deskthority

> I was very, very tempted to make my own alteration so it went ASRTD on home row. --- "...and so it begins." Once you change a big thing, the urge to make small changes is strong. Most OSs support plain Colemak now. If yours does, there's a lot to be said with just staying with that. But if you're ...

What's the problem? If you don't like the short spacebar, you can map the extra Japanese keys to send the spacebar keycodes.

Other than the spacebar row, it looks like an ordinary compact ISO board. It doesn't have the weird Japanese cursor pad or the split shift keys.

Thanks, Clicky.

Hmm. That zigzag cable gives me ideas...

I gave it almost five months, then turned off the sticky keys. The main problem was if I pressed a modifier key, then the next keystroke was a modifier. I backspaced over a lot of unwanted caps, and found that most web browsers are loaded with control-key shortcuts you can't turn off. The obvious fi...

One of my Model Ms has the TrackPoint. As some members had warned, the cursor movement is very slow. Twiddling the speed in the OS settings didn't help much. What was good on a 640x480 EGA monitor doesn't work well on a 1920x1080 monitor, I guess. Anyway, it occurred to me - would it be possible to ...

Weird that it has an AT layout but XT protocol. That was quite common. Companies were still making XT-class machines for several years after the AT came out, but almost everyone used the more modern, zippier AT key layout. OEMs like Epson could make XT-only keyboards, but the aftermarket and some s...

So, board #3 is ready to go back together. Just a cleanup, new foam, and extra flippers for the various split keys. The disintegrated foam made it easy to simply slide the plates apart. Fresh foam makes it difficult to put them back together. I managed to squeeze the plates enough to engage the tabs...

You know you can swap those keys around with software, right? The hard way with xmodmap or xkb, easy with KDE. I think you can do it in Windows, too.

And therein lay the problem: to learn a new alpha layout besides QWERTY, you must go through an angry world of SUCK QWERTY might as well be random, particularly for non-English text. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The object behind most of the alternative layouts is to minimize finger travel, ...

There were warnings of keyboards and mice with built-in USB malware back in the early XP days. By default, older versions of Windows considered a USB device to be a trusted source, and would load drivers - or what said it was a driver - from a USB device. Depending on how the OEM configuration was d...

I have one keyboard I remapped with xmodmap, using with a simple USB adapter. I have a second board I took apart and cleaned; I'm still waiting for the barrels and flippers. Last night I took the third (and last) keyboard apart. The foam was completely disintegrated, and the remains were solidly stu...

The precut foam from the kbdzero on eBay showed up. It's more like very soft rubber than foam. It looks very nice. Still waiting on the xwhatsit, extra barrels, flippers, and other bits from modelfkeyboards.com. It has only been a little over two weeks, but I want my instant gratification RIGHT NOW!...

After writing that I remembered I had one of those 9-switch "switch testers" with different colors of Cherry switches. They're standard desktop switches, and the adapters fit perfectly. They're actually noticeably tigher than the original caps. The tester got relegated to the junk box shortly after ...

I'm not really complaining; I lowballed the printing on purpose, because I suspected they'd need some tweaking. I might have to fiddle with the post dimensions a bit, too. I don't have any MX keycaps to compare them to. Maybe they're supposed to just pull off. I'm used to IBM keys, which snap into p...

The MX-to-IBM keycap adapters showed up from Shapeways. They're marginally satisfactory. I took the default material and surface finish. They have "3d print" lines, but they're no problem. The Model M keycaps fit, but loosely. I'm guessing they need to be .005" or so larger each way for the caps to ...

I ordered a precut foam panel from a vendor on eBay. Since I have three keyboards to do, I'll try DIY'ing the foam on the other two. Finding round tuits to make a new foam panel wouldn't help get this one done. The original foam looked okay when I took the keyboard apart, but it didn't survive disas...

Try it on another computer.

Try it on a powered USB hub.

Ask the manufacturer how much an out-of-warranty repair might cost.

Huh. It looks like the designers made text editing the priority, right down to keys for font sizes. And then didn't bother to provide cursor keys... Of course back then, not all terminals had cursor keys anyway, and serious programmers all used vi or emacs, which had been developed for machines with...

Yeah, it's apparently easy with the Pi 4. I have to make another attempt with the Zero; sometimes the desktop will see something there, but it can't talk to it. I'm hoping it's a cable problem; I just got another OTG cable to try. There are other micro-micro-computers out there, including some with ...

The top plate had the usual white measles. Definitely corrosion of some sort... but it's a steel plate, and steel corrosion is red, not white. There was corrosion on both sides of the plate. The black paint practically fell off when I hit it with sandpaper. I wonder if it was something in the paint ...

xhwatsit controller, barrels, flippers, springs, and a short space bar coming from modelfkeyboards.com. Two MX-to-IBM-keycap adapters coming from Shapeways. I took the default material and surface finish (white ABS, no post-processing), which came to $8 for two pieces, for a total of $22.41 after va...

On the PC/AT cursor pad, my ring finger does Home-Up-PgUp-Left and my little finger does Right, PgDn, End, and Del, as well as "-" and "+". After remapping the cursor pad, the little finger also does Enter and "*". I swapped all the keycaps with Model M ones, including Enter. I had Unicomp make me a...

You can open up a "laptop-size" USB hub - the Sabrent ones have a single screw - and remove the circuit board, which makes it a lot smaller. On my "smart keyboard", the USB hub is a big problem; room for the plugs becomes a problem. So I'm planning to (hopefully) de-solder the connectors and hardwir...

Yes. And a Cherry switch mounted to the top plate will line up exactly with the buckling-spring barrels.

All the IBM keys and keycaps are perpendicular to the barrels. The "curve" parts are the two plates and the flexible capacitance membrane.

An added-on switch would be in the same orientation as the original IBM switches.

6-conductor coil cable, up to 3.75 meters, on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/354844841520

It's shiny black instead of flat black like the original IBMs.

It's gorgeous. I hope you manage to connect it to a PC, somehow.

It's hard for me to express how much I hate the inverted-T thing. Going back to a proper cursor pad was the main reason I finally went back to the AT keyboard. The F107 has the arrow keys laid out properly, but exiles the Home, End, and Pg?? keys off into Siberia. I do a *lot* of text editing, and I...

I have a 1u gap on each side of the bottom row, if I trim the little plastic tabs between the spacebar (or M alt keys) and the outer keys. I picked up a couple of Cherry laptop switches to see what the space situation looks like. There appears to be sufficient room for the low-profile laptop switche...

I'd like to use some IBM Model M keycaps on some Cherry MX style switches. I found an .stl file for it here: https://www.printables.com/model/263508 ... caps/files

Has anyone here used these? And can someone recommend a place I can send the file to, to have some printed?