Cook, potter, inventor, writer, neographer, conlanger, phantasocartographer, coder, linguist, poet, blogger, chef, webmaster, speedrunner, herald, translator, songwriter, ergonomicist, pilot, miner, outrageous liar, gardener.

  • 41 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 9th, 2023

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  • The code part is already messy, compared to any other piece of HTML i’ve written. Yeah, it’ll be messy. It’s far from done, but it’s finally done enough to share more publicly than i have before.

    If the diacritic spam gets to be too much for stuff in the chart, i’ll just add new Unicode characters as letters. I’m already planning to do that for some of the PoAs missing from official charts.

    I hadn’t thought before about the limits of what can be nasalized but it’s not too hard to see that many sounds can be. I’m not the International Phonetic Association so i can do whatever i need or want to with my notation if the IPA isn’t good for something. If i come up with a better way to indicate stuff like this, especially using just Unicode, i’ll at least mention it as an alternative notation.

    I already know i’ll have to add my own modifiers for things like articulating in the side of the mouth (move your tongue left or right and make some phones) or with the tongue rolled (a voiced rolled linguo-exo-labial fricative sounds a lot like blowing over the top of a bottle). And more beside as it comes up or people tell me about it.

    The vowel chart probably will rely a lot on diacritics because i don’t want to map out every part of it with different, individual letters. Especially for how divisible it is, there’s always something between [i̞] and [i̞̞] and [i̞̞̞].

















  • A few things.

    A laptop with 2-way HDMI, so i can plug it into a game console and use it as a small TV. Note that i’m aware that HDMI might not work like this.

    A wearable soundboard with speakers and batteries hidden in my pockets, and controlled by chorded buttons in my shoes. Use cases include crickets, canned laughter, the Seinfeld theme, and audible air guitar riffs.

    A handheld computer that:

    • Has physical buttons instead of a touchscreen
    • E-ink display for all the benefits of that – Physical light switch for a backlight for the screen (my phone is e-ink but i have the backlight turned off by default, a side effect is i can’t see the screen to turn the backlight on when i need it) – Button to refresh the screen, instead of relying on automatic refreshes (Light Phone II) or updating what’s on screen to get it to refresh (Sony PRS 505) – Solar panel, if the OS is light enough to permit it. Ereaders are totally low-power enough that if one had a small solar panel like a calculator you’d almost never need to charge it. A full handheld computer could probably also benefit from this.

    A music player / DAC that:

    • Has physical buttons, non-touch screen, & light switch for screen backlight like the above wish.
    • Lets you mark some files as audiobooks/podcasts, so it remembers your place in those
    • Isn’t just an Android phone that can’t make calls
    • Has a reflective or transflective display, so you can use it outdoors without fighting the sun
    • Can listen to the radio, if you unfold or plug in an antenna
    • Has a headphone jack There’s more to this one because i’m planning to actually make it someday, simply because i don’t expect anyone else to make one that does what i want it to.

    Somewhat ergonomic keyboards in laptops. I know split keyboards are hard because the screen has to be about as wide as the keyboard, but i’m sure there’s a way and i intend to someday prove it. I know we can do better than typewriter shaped keyboards with QWERTY by default, even ortholinear boards would be an improvement because layouts can be done in software.

    An electric notebook with a touchscreen that instead of using OCR to turn handwriting into text, stores handwriting as vector graphics as a middle ground between OCR and images with huge file sizes. Probably with a slider for how much to simplify lines, and an option to select areas of a page to convert to text via OCR so you can still have diagrams and doodles alongside plain text that’s easy to export and edit.

    A device like a generation I pokedex, but for real world animals and plants. This one probably won’t happen because stuff like this is only done as smartphone apps anymore, not as standalone toys.

    HUD goggles that are the display of a full portable computer.

    • Keyboard input could be done through a split keyboard that hooks onto your belt, with half on each thigh
    • Mouse input could be done with a trackpoint / trackball on the keyboard (simple option) or with a bracelet that emits IR light from multiple points so it can be tracked by sensors on the goggles (if you don’t understand what i mean, kind of like a Wiimote and sensor bar), with a ring that goes around your middle finger attached by a wire to the bracelet. When you tug the ring down by bending your wrist or fingers down, that’s a mouse click. (complicated option)
    • Two or more hot-swappable batteries, so you can change one out without the device having to lose power
    • Transparent LCD over one eye, so the background of the image is just what’s actually in front of you
    • Gyroscope somewhere on the head part, so you can turn your head to access different windows like it’s a VR headset. Imagine there’s a bubble around your head with program windows projected onto different parts of it. Large windows look curved around the surface of the bubble. You can drag them around with the mouse, or turn your head to move them relative to your eyes. Probably also makes this good for AR stuff.
    • Headphone jack and bluetooth for audio, but not necessarily built in speakers This one might never happen, apparently making any kind of HUD is very hard and expensive and this one is asking for a lot. But it would be so cool. It would finally be a portable computer with a good input system (keyboard) and a display at the same time.

    And there’s more stuff i want to exist that doesn’t fit the question. Software (why hasn’t anyone mad a 3+ D spreadsheet program?) and non-technical products.
















  • I forgot how frustrating Blender’s boolean modifiers can be sometimes. I did try but Blender crashed my computer.

    I’m about ready to give up on solving this problem that i have no personal stake in, but here’s what i was planning to do.

    1. Open a blank keycap model in Blender and import that SVG.
    2. Convert all the line segments to meshes and join them into a single object.
    3. In edit mode, extrude Tux to make him 3D.
    4. In object mode, line him up with the top (or front, i guess) of a key and shrink and rotate him so he sticks into the cap.
    5. Select the key and make a boolean difference modifier on it with Tux. This should cut a Tux-shaped hole into the cap.
    6. Export as STL and import into a slicer program for 3D printing.

    I found suitable caps for MX and Choc V1, though i didn’t get around to trying the Choc files.

    The SVG i used is based on the flat one here, and my monochome single-object version is here, since i can’t upload an SVG in a comment here. It’s text but you can copy that into a plain text editor (xed, Notepad, etc.) and save it as an SVG file.

    On the custom keyboard i’m designing, my plan is actually to use U+2756 ❖ as the legend for my super key if i ever put legends on the keys. That key doesn’t have a standard symbol but this one works well enough.


  • It looks out of place as a sculpted key next to keys with printed legends. I think what would be better is a slightly simpler picture of Tux with thicker lines that can be filled in like a normal key legend. Or the lines could be filled in with a different color on the printer, for printers that support that.

    But no, i haven’t seen any better Tux caps. I also haven’t looked, so for all i know they’re out there. I could probably throw something together in Blender if people really want this.