I second this as a great way to get started. If you look on Amazon there are a bunch of cheap eight key macros (Lichifit makes one) that are built via layers of acrylic: a base layer, a layer that houses the microcontroller, and a layer for the keyboard. It's easy enough to sub your own micro and 3D print a replacement layer.
It's chorded, (based on the https://ardux.io/ layout), but I don't think chorded is really that hard to learn if you're actually willing to give it a week or two (which you have in any situation where you need a one hander).
The key (ha) I've found is that you want the keys to be as easy to press as possible while providing feedback. The Twiddler, https://twiddler.tekgear.com/ , is great for this as it uses light tact switches, but it has reliability issues.
This is a great project. Of all my one-handed experience, I never got to try a FrogPad because of the expense. Having a software implementation of the FrogPad is awesome.
Having seen this but not yet having gotten to building it - is it wildly impractical? It looks a little slow (and obviously there's a learning curve) but it seems like it would work nicely in a number of cases where a normal keyboard wouldn't. (Ex. I bet I could use it on an exercise bike)
To be honest, I've only used it twice. It was fine, really, there's just a big learning curve and it can only do 32 characters. I imagine that, with some good autocorrect, it might be fairly usable.
Something like a t9 dictionary might be useful for it, even if you'd probably need the other device to handle the dictionary unless you wanted it hacky as all hell.
Replacing the thumb button with some kind of clicky D-pad (D-pad mounted on a microswitch) would be a somewhat easy way to add more buttons. (my first thought was going with two per finger by adding one around the side or to a strap on the outside of your fingers)
The T9 dictionary is for a keypad of 10 digits, I don't see how it can be used here. I see many people say T9 when they mean "autocorrect", and I'm not sure where the confusion stems from.
> I am a heavy user of a proprietary one-handed keyboard system. Recent maintenance issues and the lack of user serviceability have turned my attention to creating a more reliable solution.
Oh no! That's so sad to hear.
I was overjoyed when the new BT model came out; I was finally going to get to do the thing & get good at this. A couple years latter I actually made an effort to really learn it & get a little competent. For whatever reason (allegedly more coder friendly) I almost immediately adopted TabSpace layout & printed up a half dozen key map graphics so one would always be at hand.
It was a fun time but I never committed hard enough. I'm also just shocked how effective & capable I am at writing on a touchscreen. I'd tried some more code-oriented keyboards for coding, and this was a while ago but they lacked most of the intelligence/helpfulness of a mainstream touch-keyboard & weren't something I could hard adopt. In the meantime, the mainstream touch-keyboards forever annoy me; I really wish long presses could offer a lot more options but we seem forever consigned to be flipping between screens to get a special character or two.
I'm super excited to hear of Twiddler / one handed users in the wild. That's crazy awesome that you build your own! That it only takes 8 keys is a feat!
One-handed daily drivers are out there. We're nuts, but at least it's not Dvorak (kidding).
TBH, the the Twiddler layout is probably superior (though not by much). I went with eight traditional keys because it could be hand wired. The Twiddler approach is basically limited to soldering directly to a board, with all the issues therein. After about six months or so I would get debris caught under one switch or another and the Twiddler is basically welded shut. :/
Speaking of design issues (and talking about the BT). I highly recommend using a Nice! or other wireless/BT microcontroller. Not only is it more convenient but cable strain is a real issue on most microcontrollers. If the Handler has a design flaw, that's the biggie.
I’m curious if you have ever looked into the Tap Strap 2? I recently got one and it looks promising with preliminary testing but I haven’t invested much time learning and configuring it yet.
Wow. Unless I'm thinking of a different device, those were much more expensive the last time I took a look. That's super tempting.
Just giving a preliminary skim of the website, it looks like their alphabet doesn't include meta characters like CTRL, ALT, and WINDOWS? Is there a more advanced mode? When you customize things, is that done on device (just sending keystrokes as a Bluetooth keyboard) or do you need special software on the device you're interacting with? Learning aside. How accurate has it seemed so far?
