Kickstarter: HashKey - most cringeworthy "keyboard" ever

[ne0phyte]

Some guys are trying to kickstart the "HashKey" which is nothing but a hash # key.

What makes it cringeworthy to me is that they make the #-key look like it's called hashtag and that it's only ever used for hashtags
Have they never seen any rc-files?


>> People are always asking us "where's the hashtag key?" or "how do I do a hashtag on my computer?" <<

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10 ... he-hashtag

[Muirium]

That's the thing I like the least about Kickstarter. (And Twitter, and the linkbait industry in general.) A viral idea beats a good idea every time. In fact, by definition!

Ugh. The poorly informed, easily amused crowd out there…

Besides, it's been done.

[7bit]

I will soon bring the Hyper0, a 0x0-matrix keyboard, which can be used to enter the empty word!

[Muirium]

I got one like that already. It's wireless, too. And you don't even ever need to find it.

[Halvar]

Indeed, it has been done. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

[Muirium]

They didn't put the boat logo on it? Avast! RRRRRRRRRR!!!

RR

A little white and girly for a pirate anyway, needs more wood and filth.

[mr_a500]

I've always known the "#" symbol as "number sign". The Americans annoyingly started calling it "pound" and phone messages everywhere said "press pound for more options". This is the damn "pound" symbol: "£" and I don't see it anywhere on my phone. Then Twitter came along and all this "hashtag" nonsense started.

[7bit]

I got one like that already. It's wireless, too. And you don't even ever need to find it.

No, that would be the HyperNoise keyboard, with integrated telepathy module!

[Muirium]

Hash is the English name for #. Despite it being the number sign, and indeed the sharp symbol in music. I think the original user on Twitter was either English or wanted to sound fancy.

But have Americans ever used # as shorthand for lbs? Let alone £s!? (I always thought the lb markings on scales referred to "labs" which I guessed was a daft old unit of weight, opposite kilos. When an adult finally corrected me, I knew they were full of shit. Where's the l in pound? And the b!?)

[ne0phyte]

The lb/lbs is actually latin
(Yeah I checked Wikipedia..)

It's a short for "libra" which is "scale" and most of the times used in plural (lbs).

[mr_a500]

Hash is the English name for #. Despite it being the number sign, and indeed the sharp symbol in music.

I know. "Hash" is at least better than "pound", but "hash" has always reminded me of "hash browns" - and I hate that crap. (especially if it has onions in it)



I wonder if they'll now have "hashtag browns".

[bhtooefr]

My understanding is that American use of "pound" for # comes from a codepoint collision in certain Baudot codes, where # and £ share a codepoint.

Also, apparently Bell System engineers wanted to call it the octothorpe when it was added to touch tone phones.

[Touch_It]

Well, this is so dumb but I like it. At any rate ideas like this always win out over good ideas because everyone likes "shiny" things over useful products. It's the world we live in. Brilliant though from the sellers perspective though as it is likely to make him a lot of money imo.

[7bit]

Chiffre in France and Germany.

I also know it as Zaun (fence), but in computer usage, it always was hash.

Pound comes from the fact that it is placed at the same spot as the pound-symbol and maybe because people didn't know what it had to be called.

In RFC20 it is called Number Sign

footnotes:
3 These characters should not be used in international interchange
without determining that there is agreement between sender and
recipient. (See Appendix B4.)
4 In applications where there is no requirement for the symbol #,
the symbol (Pounds Sterling) may be used in position 2/3.

[Muirium]

Yup:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

Octothorpe was the typesetters' name for it, and would have been a big improvement over pound. Octo 13! (Unlike *69, which was an REM song, I don't know any # codes with actual meaning, this is what we suffer by living outside America…)

As for libra and all of that, I knew the teacher trying to correct me, age 12 or so, was full of shit when they had to resort to "Roman"!

[ne0phyte]

Guys, guys... stop!!1 Didn't you see the Kickstarter?

