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What's doubly amusing is that he was very much an outlier in his day, hence the need to GTFO of Missouri after Joseph Smith got himself shot. A nicely layered meme, if I do say so myself.

The meme may be lost on you if you are not an ex-mormon. That question is asked of everyone from age 12 on up by their bishop (think pastor or preacher in normal Protestant context) in private, regularly scheduled interviews to determine whether the person is worthy to remain a member of the congregation in good standing, and as is typical in these sorts of things, lying is frowned upon. It's sort of like a reverse confession.

It's suuuuuper creepy, and among other things teaches teenagers that they're bad people and hypocrites who will need a lifetime of church attendance and internal promises to repent and do better so they don't disappoint anyone important to them.

All those firmwares work fine, or even better, over USB. Of course, there's also the option to simply buy a kit. No idea if these people are legit, but the tech itself looks simple enough, a circuit board with contacts that let the linkage make a connection.

I am not quite sure I'd be ready to recommend it, but your more adventurous patrons may want to experiment. These keycaps are PBT, a cousin of polyester. They are not particularly pleasant smelling when heated or especially when burned, but they're not as unhealthy as ABS (the other common plastic for keycaps) and certainly not as bad as the straight up poison gas that comes from PVC. I use a basic 5W blue diode laser, coat the keycap with an "infusible ink" pen from Cricut (most of their infusible products are polyester-based), put it in an alignment jig, then laser a raster image "low and slow." My particular laser seems to do best when I do two or three passes at 2% power and 45mm/minute. The idea is to heat it roughly in line with the crafting heat presses without letting the heat spread and color in areas beyond the beam. I experimented with actually burning or engraving, and that sort of works, but (1) it's stinky, and (2) the ash wipes away and you're left with a mostly colorless letter-shaped indentation. The "dye sub" technique produces barely any fumes at all. There are a few people on youtube who've tried similar techniques, and quite a few who have used different heat or dye sources.

Aesthetically, the process was only marginally successful, though I'm optimistic about the longevity, at least compared to other low-end manufacturing techniques. I've been using a similar set of home-lasered keycaps for about a month with little to no wear. My jig was not as good on that set, AND I tried to center the keycap legends, meaning every fraction of a millimeter was painfully obvious. These legends didn't end up exactly where I might have liked either, but they're all off by the exact amount (about 1mm), so being consistent, the alignment isn't too bad.

It should be doable. The way these things are wired, you wouldn't use a common. You'd instead wire a matrix with diodes to avoid ghost presses. The firmware on the arduino or RPi microcontrollers will constantly scan for keypresses. So much would depend on the exact mechanism of your typewriter, but you could find a place where a keycap moves parts in close enough proximity to make your own switches, or if some part of the mechanism presses straight down, you could just have that actuate mechanical keyboard switches.

For wireless, you'd probably want ZMK. QMK is the most famous, but ZMK supports more wireless MCUs. I use KMK, a firmware where everything is human-readable python. I understand it has some wireless support, but I've never looked into it.

I thought a tombstone or a boogieboard. 🤣

More seriously, things get weird when you want to go no-stabilizers but don't want to buy a custom set of blank keycaps. This one only uses the 1.25u to 1.75u keys from a standard TKL or full size.

Doing it on the keyboard could very easily work, but I have a laser-cut jig that holds twenty-six 1u keycaps, and has one open-ended spot for anything up to maybe 3u. I considered 3D-printing the jig, but 30 minutes on the laser made more sense than 5 hours on the printer.

This plastic didn't love my "Infusible ink" pens, so the legends are duller than the last time I did this, but the jig helped a lot with alignment, as did adjusting my ambitions and expectations. Much less disappointing to land 1mm off when you can pretend you wanted it there all along, and that is much easier to do with corner legends versus centered. :-)

Thanks. Kind of a 2004 Apple and Logitech thing going. Probably need another couple of years before it's in vogue. white filament on the printer though, so white keyboard it is.

putting another tab button on the numpad

Horizontal spreadsheet data entry, my friend. it's probably one of the less crazy parts of this layout! Of course, ten minutes on the laser and/or 5 in the software, and I can make it any key you need. Programmable keyboards are a godsend when you're winging it on the layout.

I am currently typing on my one and only red-switch board, and I am mis-hitting keys like a mofo, and bottoming out even harder than normal. I don't type anywhere near correctly, but I make up for it by typing enthusiastically, and whatever the category, my favorites are always heavy.

From my keebtalk post, which also has more pics:

It’s early obviously, but I’m optimistic about this one. It feels pretty nice, and the Jades are almost as nice as the Navies, just missing that slight “kerchunk!” that the Navies have. The Jades are a bit snappier, and I agree that they may be ever so slightly louder, but I don’t think they dethrone my dark blue fingerbreakers.

After my last set of keycaps came out with some fairly obvious alignment issues, I rethought my jig and made a new one that could support 26 1u keys, plus one of arbitrary width. I also went with corner legends instead of centered, as that punishes a lack of accuracy much less, if you can at least get your setup repeatable. Then, I did clusters together in batches (i.e. all alphas in one run, all F keys together, etc.). The result is a much less jarring alignment situation. It would be ideal, if the plastic itself had cooperated. This PBT recipe didn’t like the infusible ink nearly as much as the DSA keycaps on my other no-stabs build. Legends are not as crisp as I’d like, and the colors are pretty muted, but the improved alignment makes this a modest victory.

Overall, I like (though not quite love) the way they came out, and the overall effect for the board, between the layout, case, and font, is a bit “Apple meets Logitech,” which may or may not be a good thing, but it’s always satisfying to wrap one of these up.

Would it be better or worse if the most popular large breed in the world were not erroneously referred to as a "Labrador" retriever?

Also, hello cousin. I've never been within a thousand kilometers of Newfoundland -- Boston or Montreal is as close as I got -- but I found out as as a grown-ass, gator-swimmin', boild-pnut-eatin' Florida-man that my biological grandmother was born and raised in Clarenville. Apparently, I have relatives from Moncton to St. John's to Toronto to Fort McMurry to Vancouver, and damn near every single one of them is mortified that that Granny's boy had a one night stand in the '70s. 🤣

At my rather beginner level, designing single parts for a 3D printer or laser engraver, it behaves almost exactly like most other parametric-history CAD apps in the broad concepts. The devil is just in the details, really. Shortcuts are different, terminology is different, Certain QoL and UI elements are either missing or somewhere else. The workbench model is not unique, but some of the kruft that has built up around FreeCAD's benches and the defaults (better in recent versions if you look at the start screen) can make a new user "nope out" if they have other options. I guess assemblies in particular remain a fragmented area and lag behind the commercial packages, and I can say for certain that it still requires "good design practices" in a way that some of the commercial apps manage around, toponaming the biggest among them.

If all the negatives kill your workflow to the point that you want to pay for commercial software or live with the limitations (current and potential) of their free tiers, then that's absolutely understandable. Commercially, it's doubly so, and with addition of the "business reality" that there's also no one to blame or sue if FreeCAD is not working for you. Hell, I don't use it for all my stuff either, as I find no-history modeling still mostly works for what I'm doing and I have some free or cheap options in that space that are decent, but I can see the appeal as I'm starting to make things that could benefit from tweaks after the fact. What I get frustrated by is claims that FreeCAD "is no good" or "will never be useful". I call BS. It's already good and useful for many use cases, and anyway the number of free parametric CAD suites that do not restrict your use of your designs is exactly ONE. Otherwise, you're looking at an absolute minimum of $300 a year to subscribe and hope that Shapr3D's new history functionality doesn't break, and that neither they nor Alibre gets gobbled up.