Monthly Archives: May 2025

New Guide! USB Chording Keyset #3D Printing #AdafruitLearningSystem

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: Sweet! someone built a clone of the style of chorder used on the Engelbart SRI machines and the Alto. I've been thinking about doing it for funsies, but never decide to do so since it's historically interesting but not actually ...good.

Build a chording keyset inspired by the Xerox Alto

Learn Guide: USB Keyset

This is a take on a custom input device inspired by the original keyset from the 1960’s that never quiet caught on. This 5-finger keyset lets you type without moving your hand, entering full words and phrases by pressing multiple keys simultaneously as a chord.

Content Summary:
– The guide provides instructions on building a custom USB HID device that functions as a chording keyset, allowing users to type words and phrases by pressing multiple keys simultaneously.
– It includes a step-by-step process for assembling the 3D printed chording keyset, wiring the components, and programming the Adafruit QT Py RP2040 with CircuitPython to create the USB keyset.

Adafruit Products Summary:
– The project is powered by the **Adafruit QT Py RP2040**, a small and powerful board based on the RP2040 chip: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4900
– A **USB-C Cable** is used to connect the USB keyset to a computer or USB hub: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6278

Read more at USB Keyset


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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Feather or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!



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Ransomware attack on MATLAB dev MathWorks – licensing center still locked down

Source: The Register

Article note: And this, children, is the classic argument for why you avoid dependency on anything cloud based or with an online licensing scheme.

Commercial customers, STEM students all feeling the pain after mega outage of engineering data-analysis tool

Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide.…

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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This neatly hits two important points that a lot of AI discourse has trouble with, quoting: 1. "there’s a big difference between getting something explained to you, and actual learning. You might feel like you are learning when querying a chatbot, but those intellectual gains are often illusory." 2. "AI severs the connection between an output, like an essay, and the real learning, thinking, and practice creating that output usually requires. There’s now no way to be sure that a student who turns in a good essay actually has a grasp on the material that assignment was supposed to push them toward understanding. Thus, AI lets students skip the “desirable difficulties” that produce real learning. The temptation to skip these difficulties is powerful enough that even very engaged students, students who understand the value of “desirable difficulty,” will use AI for the sake of their GPA, their time, and their stress levels."
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College Board keeps apologizing for screwing up digital SAT and AP tests

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ed Tech is always such a shitshow. The customers aren't the users, the vendors DGAF because they're mostly compulsory and/or monopolies, the vendors are usually run by carpetbaggers, the sites aren't generally well equipped for the correlated load for this kind of testing, everyone up and down the chain believes in weird security theater woo...

Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board—it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation.

Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.

Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together.

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Deadlocked Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma

Source: NYT > U.S.

Article note: This is surprising good news among all the bad.

In a 4-to-4 decision, the court upheld a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the school.

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Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: I've been waiting for a clear summary of this greasy shit from outside the terminally online gamer segment and their hysterics. It... actually does seem to be as greasy as the hysterics. I shouldn't be surprised.
A mockup of an RTX 5060 graphics card in a PC, backlit by Nvidia’s green strakes / vents on a wall like so many overlapping bird feathers.

Nvidia has gone too far.

This week, the company reportedly attempted to delay, derail, and manipulate reviews of its $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which would normally be its bestselling GPU of the generation. Nvidia has repeatedly and publicly said the budget 60-series cards are its most popular, and this year it reportedly tried to ensure it by withholding access and pressuring reviewers to paint them in the best light possible.

Nvidia might have wanted to prevent a repeat of 2022, when it launched this card's predecessor. Those reviews were harsh. The 4060 was called a "slap in the face to gamers" and a "wet fart of a GPU." I had guessed the 5060 was headed for the same fate after seeing how reviewers handled the 5080, which similarly showcased how little Nvidia's hardware has improved year over year and relies on software to make up the gaps.

But Nvidia had other plans.

Here are the tactics that Nvidia reportedly just used to throw us off the 5060's true scent, as individually described by GamersNexus, VideoCardz, Hardware Unboxed, GameStar.de, Digital Foundry, and more:

  • Nvidia decided to launch its RTX 5060 on May 19th, when most reviewers would be at Computex i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I never liked pocket, and was annoyed when Mozilla pushed it so aggressively ... But this has a lot of the same vibe as when Google Reader went out, cutting off accessible curation and archive method for the media people consume. I took the lesson that time and went to self hosted, tt-rss has its issues, but at least the data is in my control and even if the project disappeared it's open source so I could run it long enough to perform a more controlled migration. Conspiratorially, there is a _real_ bias for the last years against any tool that gives users curatorial control over the content they consume, algorithmic coercion is way more profitable and manipulative for the whole publishing ecosystem.
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By default, Signal doesn’t recall

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Making the various user-hostile things injected into Windows to support interests parties-not-the-user fight, so they disable each other. Using the DRM hooks to block screen capture to block Recall. Clever, but gross.
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Under RFK Jr., COVID shots will only be available to people 65+, high-risk groups

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Fuck. Gonna make schools a shit show in the fall if their bullshit holds.

Under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally terminating universal access to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines; instead, only people who are age 65 years and older and people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19 will have access to seasonal boosters moving forward.

The move was laid out in a commentary article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Trump administration FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and the agency's new top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The article lays out a new framework for approving seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a rationale for the change—which was made without input from independent advisory committees for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called “Karton”

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Reserved hope about this. I really wish the libvirt and SPICE ecosystem this (and virt-manager and gnome boxes) weren't so rough, especially for desktop virtualization use. The deep KVM/QEMU tooling is very solid, the USB pass-through story has improved to "Basically usable" in the last year or two which was a long term showstopper that kept me on VirtualBox for some tasks. A UI that isn't as awful as virt-manager would help with usability.
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