As of now, the # key is called Hashtag. No arguments!

[7bit]

Correction:
In France they call it croisillon
and in Belgium and Canada: carré
and in Germany, when it comes to telephones: Raute

[Muirium]

In Scotland, it's "pow!" (Rhymes with cow, but with more spittle.)

Guys, guys... stop!!1 Didn't you see the Kickstarter?

As of now, the # key is called Hashtag. No arguments!

Damn it, you fit that in 140 characters. I was going to make a truncation joke, you heartless clod!

If Twitter says #hashtag, that's enoug

[mr_a500]

Yup:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

Notice the part where it says:

In Canada the symbol is commonly called the number sign. Major telephone-equipment manufacturers, such as Nortel, have an option in their programming to denote Canadian English, which in turn instructs the system to say "number sign" to callers instead of "pound sign".

Unfortunately, I don't think any company used that option.

[Muirium]

Everyone's eyes glaze over when it comes to Canada, you guys know that by now!

[ماء]

i wil make ماءkey

[woody]

Couple of decades ago, a friend jokingly called the '#' symbol "a prison", because of the bars. Otherwise it was the musical "sharp" for us.

EDIT: Actually a "prison", but in slang. Hardly can translate that.

[bhtooefr]

Vertical service codes typically use *, not #, even in North America. Usually, # is used to denote the end of input - for instance, "enter your password, then press the pound or hash key", or "say your name, then press the pound or hash key" is common in American automated phone systems.

Although, on my ATA, I moved all of the ATA-internal VSCs to #, so that I could pass arbitrary * VSCs through to the SIP PBX that I connect to. And then, I found out that my pulse-to-DTMF adapter has no way to detect dial shunt on a Western Electric 500, and therefore the long hold method of getting * and # that it provides doesn't work.

[Muirium]

EDIT: Actually a "prison", but in slang. Hardly can translate that.

Clink? The cooler? On ice? The can? The pen? The chokey? The pound? The tollbooth?

(That last one confused me as a kid, as my hometown's historical jail was called The Tollbooth, and there were toll roads here in past centuries and I assumed the hangings there were to do with carts not coughing up…)

Hey, look, I opened the thesaurus!

[Halvar]

and in Germany, when it comes to telephones: Raute

I wonder who came up with this ... a Raute is actually a rhomb / diamond.

[mr_a500]

I found out that my pulse-to-DTMF adapter has no way to detect dial shunt on a Western Electric 500, and therefore the long hold method of getting * and # that it provides doesn't work.

I have the same problem. I've got a pulse to tone adapter for my WE 500 phones, but "*" and "#" don't work. I think my adapter is a piece of crap though because it keeps needing to be reset. I wish I could find one that works properly. I didn't need one until my phone company replaced my dead cable modem with one that doesn't support pulse dialling. Damn my phone company!

[cookie]

Correction:
and in Germany, when it comes to telephones: Raute

There are some crazy folks who call it "Schweinegatter" what actually means "Pig Fence"... A former colleague called breakpoints a "Brechpunkt" what for me sounded like "Vomit Point"... sometimes you are well advised to stick to the english word!

[webwit]

In Dutch it is actually called a fence.

[jacobolus]

My favorite is “octothorpe”. According to Wikipedia:

Octothorp, octothorpe, octathorp, octatherp
Used by Bell Labs engineers by 1968. Lauren Asplund says that he and a colleague were the source of octothorp at AT&T engineering in New York in 1964. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr's essay, in that it says "octotherp" was the original spelling, and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke. The first appearance of "octothorp" in a US patent is in a 1973 filing which also refers to the six-pointed asterisk (✻) used on telephone buttons as a "sextile".

[woody]

EDIT: Actually a "prison", but in slang. Hardly can translate that.

Clink? The cooler? On ice? The can? The pen? The chokey? The pound? The tollbooth?

"pen" is more of an abbreviation than slang, right?
The rest are all new to me.

The "fence" is close in visual meaning.