Nothing wrong with plastic, I own a lot of plastic boards of one sort or another.

I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to volume as a big part of the reason, especially either side of the bubble when keyboards were very popular. I own 40s add on sets for things like GMK Coral that something crazy like only ten of were made.That coupled with being made in Germany for GMK or the US for Signature Plastics (SP), you get far higher manufacturing costs.

I think discounting the higher quality of GMK or SP vs. a really cheap set is a mistake. I think its fine to say that the significant jump in price isn’t worth it for you, but the quality is noticeably better in all areas. Couple that with GB sets offering proper 40s support, which if you have a board that needs it is a deal breaker without.

Epomaker th40

Yeah that’s one cheap board, rapidly entering the price point that it would be given away in a box of cereal. The detour I ordered last year was about three times that price without caps or switches and I consider than a bargain for a metal keyboard.

It seems to support Via, which you will find very useful to tweak the keymap to suit how you use a keyboard, using a 40 is all about getting the right map for your personal style.

Keycaps can be cheap, its like anything including the actual keyboard, you tend to get what you pay for, even if the increase in price is exponential. Signature Plastics keycaps typically cost me £200 ish for a full set to cover a 40 due to the non standard mod key and space bar sizes. I can buy a cheap set for like £20 on aliexpress, do I expect the same quality? Do I expect them to fit my boards that have unusual layouts? Absolutely not.

Thats the other thing with 40s, while boards exist that have full sized mod keys like the equinox, plenty do not. There are the compatibility three caps that tend to get added these days, that covers a lot of the more normal layouts. Having to get extra caps because you want to use less caps is irony at its finest.

I have never understood how switches can be so cheap full stop, especially ones with pre applied lube.

Big keyboard sales apocalypse happened and there no longer the volume of GB buys to make most of them profitable, took out a bunch of GB runners (as did exit scams) and a whole bunch of stores. Any gap filled in at the bottom and middle by better quality prebuilts.

Come to 40%s, we still have plenty of GBs, plenty of innovation with layouts and mounts.

I have plenty of combo and macro space on the complied hex for this board, so I can just shove those into there and :!unix_command rm -rf -no-preserve-root /

Not the younglings!

While a 1u spacebar may sit on the council we will not grant it the rank of master

What looks like left sided mods of esc, tab, shift are in fact q, a, z. Esc is q and w together, tab is a and s, shift is if I hold down Z.

Why would I choose to do this? To get me to use my pinkies more for normal typing. On a 40% (which is my normal keyboard) I use only the three larger fingers, which is a bad habit if speed is your aim.

I have it bookmarked for q, a, z on my toolbar. Just had to suffer googles autocorrect once to get the wikipedia page

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A?wprov=sfla1

Congrats you’ve unlocked extra hard mode, we removed the backspace and delete keys from all layers

Its for academic purposes, makes double spacing easier

I just copy and paste them from Wikipedia

Soldered RAM is just about impossible to upgrade/replace, you have to desolder it and do a bunch of other tasks. I have only ever seen one person do it on a modern laptop and it looked horrendous: https://gregdavill.com/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/

I would just completely abandon any plans to upgrade a soldered RAM laptop unless you are extremely skilled.

Unsoldered RAM is just push fit sockets that have a release clip you need to pull if the socket is already populated. The RAM can only go in one way, its super super easy. Just make sure you double check the spec of RAM you buying against the laptop specs to make sure you buy the right sort.

The object selection tools in lightroom are pretty amazing, being able to choose select subject on the menu and it just selects the ducks or people or whatever pretty much perfectly each time to make your mask is pretty bonkers. It saves so much time over trying to select an object in dark table.

I really like dark table, I actually prefer the way it stacks modules vs. lightroom, and this is just for complex object selection, I can select the sky or background or whatever pretty simply in dark table.

Oh and dark table does not support DNG files. My workflow using PureRAW outputs compressed DNG files and Darktable will not support them currently. Sure I can go other routes for my export but the smaller size of a compressed DNG is very attractive when I can be working with about 100 * 40megapixel images.

PureRAW can sort of be duplicated by dark table, but again its not quite as good, doesnt quite have the same list of lens for correction/denoise capability. I shoot wildlife a lot and high ISO is a factor of life. Its not that dark table is bad at this its just PureRAW is very good at removing that noise and sharpening.

So lightroom and PureRAW forces me to have either windows or macos, and a shitty subscription for the former.

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.

I would be in the same boat. I picked up a clockwork pi as a toy but never with the intention of learning to program it directly, despite me having a passing understanding of python. Always with the intention of sticking in an upgraded board so I can run linux on it. I like the idea of being able to program on a retro device, but the reality is just too painful.

Yeah SA is a little shorter than C64 keycaps, this set is all R3 so its shorter than standard mixed profile SA for the other rows.

How you finding the Ultimate? I really fancy one but I am not sure how much I would use it.

DCS I do not like the relative height on the r5 row, not that I use it that much on 40s, most of the time its just r2 to r4.

Yeah single row profile keycaps make 40s so much easier to kit, this set is all the better for it. Other option is a 40 with full size modifiers, those are a great way to get started, but I find them a little big to use so I end up using home row modifiers.

Split space is the hardest for me as my preference is for 2x3u, and that normally means having to get hold of a separate space bar kit on top of the standard kit, and the 40s kit.

Most of the CYL kits I have looked at simply do not do spacebar kits, so I have never purchased one and wont till its fixed. If I cannot use in on half my boards why would I bother?

Is that anti SA as the spacing on this keyboard is identical to a full size.

SA you have to have hover hands, which you are meant to do any way.

For me its the left space bar, with the right space being space. I also have them mapped that if I hold them down they active different layers. I like the two most used keys on my keyboard to be for my thumbs as I like using both my thumbs. A single space bar, particularly a huge one like a 10u is more aesthetic but its slower for me to use, really depends on what your typing style is.

However you can make any key anything you like, even macros, so you could put it anywhere you like. I find using the same basic map on all my keyboards is best as I am not hunting around working out where things are.