Out of curiosity, I've been watching a few restorations of those spectrums, and I've noticed the keyboards having a rather peculiar construction, judging by today's standards. They have 2 springs, the small one, as far as I understand, presses the membrane layers together, and the larger one returns the key into neutral position once the key is released.

I personally haven't used any spectrums, yet I've encountered the very same construction on a keyboard of a Russian clone of said machines (namely, zx atas), and to this day I haven't touched anything worse... The only way I can describe it is like trying to type on a piece of raw meat.

So, if anyone here had a chance to type on the original spectrums, was it this bad? I suspect otherwise since I haven't heard of crowds of people requesting PTSD treatment, but the whole thing still somewhat bothers me 😅

Just thought I'd share. Probably nothing new or fancy, but may help some of you find a way to repurpose devices that aren't worth repairing into home servers or something: e.g. op5 I've used has better CPU compared to raspberry pi 4, can run linux (postmarketos, albeit with some caveats), and costs less if bought with broken display (or nothing if you have one lying around)

Decided to share an older "project" of mine - ms sculpt wireless to wired conversion (also, it runs qmk, so we get all its features). A sensible person would order a custom pcb (such projects exist on the web, take a look if you're interested), but I went with removing all the components except from the ribbon cable connector, sending the PCB smooth, gluing a piece of discount card to isolate the traces, gluing a Chinese rp2040 on top, and wiring all the necessary traces to it. No, it wasn't fun. Yes, it works.

Bonus: when I disassembled it now I found out the type-c wasn't soldered well and decided to separate from the board:

So, here we go: using phone as a poor man's microscope (note: also, still works)

The end result kinda doesn't give it out, so whatever (insert your frontend -- backend jokes here)

x-post from tg: https://t.me/theaftertimes/15396

So, a while ago I bought a cheapest oneplus 6 available in my area to subject it to a few experiments with running Linux. Among the other issues that came for that price, the power button was almost flush to the frame, hard to press, and had almost no feedback.

Today I finally got tired of it and decided to check what's wrong. The button itself turned out to be just fine, but the thingy that presses it looked weird:

After a few tries of gluing smth to extend the middle pin, I found out that I can just cut off a piece of plastic from the blister of my favorite headache pills and place it between the button and said thingy. Works wonders 🤣

Btw, the actual problem is that it was missing a few rubber spacers, as far as I understand, but whatever

Forked from https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/19c35a4/pictured_avg_linux_user_fixing_thier_pc/

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it's 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you're about to execute... And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: "damn, what did I expect to happen?".

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it's units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors... So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it's contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect... So, I installed glibc from Debian's repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn't have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?