IDK, I didn't even see an enhance button on that keyboard.

Blue wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 08:37:

Purism more than anything, I guess. I certainly could swap, but it would be cleaner to just have one keyboard.

There are a decent number of keyboard and mouse storage desktop racks just for this purpose. So you could keep it neat and clean and "cool" looking.

Enahs wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 21:15:

A complication is I'd want it to also serve for work as well as play,

Why? Both can be plugged in as the same time. Easy to move one behind the other. Since your job and hobby involves using the keyboard, why not use the best for you for both options? Plus then work use does not take away from the life of the expensive gaming keyboard.

Purism more than anything, I guess. I certainly could swap, but it would be cleaner to just have one keyboard. But you're right, I'll be flexible about this when evaluating options.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

Beamer wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 21:29:
Or you missed the moisture and grease issue lacking with sunflower seeds and raw potatoes

Not defending Cutter but moisture control is a concern with raw potatoes. This is from the perspective of growing and storing them, long term, for personal consumption. Generally, you want to harvest them and leave the dirt on them. You put them on a wire rack not touching one another. Your storage area has to be cool (37-50F is the perfect range), dark, and humid. But the "humid" part is the tricky part. Too little humidity and they dry out, shriveling in the process. Too much humidity and they get squishy, either rotting, molding, or both. The thing you truly want to control is the starches converting to sugar and creating solanine as a byproduct. Too much solanine and you'll be sick as a dog at best. Vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and headache. It gets worse from there. It can impact breathing and cause severe abdominal pain which may be a sign that your liver is now not all right. You'll know that solanine is present if you see green in the flesh of your potato after peeling it that is not attributable to mold growth.

Yams are a bit more hardy and slightly less fussy in my experience. Plus they're a healthier tuber and, bonus, you can feed them to your dogs as part of a well-balanced diet along with peas, carrots, boiled chicken, and brown rice in the appropriate amounts.

Totally random non sequitor.

Cutter wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 21:10:
They can stitch the bags closed. I buy 50lb bags of sunflower seeds that are imported from Bulgaria. They come in paper sacks stitched closed - which still has most potatoes are still sold as well. Industry simply does not even want to look for alternatives and are only concerned with cost. This is why they must be made to do better.

Or you missed the moisture and grease issue lacking with sunflower seeds and raw potatoes

A complication is I'd want it to also serve for work as well as play,

Why? Both can be plugged in as the same time. Easy to move one behind the other. Since your job and hobby involves using the keyboard, why not use the best for you for both options? Plus then work use does not take away from the life of the expensive gaming keyboard.

They can stitch the bags closed. I buy 50lb bags of sunflower seeds that are imported from Bulgaria. They come in paper sacks stitched closed - which still has most potatoes are still sold as well. Industry simply does not even want to look for alternatives and are only concerned with cost. This is why they must be made to do better.

Who wants to learn about packaging french fries! Nobody? Too bad!

It's time for WarPig's TMI story hour!

I've worked in the packaging equipment industry since 1987 (yeah, I'm old), and much of it has been for french fries. As far as french fry plants go, I've designed and built baggers, case openers, and case packers - much of it for Lamb Weston (the other big companies in the USA and Canada are McCain Foods, Simplot, and Ore Ida - and we've built machines for all of them). As a matter of fact, I worked on a Lamb Weston project today. This is why I'm really surprised that I haven't heard this news before now.

A lot of the individual packaging lines package nothing but unlabeled retail bags that get sent out to restaurants, and these bags look like brown paper bags. Of course there are things that make the paper itself challenging - one, the grease can't soak through the bag, and two, the bag needs to be able to be sealed quickly and securely with heat.

As far as creating the bag goes, the baggers for the retail bags (usually 6lbs. per bag), run at around 50-60 bags per minute. So, you need to be able to seal the bag, fill it with 6lbs. of product, and have the seal cool down enough to support the weight of the product without bursting open - all within one second. So, this is why they can't just use paper - it has to be coated with something that's food-safe but melts together to form a strong bond.

