I’m on the road right now and don’t have much to say, so I’m going to wax poetic about stuff I’ve been thinking about with the notion of the Out of Box Experience. Here goes! When it comes to user experience, the first impression is often the last impression. That’s why companies focus on creating a seamless and intuitive Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) for their products, especially in the realm of consumer electronics and software. The term OOBE refers to the initial set-up and configuration experience after unboxing a new device or installing new software for the first time. This process …
Author: Brad
On Heat Set Inserts
I’ve been tinkering with my 3D printer and have found myself quite enamored with the notion of adding heat set screw inserts into 3D printed PLA parts. I’ve spent a fair amount of time mastering the technique and I thought I’d share some insights here, in case it proves helpful for anyone else. The What and Why of Heat Set Screw Inserts Heat set screw inserts are nifty little brass threads that you can embed into your 3D printed parts. Their purpose? To create durable, reusable threads for machine screws. This is particularly handy when you’re building parts that need …
The Massdrop Alt: Custom Animations and More
I fallen in love with my Alt and put some time into learning how to do animations and effects on it. I thought I would write a bit about it here in case it ever proves useful. Getting more control I was convinced to try out using caps lock as control by a post on Reddit. The argument in favor of this key layout (commonly seen on the HHKB) is that it’s more ergonomic to move your pinkie sideways to hit the control than it is dragging it all the way down and equally far to the left. I tried …
Macbook 2013-2015 SSD Upgrades
Background As of High Sierra, it is possible to replace the stock SSD in a 2013-2015 MBP (and MBA) with an NVMe drive with the aid of a M.2 adapter produced by a Chinese company called Sintech (various adapters available, example in Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CWWAENG). This has resulted in a lot of questions and mixed reports of functionality/compatibility. This thread at macrumors has accumulated over 140 pages and is STILL actively being posted to about it. Apple of course has been silent on the matter, leading me to believe that this NVMe support is not exactly a supported feature. My …
The Massdrop Alt: Customization With No Middle Ground.
Introduction The Massdrop Alt is a superb (and expensive) keyboard. It’s a 65% board. It has individually addressable RGB backlighting and underglow. It’s USB-c and has a built in USB-c (but with only USB 2.0 bus) hub. It’s QMK compatible. It’s heavy and made of metal. It had linear switches available. It ticked off every want I had in a keyboard. The Configurator: Customization Made Easy Massdrop has an online configuration tool available that lets you graphically select the function and backlight of each individual key on each individual layer. After which, it compiles the selections into code for download …
Starting over: Digital Self-destruction
Background A friend of mine recently approached me and asked for advice on how to start over online. He’d been going through some changes in life and he wanted a “clean slate”. That’s an interesting problem to me so I started thinking about it. I came up with a list of steps and recommendations. I don’t know if it’s complete or even effective, but I thought it might be worth codifying in words somewhere more permanent than in a Discord PM. The Problem Persistent digital accounts, particularly as one ages and their interests and priorities change, tend to pile up …
Encryptic: Dropbox fun
Overview I had to do some rewriting on the way that we handle dropbox authorization per their requirements. Hopefully the method I’ve gone to will suffice. We have a kind of strange relationship with Electron, so it’s not really straightforward for us to do things the way they want us to, but I think I found a compromise that I think will satisfy them as well as not require an entire overhaul on our part. This should hopefully solve #63. I’ll report back when I heard from Dropbox. Background Dropbox development status allows for 200 users to be connected at …
And yet another blog is born!
Everyone has a blog right? I’ve had a couple but I’ve been bad about keeping them up to date. I’m going to attempt to keep this one up to date weekly.