I have a Tap Strap 2. (Although only as of a couple of weeks ago, so still pretty new to it.)
Answering your questions, split into pros and cons:
## Pros
You can customise the layout, including meta keys like control/alt/windows. I think the "more advanced mode" is basically just designing your own layout.
It's honestly very accurate for a keyboard that is basically just tapping your figures against a table. It definitely misreads the odd input (or perhaps more accurately, it is sufficiently easy for me to waggle my fingers wrong), but it doesn't make so many that I'm really bothered by it.
I had an issue with the firmware on mine when I first got it, and the support team were super responsive. I really appreciated this.
The Android/iOS app is well designed for learning how to use it -- it comes with an excellently pedagogical typing tutor.
If you're curious, I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. IIUC the WPM most folks get with it is about equivalent to to other one-handed-keyboards, ~50 or so. I've found learning it to be pretty easy. (Substantially easier than learning a new layout on a regular keyboard, for some reason.)
It connects as a bluetooth keyboard, no special software required.
## Cons
Customising layouts is unfortunately a bit of a chore, being both tied-to-the-company and requiring additional devices. The layout must first be designed through a webpage on their site, which you need to log in to using your account. Then you need an Android/iOS device to actually connect to the TS2 and push the layout.
## Worth knowing
You have essentially five layers: default, double tap, triple tap, shift, and switch. Shift and switch are pretty similar to layers as you'll find them on most ergomech keyboards. However, the double and triple tap layers work by inputting the key corresponding to that chord on the default layer, then detecting that you're doing a double/triple tap, then inputting backspace, and then inputting the key corresponding to the chord on the double/triple tap layer. So if you'd like to use it for something like vim, then that first input might actually mean something! If that will affect you, then in practice you can't use the double/triple tap layers, and you only have 60% of the real estate to fit your custom layout into. That is just enough to fit basically a whole keyboard -- I've got a custom layout that does this -- but it took me some careful thought for how to cram all those keys into such little space in a logical way.
The insertion of backspaces is interesting. One of the drawbacks of--say--Ardux is that some layers are accessed by holding down one key and then pressing others. It's adjustable but it means there's a delay when you want to enter characters on such layers as the keyboard has to wait and make sure you're actually holding. Conflicts aside, committing early and then correcting is interesting.
The Twiddler eventually got third party tools, maybe the Tap Strap can.. as well. Being at the mercy of an app service for what is for a large portion of users a medical device is insane.
I won't lie, straight-up prose is much slower. I can just about break 120 wpm with a full QWERTY whereas I can only do roughly 40-45 single-handed. Typing passwords sucks.
The big 'however' here is coding. I also have a one-handed mouse from Elecom. Not switching between mouse and keyboard to navigate, combined with macros being less strain (basically no hand travel and sticky meta keys) means I'm faster editing code to the point I just eat the prose cost (or use my phone keyboard/dictation to compose longer prose).
Yeah, I was introduced to the Twiddler in the context of robot interfaces and while I can't find the study now, there were a couple showing that eventually the slowdown is down to the extra movement, which is almost exactly x3 on most chorded systems.
I use the mouse almost exclusively now, to the point going back to search/word/character navigation when a terminal won't pass mouse events feels excruciating.
Macros are mostly code refactoring in emacs. Things like moving blocks between brackets, repainting, stuff like that. These really benefit from sticky keys. No letter is closer or further from super, hyper, or alt because I hit the chord for the meta key and then the one for letter.
> Not switching between mouse and keyboard to navigate,
I found the opposite solution also works:D A combination of keynav, a tiling window manager, and ex. vimium[0] make reaching for the mouse pretty much optional:)
[0] The key feature is a hotkey to quickly select links with the keyboard.
