Archive for May, 2009

I quite like the Idea of CO2 offsetting.  I'd like to have solar panels assembled to the roof of my house when I'll get more money.  There are quite a few sites that are dedicated to this topic such as actioncarbone.org or carbonfund.org.

Jópár alkalommal küldtem már levelet különböz? Volán Társaságoknak amikor azt tapasztaltam, hogy valamelyik sof?rük dohányzott a buszon és a válaszlevélben tájékoztatni szoktak róla, hogy a sof?rt megrovásban részesí­tették.  Ez sosem töltött el igazán elégedettséggel, mert szerintem minimum egy párezer forintos pénzbüntetés szülne jelent?s visszatartó er?t ahhoz, hogy az illet? a jöv?ben se gyújtson rá arról nem is beszélve, hogy törvény alapján is pénzbüntetésben kellene részesí­teniük a sof?rt.

Az elmúlt hónapokban küldtem pár levelet bizonyos szervezeteknek, mint például a Leveg? munkacsoportnak, és az Országos Dohányfüstmentes Egyesületnek, hogy hogyan lehetne elérni, hogy pénzbüntetést rójanak ki a sof?rökre.  Az illet? szervezetek vagy tipikusan nem válaszolnak vagy egymásra mutogatnak.  Megértem, hogy nem ez a világ legfontosabb problémája, de amit meg tudok tenni azt megteszem az ügyben.

Az azért örömmel töltött el, hogy Wittich Tamás, a Fogyasztóvédelmi Hatóság vezet?je válaszolt a tudatosvasarlo.hu-n feltett releváns kérdésemre.

Attól függetlenül, hogy nem mindig rónak ki bí­rságot a vétkez? sof?rökre azért azt örömmel könyvelem el, hogy azokon a buszokon amelyeken utazni szoktam és egyszer már küldtem levelet, ott azután soha nem szembesültem dohányfüsttel újra, í­gy azt hiszem a megrovásnak is lehet visszatartó ereje.

There's a pretty interesting comany I've heard about lately named Matias.  They create various products, but some of their keyboards are especially interesting because of the special layouts they're using.

Their Optimizer layout that is used in the Matias Optimizer Keyboard really hits home for me.  The idea is very good, but they're not the first to invent such a special layout and probably neither me.  I've seen a similar layout a long time ago on a site that I don't remember, but a guy basically made a customized X Server layout with the core idea of using the JKLI keys and the Windows key as a shifting key to produce handy cursor navigation.  I've seen his work after I came up with the Ultimate layout which is similar to these layouts.  The core idea of the Optimizer layout is very good, but their implementation is suboptimal for a number of reasons which I won't talk about now because I don't wanna share the details yet.

On the other hand their Half-QWERTY layout that is used in Matias Half-QWERTY One-Handed Keyboard and Matias Half Keyboard is new to me and I haven't heard about it yet.  It may truly be their own invention although it doesn't take a genious to came up with such an idea I believe.  I think the Half-QWERTY layout works wonderfully in practice because it's easy for the human mind to mirror the keys of one half of the keyboard.  One thing that is hard to understand for me is why these products are so bloody expensive.  They sell them about $600.  One reason I can imagine that the target audience is very limited and they cannot sell many of these and want to make additional profit with these products but such high prices are very discouraging for customers I believe.

I change hosting providers quite frequently nowadays.  I moved to BlueHost about two months ago and now I've just moved to Linode.

BlueHost is absolutely the best shared hosting provider in my opinion but there are several things that I've missed, such as:

• providing a Subversion repository through HTTP
• doing resource-intensive shell operations without the fear of being kicked out
• administering my server without going through zillions of CPanel pages

It's not hard to realize that it's not possible to do the above things on a shared hosting account.  A dedicated server would have been truly overkill for my needs so I opted for a VPS account.

There are two main kinds of VPSes: XEN and OpenVZ.  I wasn't conscious about the major differences between them for a long time, but I am now.  You can do your research, but my conclusion is that XEN gives you much more freedom, because it's a true paravirtualization technology, not an OS-level technology like OpenVZ.  XEN may have slightly more overhead, but it makes you able to use the OS of your choice, manipulate iptables, load your own kernel modules and such.  Using my preferred OS (Ubuntu) is certainly a major benefit for me as most OpenVZ providers offer you CentOS which I cannot stand personally.  OpenVZ may have the advantage of providing "burstable" RAM that is temporarily usable RAM that the others don't use momentarily, but I don't like the concept because it may be the cause of nondeterminisic errors upon memory overruns.

Linode has very good prices and they provide a very advanced custom-developed web interface which is ahead of their competitors.  You can install your OS image of choice in a matter of seconds and they also provide a unique feature: lish, the Linode Shell which runs at the hypervisor level and makes you able to log in to your VPS even when something terrible happens, like sshd gets killed.