One of the reasons this new paper is interesting to me (and probably no one else here ) is that it must already work with existing baggers, because if it didn't, I definitely would have already known about it. Back in the day when trans-fats were banned, the new oils would soak through the paper, and the new paper the industry came up with didn't seal like the old paper. So they had to keep working on that while equipment manufacturers worked on new sealing jaws.

If you want to get a feel for the scale of french fry production... around 15 years ago, we built one of our case packers and leased it to a french fry plant. We were a newish company at the time and the customer didn't want to commit to more than the one machine without proof that we knew what we were doing. We had a counter in the program to let both the customer and us know what the machine had done in a year. All this machine does is pack six, 6 lb. bags into a cardboard box - so, 36 lbs. of fries per box. After a year, that one machine had packed over one million cases. The customer ended up buying that machine and ordered four more, and that's just one packaging line in that one plant. So yeah, that's a lot of spuds!

jdreyer wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 18:31:
My coworker was pulled over by a cop in Texas for "not stopping completely at the stop sign before turning right," and given a ticket. She's a very careful driver that has never gotten a ticket or been in an accident. So she challenged the ticket in court. She got the video footage from the gas station that was on that particular corner, proving she had stopped. So she was able to get it dismissed.

By funny coincidence she's a dark-skinned Indian, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with why the police gave her a ticket despite her excellent driving.

Good for her.

Man, those hall effect keyboards are expensive.

New York judge resigns after saying he can't be on a jury since he thinks all defendants are guilty

According to court transcripts, Snyder tried to avoid serving on a jury in 2023 by first identifying himself as a judge and then saying, “I know everybody come in front of me. I know they are guilty. They would not be in front of me.”

Just, wow.

My coworker was pulled over by a cop in Texas for "not stopping completely at the stop sign before turning right," and given a ticket. She's a very careful driver that has never gotten a ticket or been in an accident. So she challenged the ticket in court. She got the video footage from the gas station that was on that particular corner, proving she had stopped. So she was able to get it dismissed.

By funny coincidence she's a dark-skinned Indian, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with why the police gave her a ticket despite her excellent driving.

hi, long time lurker here (i contributed to a post and some comments a long time ago but account is gone). anyway, you asked about something i know about so here you go.

there are no awesome full size he keyboards out there yet besides wooting (and many of those are raised keys and not submerged which results in a thin and louder high pitched click vs thocky goodness). if you're going to try something new try the following setup for gaming and/or work. it will take most people at least two weeks to adapt to any new key layout and they likely will not find it comfortable or speedy at first. this recommendation is for gaming, for work most would be better served with a tenkeyless (TKL) keyboard and a simple numpad (as per below).

1) get the largest mousepad you can (plain or rgb, doesnt matter as long as its thick and good) that can cover your desk enough to put a keyboard and mouse on it.

2) the keyboard - AJAZZ AK820 MAX HE Rapid Trigger Keyboard
one of the best hall effect keyboards at any price (wooting overpriced and not as butter)
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJ2HSKQ6

the front facing (versus facing up) see through keycaps are awesome and should never wear. the led lighting also is not directly in your eyes when you look down at your keyboard this way (normally you have to put your own keycaps on to get this and make sure the led lights are south facing). this is one of the best keyboards i have ever used for gaming out of the box and that is by default without any software features such as rapid trigger, mod tap, dynamic key, or toggle keys; pure butter. switches and key layout are great too; i really dislike 75% or 83 key keyboards that don't at least have home/end pgup/pgdn and ins/del. this one is only missing insert which you have multiple other ways to achieve and trades it for a very nice metal knob (volume / mute or whatever else you want it to do you can even program it to insert). so this is 82 key + knob instead of an 83 key layout.

unless you need wireless i recommend the wired version (black/grey color) to get you that juicy 8000hz polling rate (which likely no humans can detect but i personally find wired to be better for low latency and with no battery shenanigans at the wrong moment this way too). its also on sale 14% off and has been for some time now.

