Keyboard Page Update

Updated the keyboards section with conclusions about the Tactile Pro. Started a links section. It’s amazing to me how much more organized the Japanese keyboard enthusiasts community seems. As far as I can tell, there is one guy who started a small store in Akihabara (Tokyo’s electric town area) just to serve this community. There […]

Next Up: SMK-88 Mac Mini USB keyboard

With the cash freed up by the return of the Tactile Pro, it’s time to move on to the next candidate. This one wasn’t actually on my list until very recently. It’s the SMK-88 sold by DSI for $60 USD. It uses the black-stemmed Cherry ‘linear’ feel switches. I’m a little nervous because the Qwerter’s […]

PhotoShelter

I’ve been pretty happy with smugmug, but today I came across PhotoShelter, which purports to be a smugmug type service meant for Pro photographers. Interesting features include the ability to upload RAW images and that they provide strong backup features. It had always annoyed me that you couldn’t upload RAW images to smugmug. They probably […]

Back it goes.

Got a reply from Matias. Turns out their manufacturer has exhausted their supply of ALPS switches, so they can’t make any more new ones. So no more new versions left. I guess that’s also why the price has gone up to $150 on their website. They should look into using Cherry switches instead. There are […]

Hope yet…

On two fronts: Keyboard: I’ve arranged for a RMA from OWC for the Tactile Pro, since the ghosting thing is too annoying. But then I found this page: http://www.macintouch.com/keyboards.html where a MacInTouch reader describes the exact same problem that I’m finding, and goes on the recommend that fast typists stay away from the Tactile Pro. […]

The problem with laptops

The problem with laptops, is that the usecases they support are always a subset of those supported by desktops. Sure, you can “move” a laptop, but moving a computer is not a use case in itself. You end up giving up a lot of capability, for the ability to take your task elsewhere. But what […]

Ghosting it is…

Well, it turns out that whenever I ssh’ed into work, the problem would reproduce itself. Odd. As I final test, I tried plugging the board into my windows desktop, and hit the “space, o, p” combination over and over again. Well then what do you know, I start to get capital o’s and capital P’s […]

Goodbye Speakeasy

So I just waited for about 15 mintues on hold to cancel my speakeasy account. I suppose I waited a long time because I called at such an odd time. Anyhow, the guy that finally picked up was suprisingly pleasant. He just quickly asked me for the reason I’m quitting (I just gave him some […]

A New Hope…

After reading about keyboard ghosting problems on the internet today, it seems that the kind of problem I was seeing is actually unlikely to be a ghosting problem. As my co-worker Edward pointed out, ghosting due to matrix scanning shouldn’t be a timing dependent problem. If it is a ghosting problem, it should be perfectly […]

Back in the box it goes..

It was nice to know thee. But in the end, you were just too expensive to have such a fundamental flaw. In other news, reviews claim that MS’s new Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 has worse switches than the previous models.. so I guess that one is off my list. Does nobody care anymore?