typing

This is a review of the AUKEY 'Blue Switch' mechanical keyboard, available for a little over $50 on Amazon.

For years, I've used the various versions of Apple's USB and Bluetooth keyboards, mostly because they lasted forever (I still have a couple spares that have most of the home row letters worn off), and they're pretty comfortable for my typing style. Also, they're pretty quiet. And the switches are robust. And the body is sturdy aluminum so there's no flexing while typing (a lot of plasticky keyboards have that problem).

As an ardent keyboard-only user of Mac OS X (mice are so early 90s!), I like having a very fast key repeat rate, allowing me to hold the delete key to remove characters, command-z to undo a bunch of things in my text editor, etc.

Since I have a MacBook Air without an Eject key, I had to use KeyRemap4MacBook to switch the F12 key to behave like the Eject key for the purpose of turning off the screen with the keyboard.

This gives me another nice feature, too: the ability to have extremely fine-grained control over key repeat rates. After installing KeyRemap4MacBook, you can click on it’s ‘Key Repeat’ tab in the System Preference pane, and set your own values (in ms) for waits.

I simply set the ‘Initial Wait’ to 200ms, and the ‘Wait’ to 25ms. These values let me type, delete, and undo things very fast. That’s sooooooooooooooo spiffy ;-)

This is my first blog post from the iPad. Unfortunately, the iPad doesn't work with CKEditor, which I am using on this website, so I have to use the plain text editor. Luckily, typing on the iPad isn't too much of a chore, although it is pretty easy to lose your finger positions while typing.

I think that's all I'll type for now, because my hands are getting tired, and it's about time to go to bed. But hopefully Ill have some more time to test out typing on the iPad tomorrow.

As an aside, you can't use Drupal's built-in file uploading (via FileField) with the iPad, at least not natively. I'll have to investigate this more over the next few weeks. There's got to be a way to add a picture to a blog post!