note: software is difficult to pick the right one, you want this one - "AJAZZ_AK820 MAX Single Mode RGB Magnetic Axis_Keyboard Driver_Installer_V2.06.01.zip"

3) since you want full size you can add on a mechanical rgb numpad for when you use it. i use one myself for some games (usually games with external cameras or some rpgs). the good heavy thocky one i use for work (epokmaker th21) doesn't seem to be in stock any more so here is one i use for gaming and a few alternatives. make sure the numpad is your preferred switch (red/brown/blue etc.) and mechanical and you should be fine / you can always swap the keycaps too if supported. hall effect is silent so you probably want red switches.

a) this is the one i use for gaming (and it has macros which you said you like - note that the main keyboard also supports both layers and macros too) -
https://www.amazon.com/MOTOSPEED-Mechanical-Portable-Backlight-Extended/dp/B0854K7NCR

also this kb does not need a driver, everything can be done via the numpad itself (paper instructions were included) which is great.

b) these others i haven't used but they look cool albeit pricier -

https://www.amazon.com/BOYI-TD31Pro-Mechanical-Bluetooth5-0-Rechargeable/dp/B0DGQV7NH7
https://www.amazon.com/Kisnt-Mechanical-Programmable-Swappable-Numeric/dp/B0D97HDC9X
this one looks cool (wireless and a calculator?) -
https://www.amazon.com/EPOMAKER-Wireless-Mechanical-Multifunction-Wisteria/dp/B0DF7H66H9

this post was supposed to be short with a couple of links but hopefully the walls of text help you and some of the fine blue users here :).

This comment was edited on Feb 5, 2025, 19:29.

Perfect Cardassian judge!

Yeah, I bet it is. You know what else is contributing to the rise in Schizophrenia Diagnoses? More readably available access to mental health.

this is almost as good as the shit sticks ponding what caused veteran disability payouts to increase so dramatically since September 11th, 2001. What could it be?

"Snyder, who was elected as a justice, is not an attorney and has agreed to never serve as a judge again."

He's justice of the peace, not a judge. Apples and oranges. You have to be an attorney to be a judge and serve in higher court. He works in traffic court, where you don't have to be an attorney. From the sounds of it he's barely literate anyway. I'm really curious as to how he was actually "elected".

"Often, food brands use a plastic film coating on paper bags to make them resistant to moisture and grease, Packaging World explained. These film-coated bags, however, can't be recycled — unlike the new Lamb Weston paper bags."

Yet, in a lot of Asia they've been using paper bags - made from straw - lined with a coating or rice starch which makes them waterproof - for ages now. The fact that we haven't forced this on manufacturers years ago shows how much power Big Plastic has.

The problem with lighsails is space is filled with stuff. What happens when it encounters it's first meteorite storm or even a handful of micro-meteorites? So long dental plan!

I'd lulz @ SC but that reality is just to painful to laugh at. The US takes over Gaza? Oh yeah, that'd work out well. The CIA has offered a buyout to all employees? WTF? At this rate I don't know that America, much less the world, will survive the next four years. Looks like I'm going to have to get my ass and gear and get my land out in the boonies and start farming and prepping.

This comment was edited on Feb 5, 2025, 15:44.

I'm over here hoarding Microsoft 4000 units like some sort of keyboard goblin.

I can second Wooting. I bought the Wooting two HE (it's full sized) a couple years ago and it has been, by far, the best keyboard I've ever owned/used. I agonized for weeks on what to get, even going into stores like Best Buy to test a few out. Couldn't be happier.

It's a little on the pricier side, but totally worth it, in my opinion.

This comment was edited on Feb 5, 2025, 13:19.

Wooting.io is really the best at hall effect keyboards. They were the first and have been leading the pack since their inception. I own an 60HE and an 80HE. Both are excellent. Though I tend to migrate back to the 60HE personally. They have fullsized boards and a full set of open source software for macros. Their keyboard config software is web based it, though they have a stand alone version if you'd rather.

If check out bad seed tech and optimumtechs videos (YouTube) on wootings boards for more info.