Extending this idea beyond technical topics is why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities or liberal arts and advise those younger than me to do the same. Most new work in the sciences is driven by an obvious gap in current theories or disagreeable data. Dramatic exaggerations of "scientific revolutions" aside, the relationship of the old to new knowledge is generally as either a subset, a superset, or an approximation of the other. See Newtonian to relativistic to quantum physics. See set theory to arithmetic etc. If you got a PhD in physics in the 70's and didn't learn a thing since, you're still in a great position to help a teenager with their homework.
This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?
trying to compare the humanities here is not something you can do in good faith. they are not subjects based on any manor of objective truth and are mostly a personal endeavor of introspection on how you treat yourself and others.
re: the 70's, yeah a lot of people had bad opinions back then, but its also not hard to form evergreen good ones
Personally I agree with you that women's studies or psychology aren't sciences or even coherent subjects, but in the majority they themselves present as such and thus here I take them--speaking of good faith--at their word for the sake of argument.
And regarding lots of bad opinions in the 70's, that's partially my point. There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong as thinking trangendered people are insane. There's something fundamentally different (and you and I know what it is but I will here leave it unstated) that allows the humanities to veer more deeply into incorrect territory. To reiterate: this makes them a terrible educational investment.
> There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong
Not exactly the same kind of "wrong", because, well, how could it be? But just a few days ago I was explaining in a comment here why nobody in academia teaches recursive descent parsers.
None of these fields are in actuality the study of human nature. They are the study of our interpretation of human nature. Interpretations change constantly.
Until we can simulate the brain at the lowest level and have accurate quantitative symbolic theories of higher level structures of the brain derived from the low level simulations... our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
> They are the study of our interpretation of human nature.
Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
> Interpretations change constantly.
Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
> our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
>Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
>Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
Usually scientific results don't change as fast as they do in the humanities. Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation. However, in the humanities any new idea can replace the current idea much more quickly because neither idea has a high degree of verification, thus the humanities are subject to change much more rapidly then STEM.
>And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
Ideally yes, practically speaking this is not exactly what's been going on in the humanities arena of academia. Much of what we're seeing involves heavy radical leftist politics getting embedded these groups.
Not all of the humanities are this way but much of it is. I would look to evolutionary biology and anthropology which are part of the "sciences" to study what it is to be "human" rather than "humanities".
Unfortunately given the nature of what is being studied the high bar of quantitative validation cannot be fully deployed in either of the previously mentioned fields. Instead the fields rely on a limited amount of statistics and logical deduction. This is still a significantly higher bar than most of the humanities.
> But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
True. But that presumes that the scientific method is a superior or perhaps only way to gain understanding. Deciding whether that's true can't be done using the scientific method itself. The humanities (in particular, the philosophy of science) is one framework for evaluating the scientific method itself.
> Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation.
Sure, because atoms are a hell of a lot simpler than brains and societies.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm saying it's definitely moved. It's just moved in such a way that almost all of the new knowledge replaces rather than extends or builds on the old knowledge. Thus almost all effort learning the old knowledge was a waste and we can expect the same for learning it today.
Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?
I don't think so. Considering thinkers like Jung and biochemist-cum-philosophers like Hofmann came along before much of that nonsense, and whose work was pushed aside with the good old American south paw for several decades. Thankfully with some more recent movement on the pharmacological front (re: resuming research into psychedelic molecules), as well as some doors opening on old estates (re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)) that there are new advances all of the time. Even Jung claimed he was just giving new language to ancient wisdom, even ideas he thought were at one point all his own.
"What's old is new again." Your chosen examples were a brief spout of practice brought about by the brutality of a now waning but once unbridled materialistic industrial power—not the end of psychology (or the humanities at large) as a meaningful study.
I think you're looking for only a certain type of reward and ignoring many others.
If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense you're less well off because you can't do something that someone who studied physics can do?
But women's studies today is different because the field has moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc. And people who have worked in the field have contributed to this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?
