deskthority

webwit wrote:which I broke on Daley Thompson's Decathlon

...ooooooh yes. I remember it well.

Are those caps printed? My DK'Tronics had stickers, and I wore them out. Good old noisy clattery switches too. And room inside for not only a Speccy but an Interface II! And power supply. And amplifier to make those beautiful BEEPs even louder.

I use KeyRemap4Macbook (which is not just for macbooks) and PCKeyboardHack. Both are fine, as long as you don't mind dabbling with a smattering of light xml.

Wow.

I'm still in, anyway.

Hmm, more details on Matias site.

I fancy trying a Matias, but not so keen on the silver finish… looks like a cheap 90s alarm clock. Squinting at the keys, looks like the bottom-right has fn..?

I grew up using 8-bit home machines with no numpad, so I just got used to that - and ever since I've just gravitated to the number row by default. I don't have to enter large quantities of figures though. Not since moving on from typing in long listings in hex...

Unusual cap shape.

What's the grey hex keypad at the back of your pics?

I'll have to give Swiftkey a try - currently having a very bad time jabbing several letters at once with my unabnormally average thumb. Samsung Galaxy here, just a small screen and tempted by something bigger. As for tablets, I think the Asus Transformer is a neatish solution - the best clip-on keyb...

kbdfr wrote:What about "mechanical"?

Ha. What about "proper"?

My ISO M from 1993 uses yyyy-mm-dd, but my old 122-key terminal M from 1986 uses dd-mm-yyyy. Both were UK-made.

It could be said that any physical switch is the completion of a circuit. "Switch keyboard" would basically mean "any keyboard". A membrane is a switch made from thin layers, that's all. That would differ from something like an electronic switch that does not rely on the motion of discrete physical ...

Another category of switches is the switches with either a buckling rubber sleeve or a coiled spring directly under the key cap, and a slider with an arc of conductive rubber or foam and metal foil on the bottom. I've seen a lot of keypads made with a rubber sheet, moulded to form small domes, and ...

Isn't the Topre switch a capacitive one? And therefore not a contact switch at all, but a proximity switch? Are there other kinds of switch that might be considered 'mechanical' in structure/operation but not contact-actuated?

"Expensive".

Personally I think that all keyboards with moving parts are mechanical in a sense, but when introducing a layman to what *we* know as mechanical keyboards, it's probably not appropriate to say that that a rubber dome is a mech board. That's more or less what I'd say. To me "mechanical" would imply ...

486 wrote:

fossala wrote:Are them keycaps cherry compatible?

Yes. All Acorn BBC use Cherry mounts except Type 3 switches and some Achimedes boards. Master series use Cherry MY.

Not that simple - the BBC cap stem is too thick for a Cherry MX switch without modification.

EDIT: Roland still sell a switch (via their spares dept.) that looks identical to the last type above, but as it's meant for the Boss pedals, it only has two pins. The old 808 switch will have been discontinued for a long time, but if you contact your nearest synth tech you might have some luck - al...

HaaTa wrote:Sony Keypad (for something, dunno what)

Looks like it was meant to go with this.

I've been using the same Rotring Tikky since about 1987 or '88 (the white one in the pic - "W. Germany" on the clip) - it's battered, the eraser's long gone, its cover is made of dents, the clip is loose, the printing has all worn off, the nib has been bent and straightened more times than I can cou...

Ah, right, cheers - was just the angle making it look shorter.

They look like nice sturdy caps. I'll be grabbing some at some point, but need to figure out what first.

That's not as tall as I'd expected - the profile photo on Qwerkeys' info page makes it look like it'd poke up more than yours does. Is the skirt longer compared to the regular keys?

Various companies make spray cans of paint that acts almost like a dye, sinking into the surface. Plasti-kote is available in the UK, for example, and I've seen other people get decent results from it, though I haven't tried it myself.

tinlong117: nice view! Can you see nothing but trees all the way round?

I'd have thought a Poker would be better for portability.

I've not yet tried iAWriter, but a freebie I do use occasionally on my desktop is Focuswriter . I've installed it on my Raspberry Pi (running Raspbian). Works just fine. If you're interested in light, portable, simple writing kit, you could worse than grab an Alphasmart. I've got a Neo2, which is th...

Anybody heard/seen one of these? Just saw this mentioned on another forum.

http://www.thesmartype.com
Usefulness debatable, but I'll hold off judgement till I see a price.

ericbentley wrote:Here's my man cave of sorts

Python the Hard Way, eh? It's not bad that one, nice and clear I thought.

Yeah, I'm beginning to wish I'd signed up for the full board tour - though I suspect it would only tempt me to chuck two hundred quid at something, it's probably for the best I didn't.

Haha, it's a slippery slope. Watch out. Before you know it you'll have splashed half a grand on keycaps and springs, and your other half will be on the phone to the men with the van, and the jacket, and the electrified noose on the stick.