dirtystylus

Keyboards, Keyboards

Update 2008-05-08: Jake Seliger just posted a review of the Unicomp (Model M-type) Customizer

Update 2008-05-06: Found the geekhack.org forums, which provided some nice feedback on different mechanical keyswitch models.

Update 2008-05-01: I’ve compiled most of people’s suggestions in a follow-up post.

This is why I love The Talk Show: in Episode 20, Dan Benjamin and John Gruber spend an entire hour discussing keyboards, specifically the Apple Extended and Extended II . If you’re someone content to hammer away at a sponge-y membrane keyboard like the ones that ship with virtually every computer these days, then dedicating an entire hour listening to two guys talk about keyboards seems insane. If, like me, you’ve spent years looking for the ideal keyboard, then starting today’s podcast was like being in the desert and seeing a faint reflection, (just there!) over there on the horizon. Could it be water?

I had hoped the podcast would bring news of a new, magical keyboard, one combining the precise feel of mechanical keyswitches (like the old IBM buckling-spring Model Ms or the aforementioned Apple Extended line) with the lower noise of scissor switch or membrane keyboards. Sadly, they confirmed my own suspicions: in a perfect twist of irony, computer makers have let the single most important input device stagnate.

I have a few good keyboards, both of which are mentioned in the podcast. The Matias Tactile Pro pictured above is what I use at home, and I like the feel of the mechanical keyswitches. Unfortunately, the super-clacky metallic ringing is a little too much noise for the office, even one that blasts music over office-wide wireless speakers. I’m don’t know how the feel compares to the revised Tactile Pro 2.0, but I will say that I enjoy this keyboard the most of all the ones I’ve tried the last few years.

Not wanting to force everyone around me to wear headphones all the time, I switched to the Macally iceKey, which uses scissor-switch keys like you would find on a laptop. The feel is pretty good and snappy and noise is fairly low, so it makes a decent compromise. It isn’t a pleasure to type on, however — if it were a hockey player it’d be a good second-line player: 25-30 goals a year, maybe 35 in a contract season. But that’s about it. I tried the new low-profile Apple Aluminum keyboard for an afternoon, but the feel was inferior to the iceKey so I’m right back where I started.

Benjamin and Gruber end the episode with an offer to buy mint-condition Apple Extended/Extended II keyboards from whoever still owns one. I’m casting an eye to the future, however. Experiments like the programmable, LED-tastic Optimus Maximus are great, but surely it’s time for some company out there to start putting some thought into core keyboard technology again — something with a precise mechanical feel that’s also well damped for sound. Something like the Leica of keyboards — built like a tank, mechanically precise, and whisper quiet.

Plugout – Flash Player Version Switcher

Update 2008-12-16: A coworker found that simply typing "plugout" has the (unintentional?) effect of deleting the flash plugin entirely, which is useful for testing with no Flash plugin at all.

While developing the recent AllStateGarage.com site I had to do regression testing on different versions of the Flash Player, to make sure that both the swfobject embedding script and the built-in ExpressInstall upgrade functionality were working properly. After doing a bit of searching I found Plugout, which in a brilliant twist of fate was written by Aaron Smith (the guy behind RubyAMF that we used on the AllstateGarage.com project).

Plugout is a command-line utility that makes switching to different versions of the flash player easy. You can specify the plugin, version number, and browser. It's smart enough to restart and run the browser under Rosetta if the plugin version is PPC-only. For example, to switch to Flash Player version 9.0.28 in Safari I fire up Terminal and run:

You can also add different plugin versions as they get released, including debugger versions of the plugin (the debugger versions are denoted by a "d" following the version number). For example:

The only wrinkle I ran into when using Plugout was that Ruby is required for it to work. This isn't a big deal to Leopard users, since Ruby is included, but before I upgraded to OS X 10.5 I just ran the plugout command in a shell session launched from within a Locomotive Ruby context. Speaking of Locomotive: development has been halted on the project, mostly because of Ruby's inclusion in OS X Leopard.

HDD Upgrade

I replaced the hard drive in my Macbook, upgrading to a 250GB drive. The process is quite easy: pop the battery, unscrew the metal L-bracket that shields the RAM slots and the hard drive, and pull the hard drive carrier out by a flexible tab. The one wrinkle in this process was that I didn't have a Torx screwdriver on my first attempt, and the drive is screwed to the carrier with those star-shaped Torx screws. Apple's documentation made no mention of this, so I had to close everything up and wait till the next day when I could run down to the hardware store and get the proper (T8 or T9) screwdriver. I found out Joseph had the exact same experience replacing the drive on Kristen's Macbook. You'd think Apple would have the best documentation, but apparently not. A good run-through on the whole process can be found here. I had cloned my old internal drive to an external drive, so once the new one was installed I booted off the external, formatted the new drive, and then copied the clone from the external using SuperDuper.

I also picked up a USB-powered enclosure to house my old internal drive. I'll probably use that as a backup drive for Jordan's machine, and shift the 250GB USB drive that used to hold backups for both our machines to being a dedicated backup for mine. I briefly thought about using my old drive and placing it in the PS3, but that would leave Jordan without a backup.

Streaming from Mac to PS3

Took a stab at setting up media streaming from the Mac to the PS3 and found it to be relatively straightforward. There's a few options for doing this, the first being Elgato's EyeConnect and the other being Twonky Vision. EyeConnect appeared to be a little more polished and installs as a System Preference Pane, so I tried that one first. Unfortunately, while I could browse my media just fine, playing the media usually didn't work. Occasionally I would get a song to play or mp3 to load, but most of the time I ended up with a generic network error message. I've noted a few online forum messages that imply that the latest firmware update (v2.0) to the PS3 seems to have broken things for EyeConnect, so hopefully this is just classic blip in the relatively new space of media streaming and they'll have that patched up quickly.

In the meantime, I've installed the Twonky Vision media server, which runs quite well. Management is done via a web panel, and so far playback has been pretty solid aside from the occasional hiccup. Resetting the media server's client table usually solves those issues. The drawback is that for some reason AAC files (even unprotected ones) don't play – they're listed as "Unsupported Data" in menu listings. Thankfully most of my music is in regular old mp3 files, but it's still a bit disappointing given that the PS3 actually can play AAC files just fine. EyeConnect supports unprotected AAC, but of course getting it to actually play the files without constant network errors was impossible.So this solution works ok for now, and I'm going to ride out the 30-day demo on the Twonky Vision software while keeping an eye out for EyeConnect updates before plunking down for one of them. It's nice to be able to route my media to the home system without using an iPod dock (or an AppleTV).

Toggling Between Main Window and Drawer in TextMate

Sometimes it pays to read the Key Bindings listing. Today I found out that ⌥⌘` (or ⌥⌘~) toggles between the main editor window and the project drawer. Since I use the Subversion bundle heavily while in TextMate, being able to switch back and forth between the two contexts is great.

Another tip that I never knew about was the "Edit in TextMate" command (installed via the TextMate bundle) that works with most programs on OS X (I use it mainly in Mail.app, although I tried it on the WordPress editing window in Safari to write this post). I clicked in the form field, hit ⌃⌘E (Control+Command+E), and it launched an editor window in Textmate. Probably not worth the hassle for short posts/emails, but for longer writing stretches it's nice to work in the environment in which I spend the most time. Saving in TextMate dumped the text back to the input form in Safari (although only when that window is in focus). This is all very geek-tastic.