I wouldn't dispute that the field of women's studies has positively impacted society. So have the sciences. Assuming their impact was similarly positive, we're back to the question of where are you now if your major investment in these fields was 30 or more years ago (as a way of predicting what an investment today would reap). My claim is that because science is more additive in how it builds itself that your older knowledge is more useful today.
And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward. There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.
Sure there is! The thread that binds it all together is history. Understanding what's going on with JK's axe she's grinding starts in the 1970s with the rise and splintering of the Radical Feminist movement, the rise of Radical Lesbian Feminism and in particular the seminal book for what people now call TERFs, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male written in 1979 by Janice Raymond. Absolutely nothing uttered by JK is her own original idea and you can trace them all the way back to where they actually came from and what was going on in history at the time that precipitated them.
Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.
Correct (and bonus points for mentioning Raymond, we should hang out). But, and maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you just emphasising my point? As you show, Rowling is in many way a good 70's feminist but according to today's feminist, she's bad. In fact, she's considered a monster. Compare to a 70's physicist: They might be considered outdated for not knowing the proposed extensions to the standard model or that the standard model was empirically justified but nothing they believe is now considered wrong. The only conclusion to draw is that the field of feminism/women's-studies is known to peddle... for lack of a better term, anti-knowledge. Rowling would be better off today being ignorant of everything she was taught in the 70's.
I guess it depends on what you think the point of gender studies is, because I've never really seen it as a how to guide for feminists with a prescriptive "here's what's right or wrong." To me it's about giving you the tools to understand and critically examine feminist writings and the social dynamics at play that inspired them with the goal of, for lack of a better phrase, letting you "see the matrix." When it all clicks you can express your own thoughts and explain the ideas that people feel but can't quite grasp.
So it's less important that people view Raymond, Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still important to the history of feminism and informs so much of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away everything in response to new information because the before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more important because it's the key to understanding where we are now.
My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask for explain their own feelings that reflect the understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time. Today I think people would recognize those feelings as transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still useful.
You're absolutely right about this exception. I would even say it "proves the rule" as the technical act of playing an instrument is so transparently unchanging.
I love Parenscript specifically, and in general I love--as the Hylang project puts it--"Lisp lipstick on [language]" projects. I understand the sentiments that Parenscript isn't really Lisp and that "you could just use [real Lisp X]", I do. However, Javascript really did eat the world and sometimes being able to sling it really is essential.
Math envy often means people downplay syntax when discussing programming languages, but the S-expression syntax is why I fell in love with Lisp all over again as a more experienced developer. S-expressions and macro based tooling give me the confidence to refactor in a much more experimental and improvisational manner. I can move logic around or invert the order of calls without having to worry if the change will leave the code in a broken state. Yes, VS and other IDE's offer similar features (especially as they embrace AI) but in my experience they just aren't as powerful, flexible, or--most importantly--reliable as decades old tools that exploits S-expressions.
Parenscript brings this confidence and power to Javascript. And it isn't just syntax. The project goes out of its way to give little "quality of life" semantic boosts like supporting a proper "loop" macro and multiple value return.
I use Parenscript extensively for my hobby projects[^1] and games[^2] and it's been great.
Don't let the slow pace of dev scare you off. It's a cultural difference in the Lisp adjacent communities. There's this radical idea that projects can asymptotically reach "done" because the language is sensibly forward compatible and the projects have clear goals and aren't all agile managed CV-bait nightmares that want to grow into all encompassing "frameworks". At work, I comfortably rely on Common Lisp projects that haven't been touched in more than a decade because they do what they are supposed to regardless of how the calling enviroment around them changes.
I just wanted to say thank you for your and your colleagues work. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Parenscript saved me from burn out and let me rediscover why I became a techie to begin with.
