM. It can be run from 0 to 24 MHz. Lemme check the oscillator to see how fast they're running this.
Looks like the answer is 12mhz
I don't have a tool to dump the 8051 right now. I could probably build one using a big enough arduino/teensy, but I don't know if they set the lock bits

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
Something that I didn't realize but hurt my brain to learn:
John Norman (aka John Frederick Lange Jr.), of the Gor series of sci-fi/BDSM novels, is still alive.
He released two books (one of them a Gor book, #35), in 2019.


I guess with the fact that the series started in 1966 and feels like it's always a historical thing... I assumed he had to have quit writing and/or died back in like 1986.

Nope. Still alive, he's 89, and was apparently still writing as of 2 years ago.

also, my brain being what it is, I totally just googled for the book's cover image by entering "trans man of gor" which is NOT the title.

in my defense, how many book serieses look like this WITH THE SAMEAUTHOR FROM BOOK #1 to BOOK #35?


Anyway if you look at any this and think it's a suggestion that you should try reading any of these novels or learning anything about them, you are quite mistaken.

Gor is bad sci-fi and bad BDSM, and you should skip it for either reason.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
Check out what I got today. You can tell it's something weird as fuck just from the box...


So this is a FISK ... thing.
It's a floppy disk fax machine! You can fax floppies to other people who have these things.


Apparently you can connect it to external drives, computers, or printers?


So I'm gonna do more research into this thing and how it works, but while I'm here, some of the other stuff I got today. Some 3.5" floppy disks. Single sided, double density ones! These were some of the very first 3.5" disks and basically nothing used them.


I also got this book: AutoSim, the Marketing Laboratory.
It's some software to help you sell cars, apparently! it was weird and cheap, so I got it. I'll of course image it.
ALL
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foone
foone
@Foone
So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much


So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway

elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN

bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)

zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!
FOR LATER READ
foone
foone
@Foone
I think I've permanently confused KiCAD
it's reminding me that I need to connect this capacitor to Nothing


attach this end to ground, this end to +5v, and this end to THE VOID

I accidentally made all the capacitors gigantic and they won't fit anymore

halp


gonna design an ISA card using some of these

it's gonna be tricky to fit in the case


that's from this
SCIENCE

More from Tech

Zen Black
Zen Black
@z3nblack
1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.
TECH , STARTUPS , {TEST FOLDER}
Matthew Panzarino
Matthew Panzarino
@panzer
New iPad Pro has Face ID, thinner bezels, squared off edges. A new touch sensitive Pencil that magnetically attaches to the edges. Thin enough to have a camera bump. Uses the XR's LCD cornering techniques.


The new 12.9" iPad Pro is physically smaller than the old one with the same screen size. It's roughly the same size as an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. 5.9mm thick.

10 billion transistors in the A12X. 8-core CPU. 7-Core GPU. 35% faster single-core performance. 1000x faster GPU. iPad Pro is Xbox One S class GPU performance in "94% smaller" package, Ternus jokes.

Apple's silicon team is just dropping bombs every event.

live shot of Apple's silicon team


iPad Pro gets USB-C for up to 5K external displays and enables charging out to iPhones. Wild.
TECH
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Neil S W Murray
Neil S W Murray
@neilswmurray
1) Looking back on my "career" with @TheNordicWeb over the last 5 years, in retrospect it's easy for me to join up the dots and make sense of the journey:

#cphftw #sthlmtech #helyes 🇩🇰🇫🇮🇮🇸🇳🇴🇸🇪

2)

- Join & start community initiatives to meet people
- Learn from these people about how special the Nordic tech scene is
- Share this with the world through The Nordic Web
- Realise the real value is in the data, particularly in building network
- Use network to raise a fund

3) In fact, it looks all very strategic, but the reality is anything but.

My lack of vision and goals during this 5 year period was _criminal_

Any movement from one step to the next was never pre-planned and was instinctive, or worse, accidental.

4) While I am embarrassed to think of my headless chicken self, there's also part of me that thinks that none of this would have turned out where it did if I had of been deliberate and strategic about this.

5) In fact, I think my genuine love for the Nordics and the ecosystem is the MAIN reason to explain how I raised my fund & managed to move from step to step.

My story is a good example of how passion can be more powerful than strategy in the early stage of an idea/company.
TECH
Zeke Hausfather
Zeke Hausfather
@hausfath
There has been a lot of discussion about negative emissions technologies (NETs) lately. While we need to be skeptical of assumed planetary-scale engineering and wary of moral hazard, we also need much greater RD&D funding to keep our options open. A quick thread: 1/10

Energy system models love NETs, particularly for very rapid mitigation scenarios like 1.5C (where the alternative is zero global emissions by 2040)! More problematically, they also like tons of NETs in 2C scenarios where NETs are less essential. https://t.co/M3ACyD4cv7 2/10


In model world the math is simple: very rapid mitigation is expensive today, particularly once you get outside the power sector, and technological advancement may make later NETs cheaper than near-term mitigation after a point. 3/10

This is, of course, problematic if the aim is to ensure that particular targets (such as well-below 2C) are met; betting that a "backstop" technology that does not exist today at any meaningful scale will save the day is a hell of a moral hazard. 4/10

Many models go completely overboard with CCS, seeing a future resurgence of coal and a large part of global primary energy occurring with carbon capture. For example, here is what the MESSAGE SSP2-1.9 scenario shows: 5/10
TECH
Ameya
Ameya
@Finstor85
After getting good feedback on yesterday's thread on #routemobile I think it is logical to do a bit in-depth technical study. Place #twilio at center, keep #routemobile & #tanla at the periphery & see who is each placed.


