Year: 2006

I’ve just considered how conservative keyboard manufacturers are. Look at your keyboard right now. At every key. And think when was the last time you used it.

Letters, numbers, ESC, Enter, and spacebar are about the most used ones. Ctrl, Alt, Shift are too. Backspace and Delete get a share of their usage. That’s about it for frequent keys.

Home, End, Page Up and Page Down were much more useful before. Not anymore, I guess. Most people prefer either a shortcut or a mouse click or scroll. I don’t know anyone personally who have used Insert key at least five times in the last ten years.

Function keys (F1, F2, F3, …) used to be very useful in DOS times. I know a few people who use them these days, but those are very few.

Tab is very useful for programmers and system administrators. Not much so for the rest of the world.

Caps Lock and Scroll Lock are the two keys that I’ve never used. Caps Lock in fact does more harm than good.

Sys Rq, Break, and Pause – hardly anyone knows what these keys can be used for.

My point is that times change, software changes, needs change. But the keyboard hasn’t changed much in it’s lifetime. Mouse is a much simplier device, but it went through a whole bunch of evolution changes (trackballs, optical mice, scroll wheels, one-two-three-…-ten buttons, sizes, shapes, etc). Keyboard? No.

There are just a few modifications that I’ve seen – blank keyboard (no letters on buttons), LED keyboard (which is still in prototype), hacking keyboard (no caps lock, no number pad on the right). That’s about it.

Do you know of any other interesting keyboards (no multimedia keyboards, please)? Do you like this keyboard conservatism?

According to Read/Write Web, Digg website will be re-released as version 3 on coming Monday.

Apart from the better interface, I find it interesting that they are going beyond Technology section. Science, World & Business, Entertainment, Video, and Gaming sections will be added with many more topics inside those.

While I personally don’t use Digg all that much, I can see how these new changes can bring more people to Digg community.

Once again my mobile got disconnected, which proves that I am really really bad with bank account management and shouldn’t paint any illusions.

Anyway, today I went to CYTA to pay my bills. With their new computer systems things are pretty fast now. I am at the counter and the nice lady tells me the outstanding balance, I pay, she gives me the receipt. I know that my mobile will be connected in a few minutes, but just to make sure I ask her “When will my phone be re-connected?”.

Her face lightens up, she looks at me like I am the stupid person on Earth, when most of that Earth population were telling her, that she is, and she says: “Soon!”. I smiled.

Of course, she meant that it will get re-connected very soon, in just a few minutes. But the way she said it… Let me just express it in a better way:

1. Paying the phone bill – 78 CYP.
2. Asking the re-connection question – 0 CYP.
3. Expression on the clerk’s face – PRICELESS!!!

This should probably go into my profile or something like that, but I’ll post it here first. This is the map of my world. Those red countries are the ones I’ve visited or lived in during my life. It’s not completely fair, as it paints the whole country even if I’ve seen just a tiny bit of it. But for what it’s worth, it gives the idea. Needless to say that I am going to paint the red much more of that world. My stats for now – 8 countries, which is about 3% of all.

You can generate your own map here.