Fidget spinners are stupid.

But what do you have on your desk instead?

The challenge of a Rubik's Cube? A classic Newtons Cradle? A stack of empty pizza boxes? Magnets, because how do they work? The one and only devRant stress ball?

I'm looking for something to mess with when I'm staring in disbelief at horrible PRs.

Preferably something semi-creative, tactile and stress-relieving. The three-dimensional material equivalent of the doodle.

Something which is less annoying for coworkers than the clicky switches in my keyboard. And a bit more appropriate than my genitals.

Users.

For once they used their brains.

For once they thought about repercussions of clicking on inconspicuous links in emails.

And naturally it happened when I sent out a legitimate email to stop their shopping sprees.

But then again, I would rather have paranoid users than clicky-go-lucky.

Buy a nice, clicky mechanical keyboard. The sound of Cherry MX blue makes me want to write code just for the pleasure of hearing and feeling my keyboard 😂

At some point, someone on the visual studio team thought: what people need is a clicky-draggy gui for editing yaml files for github actions.

And instead of throwing him unceremoniously out of the window, the rest of the team agreed, and said: yes, that's a great idea, it will be almost as useful as that clicky-draggy gui for editing sql commands.

I make clicky sounds from my mouth when I type on a membrane.

Client: Can you make the button more "clicky?"
Me:🖕🏼

Finally got my "new" keyboard! Had to use one of these at work for few months and I loved it. It has that classic tactile, clicky feel. I almost got an expensive mechanical one, but I'm glad I didn't.

I used blue switch’s for the last 15 years, I have used bought 3 different keyboards in the that time, all use the mxBlues used blackwidows now using Logitech 54g or whatever it is...

I see these people using membrane or basic bitch keyboards. And I don’t understand how they do it.. I use the clickyness as a feedback for me. I don’t care how loud it is... nobody has complained but I also don’t care lol.

I’ve tried using other keyboards but I can’t type on a non mechanical clicky key.

I want to get one of those IMB retro keyboards, but I want to try one out before I spend the money.

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

I HATE WINDOWS' WINDOW MANAGEMENT. I have two monitors and nothing can be maximized. Windows' spaces are terrible as well.
I am building in the back end in VS Code.
I have three terminals open because I need them to run multiple parts of the app locally.
I have postman open to try requests.
I have firefox for the orm system's documentation.
I have my database tool running as well.
I have an ERD diagram floating in a window.
I have another VS Code window showing a diff of my JSON compared to the version I'm replacing.
Also all of my team communication tools.

I have never hated shuffling windows around so much. Would it kill us to use some command line tools for http instead of Postman? Could we please get a decent shell in windows? Could we get some simple ways to switch between virtual desktops? Click click click. I can't automate clicking. Why do we use the most clicky tools we can find?

Can anyone suggest a good keyboard for coding? I would love something like the latest MacBook keyboard, I'm too addicted to that feel.
So I'd love short key run and a clicky feel.
I don't even know what to search (apart for the magic keyboard, which could be a waste since I'm gonna use it on windows, don't you think?)

Mount an azure file share in an app service container? Sounds handy. Nice clicky-draggy wizard to set it up, pick your file share, type a path to mount it to, hit save.

And does it work?

Does it buggery.

And is there a helpful error message so you can see what you've done wrong?

In a pig's arse is there a helpful fucking error message.

"Application error", and a link to some "diagnostic resources" that displays the exact same error message, including the same link, so a link to itself, in an infinite recursive loop of rank, inhuman stupidity.

Let me see what's in the logs. Absolutely fuck all. No, wait! There's the html markup for the fucking useless error message I'm looking at in the browser. So the UI is telling me to fuck off, and the logs are recording that I have been told to fuck off.

But this is Azure. So there isn't just one place to look at the logs, there are many places to look at the logs. And they are all geologically slow and most of them don't work.

It's probably a firewall issue. I'll have a look later on if I can be arsed, but frankly I'd rather be performing cunnilingus on a lion.

I can use my clicky mechanical keyboard. Mmmmm those blue switches feel good. Also my home monitor setup is better

Just sat through a demo of some clicky-draggy data visualisation stuff.

The guy showed us how you can write a custom script that takes a user input and pokes it into a sql command using string concatenation, so a very obvious injection vulnerability.

Ok, so it's only a demo. But you wouldn't do a demo with an example user called Captain Cock, so why do a demo with a screamingly obvious security hole?

Whole thing was basically pivot tables in a short skirt anyway.

!rant

Today I replaced my Logitech G610 that had a twitchy enter key by a Corsair K70 with MX Silent switches.
It's a whole lot of money, but man that thing is really beautiful. I'm in love with the aluminium top plate and the entire design with raised switches/keycaps.

The G610 is a good keyboard (only missing a palm rest), but the K70 is much more comfortable, and the silent switches are really a lot less clicky, nearly as quiet as a rubber dome keyboard. Really nice for office environment.

The only sad thing is, I would prefer brown switches for regular typing, because of the feedback. But MX Silents are only available as red and black.
So now I have red switches, but that's something I can live with.

I hope the K70 is made to last, I'm not planning to have another keyboard for the rest of my life.

My old budget gaming build (turned server) is screaming in agony right now.

Well, it's more like the AIO Water cooler is running on max and it constantly makes a clicky sound.

But still. Torturing servers by submitting a rendering job is fun.

...

Wait what am I doing

Treated myself to a new mouse. Going from a clicky mouse-wheel to smooth-roller is.... Amazing.

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)