This thread is inspired by one of the articles I read on the-ken about #postman API & how they are transforming & expediting software product delivery & consumption, leading to enhanced developer productivity.

We all know that #Twilio offers host of APIs that can be readily used for faster integration by anyone who wants to have communication capabilities. Before we move ahead, let's get a few things cleared out.

Can anyone build the programming capability to process payments or communication capabilities? Yes, but will they, the answer is NO. Companies prefer to consume APIs offered by likes of #Stripe #twilio #Shopify #razorpay etc.

This offers two benefits - faster time to market, of course that means no need to re-invent the wheel + not worrying of compliance around payment process or communication regulations. This makes entire ecosystem extremely agile
TECH

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Jig's Patel
Jig's Patel
@jigspatel1988
Thread on
"Intraday Banknifty Strangle based on OI data"

(System already shared, today just share few examples)
(1/n)

-Trade timing after 9:45

-Check Banknifty change in OI data at 9:45, and identify the highest OI built up in call side and put side

-We will sell both strikes with combined premium as SL on both legs.
(2/n)

28th June 2021

BN open-35440
At 9:45 trading at 35350
Highest OI in call side at 35500 CE and 35000 at put side
Strike selection 35500 CE- 35000 PE
(3/n)


29th June 2021

BN open-35323

At 9:45 trading at 35112

Highest OI in call side at 35300 CE and 35000 at put side

Strike selection 35300 CE (232) - 35000 PE (150) Combined premium 382 , Both legs SL 382
(4/n)


30th June 2021

BN open-35030

At 9:45 trading at 35002

Highest OI in call side at 35000 CE and 35000 at put side

Strike selection 35000 CE(176)- 35000 PE(213) Combined premium 389 , Both legs SL 389
(5/n)
OPTIONSLEARNINGS , OPTION SELLING , ALL
ArmaniTalks \U0001f399\U0001f525
ArmaniTalks 🎙🔥...
@ArmaniTalks
Shy people are either overthinking or highly observant of the social setting.

And in many cases it can be both.

'So what do I do?'

You learn the 75/25 law.

'What is that?'

The law of charisma...👇

Let's address the over thinkers first.

Do you have any idea why you overthink?

'Yea. Because others are judging how shy I am.'

Incorrect.

Others are thinking about themselves, not you.

But the fact that you think they are thinking about you, you fuck up the interaction.

Now you stay in your head too much & avoid the present moment.

A major no no in the social world.

Your tendency to think that others are judging you for being shy, coincidentally makes you more shy.

And that's when you start giving off a strange vibration to the social setting.

This is when you begin attracting comments like 'why are you so quiet?'
LIFE
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ArmaniTalks \U0001f399\U0001f525
ArmaniTalks 🎙🔥...
@ArmaniTalks
Manipulation Sign:

If you are compromising too much, there is a chance that you are getting manipulated.

Why are you the one that's always compromising?

How come the other person always gets their way?

Be more curious.

If something seems off, stick up for yourself.

'Wait, you sure I am being manipulated?'

I have no clue, that is only something that you can decide for yourself.

'Dang is there anything I need to look out for?'

Plenty..

But let me give you a few things to look out for.

👇

I see manipulation as skillfully controlling someone's behavior for egotistical or unethical purposes.

'How come people don't leave when it's happening to them?'

Because most people have 0 clue that they are being manipulated.

1. Guilt Trip

You ever made a mistake around someone, only for them to hold it over your head?

The will always bring up the mistake when you 2 are not seeing eye to eye.

These people will use that mistake as leverage to get what they want from you in the future.

Look out.

2. The Rationalizer

This person will commit the worst acts & find a way to rationalize it.

Example: cheaters when they get caught.

They have every excuse in the book for why they did it.

Heck, they are so good at rationalizing, they will make it seem like your fault.
LIFE
Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
@BillyBostickson
1. Project 1742 (EcoHealth/DTRA)
Risks of bat-borne zoonotic diseases in Western Asia

Duration: 24/10/2018-23 /10/2019

Funding: $71,500
@dgaytandzhieva
https://t.co/680CdD8uug


2. Bat Virus Database
Access to the database is limited only to those scientists participating in our ‘Bats and Coronaviruses’ project
Our intention is to eventually open up this database to the larger scientific community
https://t.co/mPn7b9HM48


3. EcoHealth Alliance & DTRA Asking for Trouble
One Health research project focused on characterizing bat diversity, bat coronavirus diversity and the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in the region.
https://t.co/u6aUeWBGEN


4. Phelps, Olival, Epstein, Karesh - EcoHealth/DTRA


5, Methods and Expected Outcomes
(Unexpected Outcome = New Coronavirus Pandemic)
ALL
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH