The problem is that this product category — small keyboards — is cursed. It’s not surprising, because it’s not something that the major producers are involved with much (they concentrate on actual, real keyboards), so you get a lot of semi-no-name producers pumping out junk.
One of these was the smallest keyboard up there — the M4 — which is complete junk: It drops half the keystrokes.
The biggest one up there uses a USB dongle, and works fine. But it’s just a bit too large, really — I just want to be able to have it on my table by my reading chair permanently in case I need some emergency French translation.
Today I got this keyboard in the mail. It’s a Rii 518BT Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s very straightforward — it’s got all the normal keys and stuff, and not too many weird ones. And the layout is pretty standard, which is something you can’t always count on with these small keyboards.
Rii has a wide range of keyboards, and looking over that list, I recognise several of those keyboards — they’re keyboards I’ve tried and discarded for a previous project (either because the range was awful or because the keyboards were awful to use otherwise)…
This one seems fine, though.
The only weird design choice they’ve made is that there’s a Bluetooth pairing button on the back? Like… why? Why not have the pairing be Fn+Q or something?
But it’s fine — doesn’t matter.
It works!
The range is good (at least seven metres, which is as far as I tested it), it doesn’t drop any keys, and the keys are pretty good — a bit squishy, but have some click to them.
It did take more setup than the keyboard with the USB dongle, but that’s Bluetooth for you — since the input device goes away on the Linux side, I have to listen to D-Bus events and start re-listening to the devices when it reappears so that I can route the keyboard events to the right place, and all that boring stuff…
But it seems to be stable.
When it wakes up, though, it takes the host/device several seconds to get things up and running, so you type away at the keyboard and apparently nothing happens… But! It buffers up all the keystrokes and then transmits them when everything is up, so you don’t lose any keystrokes.
So that’s OK, I think.
Darn! The keyboard is just a centimetre too long to fit into the box I have on the table… Oh well.
So I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when I heard this *boit*-sounding thing. A soft sound… like a polite notification beep or something.
I checked all the Firefox tabs, but didn’t see anything — and then switched the sound off on the laptop. Still getting a *boit* every couple of minutes. So then I had to get off the couch — like an animal — and try to locate what device I could possibly have somewhere in the living room that made the sound.
Reader, it was a plant:
(Sound on to experience the *boit*. The click after the *boit* is me using a keyboard on the other side of the room, I think.)
It turns out that this potted plant (which I’ve put in this vase) had been over-watered, and when the sun shines on the vase, it’s probably heating up the water enough for some bubbles to happen?
In the kitchen, I’ve got this humongous sansevieria plant… Well, actually, it’s a number of plants in the same pot: This sansevieria variety has only a single leaf per plant, and then it propagates by setting out a new rhizome that then has a single leaf.
Allegedly.
So when I bought it a decade ago, it was just one little leaf that poked up… Hey! I’ve got a snap of it from 2014:
Aww!
I’ve been repotting it in gradually bigger pots until it’s now reached the biggest size of this series of terracotta pots (which is the only series I use — having the same pot series for everything makes things less busy).
But now what?
Yes, I went to the garden centre and bought this monstrosity — it’s the only pot I could find that even vaguely resembles my go-to series and that has a diameter “one up” from the previous one.
But my window sills are too narrow to have a saucer that fits this pot. What to do!
Well… perhaps I could just line it with plastic on the inside? I know, I know — drainage. But I’m so lazy with my watering that there’s really no chance of overwatering my plants, so I don’t think it matters much in this case.
OK… a very sturdy bag and some excellent scissoring…
There! Brilliant.
Oh, er, OK, yeah. It was about time that I repotted this thing — the pot contains 60% roots and 40% dirt.
This might be common knowledge, but I only learned of This One Neat Trick today, so:
I’ve got a bunch of gadgets with batteries that need to be charged. All of them are USB-C these days (thanks, Europe), so I’ve got a spiffy GaN PD (i.e., high wattage) charger with lots of ports that I use for that.
But some gadgets, like the Sennheiser Momentum 3 wireless headphones, refuse to be charged by this (or any other) PD charger.
But if I connect it to a real computer, it charges just fine. So what’s up with that!?
I had just lived with this situation (like an animal) — until today, when I finally did some research. It turns out that the problem is that these headphones (probably) do not have the required resistors that announce to the charger that it’s fine to give the device some power, while the computer’s USB ports always deliver 5V no matter what.
But we can fix this very easily:
First of all, use a USB-C to USB-A adapter.
Plug it into the PD charger.
Then take a USB-A to USB-C cable…
… and plug it into the adapter.
And then plug the USB-C plug into the headphones. Tada! A green light! It’s charging!
Problem solved.
Isn’t the future disappointing?
(Apparently you can achieve the same thing if the USB-C to USB-C cable you’re using includes the resistors itself — but it’s very difficult to identify these cables without actually testing them. But you might get lucky — cheap-looking ones are more likely to work than expensive ones, because they are made to work with cheap, out-of-spec gadgets…)
This is one of those long posts… because I didn’t quite know what to do here, so this took me months and months.
Join me on a journey… of… something totally trivial: Adding a front to that red box up there, which has the keyboard to my stereo system on top, and some vinyl thingies and CDs inside. (Or skip to the end to see the stunning result.)
In there I’ve got like — a 7″ “holey” adaptor, a clamp for unruly records and a brush. And then some CD box sets — when I buy new albums, I always rip them and listen via flac, and then read the liner notes when I listen to the album the first time. But with box sets, I usually “swap them in” over several months, so I need somewhere accessible to store them until I’ve listened to all the albums in the set.
Makes sense, eh?
Oh, and there’s a couple of hinges… as one has.
Oh! And a totally functional pick-up. Oops! Well, I can throw that away, anyway…
But ever since I bought the box (about ten years ago), I’ve wanted to add either a door, or a drawer to the box — because it just looks so untidy the way it is.
A drawer would be natural… but a door would be simpler to do. I mean, a whole lot less wood to cut. And besides, the box is pretty small, and I don’t want to make it even smaller, which a drawer would make it.
So: A door.
If I’m adding a door, what kind of hinge should I use? Let’s take a tour of different kinds of hinges…
This is a hidden hinge — they require cutting a groove into the door and they take up quite a bit of space inside the box.
And then there’s these…
See? Also requires cutting a deep groove, and the walls in the box here just aren’t wide enough.
And then there’s these… but how do they work?
Have you ever looked at how many kinds of hinges exist?
Have you done your hingology classes in school?
That’s an Ikea hidden hinge, and also requires a lot of groove cutting.
Look at this hinge! What is that even!
And this one?
Well, or perhaps… I dunno. But there seems to be two kinds in general: Hidden hinges (that require cutting a groove in the door) or normal hinges that have the round hingey part visibly sticking out. I think I have to use the latter.
Anyway, while cutting material for the alarm clock I built, I also cut this piece of wood and painted it black.
And I found this in a box in the attic.
I bought it on Etsy more than a decade ago, and it’s supposed to be a hook to hang on the wall. But the person who made it didn’t know what they were doing, because it’s filled with so much concrete that the hanging bit doesn’t allow a screw to fit into the groove up there. So it’s useless. But I’m thinking I can use it as a door pull! Reuse before throwing away!
So my idea is that I can put a screw into the cavity, and then fill it with epoxy, and then drill a hole through the door.
See? The screw should be long enough.
Epoxy!
Is it straight? I think it is!
Oops! I didn’t mix the epoxy sufficiently, so it never actually set. It’s been a while since I did any epoxying.
OK, redo… and this time around, I mix the epoxy thoroughly. And it feels rock solid.
But how does the bit of wood I cut months ago fit? Pretty well — but it’s about a couple of millimetres too long and a bit too tall at one end.
And remember all those hinges up there? I decided to go with one of these kinds of hinges — the hinge sticks out in the front, and that should give me a 270-degree swing or something.
And a couple of weeks ago I bought this vice — I’ve never had one before, but I’ve always wanted one. And a plane! A proper one! It’s a dream come true.
So mount the door in the vice…
And this li’l plane is nice, too.
I’ve got a lamp! With a looking glass! So that I can actually see what I’m doing when I’m adjusting the plane!
Measure once, cut twice…
So I used two pieces of wood to protect the door from the vice…
And then check whether the concrete pull is gonna work…
It does!
OK, after sanding the door down again a bit…
… it’s time to give it a final coat of paint.
There! Such blackness.
Back to the “door pull”… I see that it’s not completely flush? Whut?
Oh, the epoxy has crept up the shaft of the screw at the bottom there. Gngng.
OK, I can use a larger drill and then just drill out a millimetre down…
There! Flush as a toilet. (I’m sure that’s a saying.)
While pondering all of this, I was wondering whether it would be easier to hinge the door at the top/bottom or left/right. Top/bottom has the advantage that there’s less torque applied on the hinge when the door is open, but screwing the screws into the top/bottom would be impossible with a normal screwdriver.
So I bought the above gadget that allows screwing in 80-degree angles. Fun gadget. But since I decided to hinge the door at the left, I don’t need it. Oh well.
Yeah, looks like the screws I have are the correct length — won’t poke out on the other side of the wall.
The MDF used in this box has a very hard lacquer, so I think I’ll use a drill to get started.
Oops! I put the hinge too far up. And the hinge is wider than I thought — I have to plane off a couple more millimetres!
Fortunately I only used one screw to test first…
Yay! It fits!
So now I have to fasten the pull… and I just bought all these lug nut bits because I’ve never had any of those before. The one from Makita seems pretty useless.
But the ones from Bosch are perfect. I ❤️ Bosch.
There! Heh heh. It’s original at least — I can guarantee that this is the only thing in the world that looks like this.
But I need something to avoid jamming the door too far into the box by accident — and I had this gold-painted wood cube from a previous project, so perhaps just wood-glue it in there? Huh, seems to work… and that gold/red is a nice combo.
And then a quick roll-over with some black paint on the side I did the final emergency planing, and then it just needs to dry again and I’m done? WHAT! This project started in May, and it’s now October, so that took *counts on fingers* FOREVER!
See? Much tidier now.
Heh heh, that whopping huge concrete thing used as a door pull makes me laugh. So stupid!
