deskthority

I replaced most of the stock keycaps on my Matias Quiet Pro Mac version with Tai Hao doubleshot ABS Alps keycaps, and I couldn't tell the difference in profile between the Matias keycaps and Tai Hao OEM profile ones. The Mac version of the Quiet Pro looks way too busy in my opinion with all of the e...

The short one usually goes in the upper mount of either the + or Enter key on the numpad. At least on keyboards with Cherry profile keycaps, the top of one of those keycaps is very short, but I don't have one handy to check which one it is. That's not the case with the OEM keycaps that Filco keyboar...

Yes, you can remap any key. The R3 software is surprisingly great, much better than what they had for the R2. The keyboard also has two layers for programming keys, which is what the big round button in the upper right-hand corner is for. When you press it, the A or B button lights up to indicate wh...

the R3s now have better quality lube on the 2u keys and spacebar getting rid of the rattle which was more prominent in R1 and still there in R2. My R3, an R3HB21, had no lube on anything but the space bar. I still had to take it apart to lube the other stabilized keys. Backspace, in particular, was...

On the subject of the R3, I wish they would hurry up and release it!!! How long has it been since the first Japanese release? A year already? I am dying to know how it compares to the R1/R2. The R3 types no differently than the others. Mine feels exactly like my R2 PFU Limited Edition, but they're ...

I bought a white silenced 45g one recently off a local guy. I think he bought it off of eBay. It's definitely a great keyboard. My only concerns are that mine had a couple of keys that pinged noticeably, so I took the whole thing apart and reseated the domes and springs. I've owned quite a few other...

Thanks! That definitely does make it look like a PCB issue. I'll have to examine the board a little more closely and see what I can find. Hopefully whatever is causing the issue is on bottom. I don't see a good way to examine the top since the plate covers it all.

I'm using an old Griffin iMate I bought 20 years ago. It's never given me any problems, and unfortunately I don't have any other ADB keyboards to test it with at the moment. I have a few others, but they're packed away somewhere in my storage unit.

I recently bought an Apple M0115 Extended Keyboard with orange Alps, which I've been dying to own for quite a while. It works great, except that the forward delete key doesn't work, and several other keys produce the forward delete key code along with their own. I verified the behavior with a key co...

That's one ugly keyboard. Realforces have always been somewhat classy, but the floating keycap look ruins it. It is nice that they're silencing it, though, since that was the RGB's biggest issue.

I've used the Deskeys rings on a few Topre keyboards and they're great. If you get the thinner ones, there's virtually no loss of tactility, and the silencing is very good. They're also extremely easy to install, once you have the keyboard disassembled. I used KBDFans Silence-X rings the first time ...

Yes, anywhere you're starting to see shine is also where paint is going to wear off. since that's where you touch it. Wheel paints are very tough, but even that started to wear off of the front edge of a Realforce RGB I painted a while back. Using a wrist rest prevented it from getting worse, since ...

I have no idea about the Niz-branded keyboards, although I like Niz caps more. Niz changed their keycaps recently, and their latest doubleshot PBT ones look horrible. The legends are uneven, a lot of them are up at the top of the keycap, and they use a hideous brown color on the black keyboards. It...

Yeah, there's a reason Topre came out with the higher-priced PFU Limited Edition models with uniform 45g weighting. That seems to be the holy grail of Topre weighting. Strangely enough that's also what their cheapest model, the Type Heaven, was, but that one feels slightly higher than 45g.

The sliders are pretty valuable, even if you don't use them yourself. I parted out a Realforce RGB on eBay a while back and got over $100 just for the sliders. I sold a ton of the springs, too, along with the USB cable and the PCB. I parted it out because I wanted the domes for a 30g factory silence...

You can get a 45g Niz dome sheet dirt cheap, at least in the US, if you want to swap out your 35g domes and see what it's like. I bought one recently from Flashquark for just over $10. I don't know if this is true of all Niz keyboards, but I've taken mine apart a few times, and each time I had to ru...

Once Topre stabilizers are greased, I'll agree, they are great. :) Ungreased, they can have an awful rattle. The AEK stabilizers are definitely odd. I disassembled one recently and had to read up on how to get the wire seated on the space bar, since it has to go straight down due to the alignment pe...

The Niz keyboards are pretty great, although they could use a little improvement. I agree that the actuation is further down. You really have to bottom out with them or else they won't register, and some keys are a little more sensitive than others. Mine was having issues with the 3 key on the numpa...

The NiZ / Plum domes are about 10g lighter than advertised. The 55g domes are great, I prefer them to Topre 45g. Force curve here: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~haata/573 I'm not so sure about that. I have both a 45g Niz and a 45g Topre in front of me, and they feel very similar. I've also had a...

I feel the same way. I recently sold a Realforce RGB and an older Realforce 103UW and regretted it. I bought another RGB and a 45g Niz keyboard, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how much I liked the Niz. It's a little noisier than a factory silenced Topre (I've owned a couple), but the stabili...

I had owned a few AEK IIs back in the day, and they all had cream Alps. I've bought two in the last few years, and they're both white. I can't tell the difference between the two. I had read somewhere that the whites might be a little stiffer than the creams, but if that's true, the difference is ve...

The Logitech K740 is still being made. I have one at work that I pull out if I need to take my mechanical one home, and it's a wonderful keyboard. It's easily one of the best scissor switch keyboards ever made. My personal favorite was the DiNovo Keyboard for Notebooks, but it was pretty unreliable.

I have a couple of old Apple keyboards with Alps switches, and I've owned quite a few AEK IIs over the years. It's amazing how bad the click gets on the cream damped switches when they get dirty or worn out. I haven't run into that problem with the orange or salmon ones, but then those keyboards don...

SP uses those same legends on the SA Industrial keycaps of theirs that I have. They are lovely in every way. I currently have them on a Cherry G80-3494 with silent blacks. I had them on a Realforce RGB for a while, but they just didn't look right on that keyboard. They look much better on the G80, I...

Topre keycaps are very nice. They're well made and a decent thickness. They need to fix the legend spacing on keycaps like Num Lock, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break, though. They put way too much space in between the words. They could also stand to make their black keycaps just a tiny bit...

I have an older variable force Realforce 103UW and the newer silent Mac version of the R2, which I converted to uniform 45g with the domes out of a Realforce RGB. They're both wonderful keyboards. I pulled out my old Apple Extended Keyboard II yesterday to test out a couple of ADB cables, and I was ...

I've been using creme developer from Sally Beauty Supply on some yellowed plastics lately, and so far it hasn't affected the printing on any of it. I don't see why WASD's pad printing would be less durable than what other manufacturers used 20-30 years ago to print on plastics, but of course I could...

Back in college (mid to late '90s), it seemed like every friend's place I went over to had a mouse that didn't work well, so I'd always pop the ball out and clean all the crap off of the rollers. Those old Apple ADB mice were interesting in that some of them had very wide steel rollers, nearly an in...

Cooler Master's NovaTouch Those things seem to be gold dust because they're MX compatible. Personally, I'm just going with Niz switches, and (I think) BKE Redux v1 domes, which are a frustrating match to assemble but theoretically pleasing to use. Don't forget about the Realforce RGB. It gets a bad...

You'd think that someone could make a decent EC keyboard for $125. Every so often I look for one of the Niz/Plum/Royal Kludge/Abko Topre knockoffs on eBay, but their prices never seem to be cheap enough compared to the cost of an actual Topre to make them very attractive. Every so often someone puts...