This site most definitely delivers on the "fundamentals" it promises. Regardless of if you're planning on using a higher level engine like Unity or even something super simple like LÖVE, I would highly recommend at least skimming through. There's just no substitute for the low level understanding it maps out once you need to debug or do something tricky with 3D or shaders. Case in point: it clearly lays out camera matrix construction. Most libraries provide a magic function for this based on camera parameters, which is all well and good until you need to extract or modify the matrix itself.
Speaking of things that I learned in a frat-like environment: there's a kind of accepted tyranny to actually doing a thing. If you plan a party, it more or less goes the way you want. If you run Twitter, same thing.
We're in some kind of horseshoe world where self-identifying Democrats are already more likely to be virgins than their Republican counterparts. Just looking at the 20 somethings I know, I don't see how this trend of progressives being less fit in life doesn't continue until we at least have 20 years of dominance from more conservative backgrounds by default. I don't see any way to reverse the trends that have become base parts of the progressive culture.
I'll let my comment stand so as to not try to pretend I didn't say something I did, but perhaps virginity was an overly charged proxy for life fitness. My apologies. Just as weirdly favouring conservative types and less charged: living alone.
We've flipped. Democrats have become the default position in many ways, and conservatives are either outcasts or the cool kids, depending on where you are.
I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this.
When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.
People try to dismiss the complaints of the old guard as them being left behind, but that is clearly not the case. As you say, there have been a number of "flips" that are clearly not "progressions". Expanding civil rights from blacks, to gays, to trans, is clearly a progression and no old school Democrat (for example) bats an eye. Speech and sex stand out as clearly having reversed and if you buy into the current ideology then the previous attitudes were wrong, sure. But pretending they extend naturally in the same way as expanding civil rights seems dishonest.
I started my career in the liberal arts and one of the reasons I abandoned them was that they were a poor investment. Physics may have "revolutions" but it always builds on the math of the previous generation if nothing else. Someone who could ace a test in 1930 could do well cold today and learn the quantum stuff relatively quickly. A 1960's feminist is wrong about just about everything according to a modern one and maybe the modern one is indeed right but it just shows that learning about feminism is useless except in as much as you need "right now". There's no future return for investment today.
Winternitz signatures are fascinating because they're secure while still being within the reach of most programmers and--as the article points out--they're quantum safe.
We never got around to implementing the Merkle tree portion because while it saved space it added more complication and still didn't quite solve the "one time" issue. Instead, we implemented a simple blockchain. Users would sign a block containing the signature of the content they wanted to sign and their next key. Again, within the capabilities of most coders to verify themselves, which was the goal.
> Winternitz signatures are fascinating because they're secure while still being within the reach of most programmers and--as the article points out--they're quantum safe.
Absolutely agreed, Winternitz is very approachable!
At one point ~10 years ago I was particular enamoured by this "Dahmen-Krauß Hash-Chain Signature Scheme" (DKSS) built on top of Winternitz. It is a stateful scheme optimised for signing small messages...appropriate for things like lightweight sensor networks (e.g. 8-bit sensor readings), but I was imagining possibly also for quantum-proof p2p systems based on replicating event logs :)
...and from there I learned about "hash chain traversal" algorithms which are slightly trickier to reason about, but still within reach of a casual programmer.
At the time this really felt orders of magnitude less intimidating than any other options for adding post-quantum signatures to my JavaScript app :P
An anecdote that will probably sway no one: was in a family friendly barcade and noticed-- inexplicably--a gaggle of kids, all 8-14, gathered around the Pong. Sauntering up so I could overhear their conversation, it was all excited variants of "It's just a square! But it's real!","You're touching it!", or "The knobs really move it."
If you wonder why we no long we have "twitch" games, this is why. Old school games had a tactile aesthetic lost in the blur of modern lag.
Celeste is not really the same sort of thing, and compared to e.g. IWBTG fangames it feels a bit like playing a platformer while covered in glue. IWBTG fangames themselves probably feel similar to people who are used to playing Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube because those people play on CRTs which eliminates a couple frames of latency compared to LCDs.
