Pricing niche products

They're still made... Unicomp ( https://www.pckeyboard.com/ ) bought the equipment ( from IBM?) and makes 'original' buckling spring keyboards now. They also have some nice 'upgrades' for them like USB connectors (ps/2 connectors can be hard to find now... )

Sure, I'll explain and link.

It sounds like a lot but I am not a particularly handy person and I did it right the first try. I just had to use a brush to remove a little excess lubricant on one of the stabilizers because it was sticky. On my GMMK keyboard where I was going for silence, the different before and after the stabilizer mods were incredible. It sounded cheap and rattled a lot, even though the keys still felt good. Afterwards it was near-perfect.

There are two primary things that make noise. Some noises are good and some are bad. If your keyboard makes rattling noises when you type, that's considered a bad noise and likely caused by stabilizers. Stabilizers the the extra things you see under the larger keys on a keyboard like the spacebar and shift. Different keyboards have different numbers of them.

The other thing that makes the noises are the switches. Some people want clicky noises, some people want silence. The case and the keycaps can alter the way your switches sound too. If you want it quieter there's some rubbery sound-dampening material you can buy to line your case with, some people use other materials. Basically the more empty space there is in your case the more potential for noise.

So if you want a silent keyboard, you use that lining material, you use linear switches that are designed to be silent, or you buy regular linear switches and silence them yourself using little rubber rings. Definitely mod the stabiliizers by taking them apart, cutting these extra little plastic feet off like the linked article, optionally placing a small piece of cloth bandaid under it, and relubricating it after wiping the original lubricant off. Some people go so far as to open and lube the switches, but that's not a 20 minute job. Everything else I described is fairly quick, but it will probably take more like an hour the first time you do it. Its easy though. As a further step, some people buy better stabilizers, authentic GMK stabilizers that screw into the circuit board. However, when I modded my GMMK I used the stock ones. Some people don't like them but it seemed decent. My space bar was kind of noisy but I skipped the bandaid mod for this which would have likely helped, otherwise it was super quiet.

If you want a clicky keyboard, you buy clicky switches. You still want to get rid of the rattle noises so you will still need to clip, lube, and optionally do the bandaid mod for your stabilizers, upgrading to better stabilizers if you want to do it. Lining the case is more optional. If you do want to line the case, its always a good idea to research whether there's even enough room in your specific case to do it. I did not try it with my GMMK.

Link to stabilizer and band-aid mods.

https://topclack.com/textclack/2018/4/29/the-stab-lab-a-stab...

There are some people that get into extreme keyboard modding. Some people try to stick little pieces of foam in the hollow parts under-neath the keycaps to minimize noise, I haven't gone that far.

Here's an example of what's possible to with a little bit of learning. Note that this guy is one of the best and he may have also used other techniques, there's probably a full stream of him making this keyboard or one similar somewhere online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69tfYxDhyyc

Here's another one that ended up pretty good. I think he describes his process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3-9ttpaU0E

Honestly, they sort of do. I would definitely call any 60% with custom QMK firmware with function keys and layers a non-standard layout. For the alpha keys, the benefits to switching from QWERTY to say DVORAK or something are largely still theoretical. No one to my knowledge has proven definitively that it's actually superior. And it's a common myth that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down. It was designed to place the frequently used keys further apart from each other, which is not the same thing as trying to slow down typists. If that were the objective, you'd find yourself doing awkward pinkie reaches for 'T' and 'E' and the like.

But even if DVORAK was superior, mastering it comes at significant costs. Chiefly, switching to a custom layout with function keys and stuff doesn't reprogram most basic typing, so you can jump on someone else's conventional keyboard pretty easily. If you reprogram yourself to be a DVORAK master, you are looking at some serious potential hindrance in flexibility since we live in a qwerty world.

> You should put in a bid where you're exactly neutral between buying-vs-not-buying. Otherwise, you're leaving money on the table. This is asking people to make purchasing decisions whose outcomes will leave them explicitly not happy - a state of mind that every person hates putting themselves in.

It seems that this is a problem the Vickrey auction solves. By charging the price offered by the 11th highest bidder, they are ensuring that everyone pays less than or equal to their bid, and most likely less than.

This works out perfectly if everyone actually bids their neutral point: the winners are all either neutral or happy (most likely happy), the 11th is neutral, and the losers are all neutral or happy (most likely happy).

In practice, people bid at a price that they'd be happy to get it, so actually the 11th will feel slightly miffed that they weren't able to purchase at that price. And of course all the losers will be annoyed that it cost so much. But the former problem can't really be helped, and the latter is baked into basic supply-demand.

Its more comparable than you think. Those artisan cables with fancy bnc connectors and pretty colors are also available for keyboards. Some are like $40-50 but some are into the hundreds. They are sold for aesthetic reasons. I myself have some decent quality, but still pretty average cables because I think my white plastic cables look good with my white plastic $600 keyboard. My cables were probably $10-12 from amazon.