I work with one of the 60% keyboards. The biggest plus for me is having the navigation keys within the home row, but the biggest negative is having to press fn to use the function keys. I don't know if I'd go so far to call it idiocy though.
The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#32I am thinking of buying (somehow. because these things doesn't exist in my country, and I am thinking I will have to build it from scratch) a MX Brown keyboard... Anyone here know if their clicking is less obnoxious, or if they click at all? I do want the tactile feedback, when you feel the key giving away and can release it immediately, but I don't want to annoy other people (myself I don't get bothered by the noise…
I used a Cherry Red keyboard in an office for a while. It was pretty noticeable for most people around me.
The benchmark for keyboard loudness in my experience is the standard apple laptop keyboard noise or the standard apple USB keyboard noise. It seems like all mechanical keyboard switches tend to be louder than those, and will be noticed. It's possible though that depending on how you type, people won't care.
I spend a lot of time writing text and type quickly and with force, so people could really hear it when I got going on my keyboard.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the mushy feel of rubber dome switches. Yes. I find rubber dome keybaords much more tiring. It's not really clear when the key activates; I wind up essentially mashing the keys. I pretty much refuse to use them. Scissor key (laptop style) keyboards are a great compromise for me: cheap and precise. Almost as good as mechanical keys for me. Mechanical keyboards are best for me, but not always practical due to noise a…
Is there any downside to using o-rings? How come no keyboards seem to ship with them by default? I just ordered an MX Brown keyboard, wondering if I should buy o-rings.
I have only one downside: if you use your keyboard to play games, it feels weird to hold keys like shift down if you have an o-ring on them, because it compresses slightly. I found my hands getting fatigued after a while of running this way, and have since removed all the rings.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#34I'm sorry but how does having no key labels, improve speed and accuracy? I haven't looked at my keyboard in probably twenty years, and most of the keys are worn off on the current one now. Will erasing the existing ones somehow speed me up?
It ellimentant the subconscious impulse to look at the keys. Many typist think they are touch typist until they are actually face to face with a unlabeled keyboard.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#35I don't really care what other people use in terms of keyboard layout or non-layout, but loud clicking is incredibly distracting. I had to get active noise cancellation headphones to be able to work in one room with a fellow developer who insisted on using such a monster.
I've swapped keyboards to quiet ones while my coworkers were out of the office. Seriously obnoxious, especially the ones who aren't light tappers.
Seems pretty obnoxious to steal people's input devices. Did you try talking to them first?
I love my Model M and use it at home, but I don't use it at work out of respect for my coworkers because it is very loud. But if a coworker replaced my keyboard without talking to me, I would not be happy.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#36Chorded keyboards are silly - just like chorded instruments. Can't argue with the obvious superiority of the 2000-keyed guitar rather than just one with 6 strings and 20 frets. Also, it's not like you'll be using keyboards for half a decade, so yeah... learning something like that would be a total waste of time. ^ typed on my favorite keyboard - the $12* Logitech K120 * Canadian... includes a mouse.
> Also, it's not like you'll be using keyboards for half a decade, so yeah... learning something like that would be a total waste of time.
Why not? It's not like we have a revolution in keyboard designs every year. If the keyboard is durable, there's no reason for it not to be used decades hence. The Model M I use at home was made in the same year I was born, and still works just as well as it did new.
Completely agree that chorded keyboards are uncomfortable though. I tried one and can't imagine using it.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#37Some of their other writing seems to be of a similarly low quality. Another of their pages [0] seems to mirror a post [1] that they had sent to comp.lang.lisp, where they describe their difficulty with finding out the identities behind some blogs in sufficient detail.
> PS it annoys me to no end when one cannot easily find the name of the author on blogs, when the blog author clearly didn't meant to be anonymous. Is there a reason you didn't want it spelled it out?
This turns into a small rant against handles, which, if you set aside the jargon, are essentially nicknames.
> (i despise hacker culture, where these “hackers” idiotic-namesake prefer to go by “handles” or abbrevs (e.g. “RMS”, “ESR”, “JWZ”) or whatnot insider-fashion fuck. But that's just me.)
One person seemed a bit annoyed by them, so they then responded with a larger rant [2] that proposes that “hackers” are a strict subset of the people who like to tinker with computers, without ever clearly describing what it is about “hackers” that they “despise” — concluding:
> It is this group of people, i despise. More accurately: i despise their general style and outlook. I despite them. Fuck them. FUCK hackers. FUCK their hacking. Fuck their mothers. Scumbags.
At this point, I’d have dismissed them as a troll, but they went to the effort of buying a domain name and everything!
[0] http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/whats_hacker.html
[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/q...
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/P...
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but active noise cancelling doesn't really work for punctuated noises like keyboard clacks. I tried a coworker's Bose Quiet Comfort active noise cancelling headphones, and ultimately decided that the passive cancelling of the Sennheiser HD 280s was better for anything that wasn't a more of a constant drone. As side benefit, they were much cheaper and sound much better (to my ear) too.
As far as I know, sound is actually so slow that you don't need to average the noise and make an educated guess as to what to filter. Acoustic noise filtering in headphones should work by detecting the outside noise with a microphone and playing the cancelling wave form as soon as the sound wave reaches the interior of your headphone. In contrast, you can't do that for the noise of a car on the road because here the…
Considering the fact that it takes about 60 microseconds for sound to travel about 2cm, you only have about 900 cycles (assuming the same clock speed as an Arduino: 16MHz) to process the input sound, do a fast Fourier transform of the noise, and output the cancellation wave. I severely doubt that it can be implemented to be that fast. And not to mention that spikes in sound aren't nicely dealt with in Fourier transforms, so it's unlikely to actually remove the noise properly.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#39I am thinking of buying (somehow. because these things doesn't exist in my country, and I am thinking I will have to build it from scratch) a MX Brown keyboard... Anyone here know if their clicking is less obnoxious, or if they click at all? I do want the tactile feedback, when you feel the key giving away and can release it immediately, but I don't want to annoy other people (myself I don't get bothered by the noise…
The clacking is entirely from bottoming out the key with browns and reds. O-Rings will take there of most of this for you, as will not typing with such force that you bottom out the keys. You generally have a good cm of travel after actuating the key during which you can let up with no appreciable impact to your typing.
Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)
#40Some of their other writing seems to be of a similarly low quality. Another of their pages [0] seems to mirror a post [1] that they had sent to comp.lang.lisp, where they describe their difficulty with finding out the identities behind some blogs in sufficient detail. > PS it annoys me to no end when one cannot easily find the name of the author on blogs, when the blog author clearly didn't meant to be anonymous. Is…
Xah Lee is a well known usenet troll. He entered my killfile many, many years ago for his ranting against Python, Vim, Emacs, Lisp, and everything else under the sun.
Must be profitable, if he's still at it.