I'm very satisfied with their service so far and can only recommend it for everyone.  I could have choosen Amazon EC2 as the ultimate VPS, but I see Linode as their smaller counterpart that is more appropriate in scenarios where less resources are sufficient.

You may also want to chose

as you VPS provider

• A világ legbizarrabb billenty?zetei
• Minden id?k 10 legrosszabb billenty?zete
• Das Keyboard II tartósteszt

I've been using Das Keyboard for about three months and one thing is sure: the rave reviews on their site are not marketing bullshit. This keyboard is different. It not only lasts a lifetime, but it's incredibly pleasurable to use due to its high-end tactile keyswitches.

Since I'm on the mission to build the best keyboard ever created, I felt the need to disassemble Das Keyboard and see what makes it tick.  Just to make things clear, I think that Das Keyboard is the best traditional PC keyboard ever created, but not the best keyboard that is possible to create because the standard PC layout requires too much travel distance for various keys and it's suboptimal from the typewriter's perspective.  No, I don't mean DVORAK, but something that I could call QWERTY Compact that is very easy to learn.  But that's the topic of another post.

First of all, I want to apologize for some of the crappy pictures.  My friend, Dömi and I did everything we could do to make reasonably good pictures but the lighting was less than optimal and we're pretty unexperienced at making such photos.  Anyways, let's see what we have!

Back panel outside with screw holes

This is the back of the keyboard clearly showing where the screw holes are.  You have to harm the central warranty label so say bye-bye to the guarantee if you proceed further.  You also have to remove the upper rubber feet to access the screws, but you'll be able to easily glue them back later.

Back panel inside with straps

Now comes the tricker part.  There are some hooks that hold together the front part and the back part of the keyboard.  It looks like this:

A hook

I think it's probably impossible to disassemble the keyboard without breaking some of these hooks, but you don't really have to worry because the screws alone will hold the front part and the back part pretty tightly so you'll be perfectly able to use your beloved Das Keyboard after assembling it.  You have to pressure the hooks from the sides with some handy tool to disassemble the front and the back parts.

Now let's see what's inside!

The Cherry MX tactile keyswitches

After removing the keycaps (which is a pretty easy job) you can see the soul of Das, the Cherry MX tactile keyswitches.  They are both extremely durable and extremely enjoyable to type on.  I'd like to note that it's a misbelief of some people that different pressure sensitivity is required for various switches, namely that less force is needed to press a switch as the distance from the center gets longer.  Every key needs constant pressure, about 50g.  I've measured the constant pressing force by placing some coins on different keycaps.

Keyswitch panel

We have lots of those switches, this obviously does not make Das a cheap keyboard.  The switches are panel mounted, not PCB mounted.  Panel mounting is a more robust solution than PCB mounting.  Panel mounting also make Das more expensive, so think about what does this keyboard provide for its price before saying that it costs too much.

Keycaps

The keycaps are not ordinary either.  When seeing Das from its side it's easy to notice that the top of the keys form a slight U shape.  This shape is more optimal for typewriters than the much more common linear shape used by the rest of the keyboards (not counting the Model M and Unicomp keyboards).  Because of this shape, each row has to close a different angle with the base panel than the other rows.

The PCB of the board

The keys are attached to the PCB (but they sit on the aluminium panel shown above).  Most dome switch keyboards use foil, but we're not dealing with mediocre quality here.

A diode on the board PCB

Das uses diodes to implement N-key rollover.  Let me note that it doesn't implement true N-key rollover, only 10-key rollover, but it's hardly a limitation as most of us have 10 fingers.

The controller PCB

See high resolution version

The controller PCB is definitely not an ordinary one.  The left IC is a Genesys GL850G USB hub controller and the right baby is a Holtek HT82K95E USB Multimedia Keyboard Encoder 8-Bit MCU.

The controller PCB of a Trust KB-1400S keyboard

One can compare Das with this poor PTH PCB.  The complexity is not the same.

Some grease on the frame of the space bar

After using Das for some weeks I could hear some squeaky noise when pressing the space bar.  I was more than surprised because everything else was so terrific about the keyboard.  After I applied some lubricating grease to it the irritating voice gone away.  Some grease should be applied to these wires during the manufacturing process.  Apart from that I cannot say any bad things about Das.

You probably pretty much know my opinion about Das after reading this post, but let me say a word of wisdom at the end.  You can buy many crappy keyboards throughout your life or one real keyboard.  The choice is yours.  You know which I opt for.

Thanks for Werner Heuser for linking this post on Repair4Keyboard.com.

Most people use Midnight Commander with the default blue color scheme which is hard for me to understand because I think it's terrible and I've always preferred it with black colors.

Here's what you need to include into mc.ini:

[Colors]
base_color=linux:
normal=white,black:
marked=,black:
input=,green:
menu=black:
menusel=white:
menuhot=red,:
menuhotsel=black,red:
dfocus=white,black:
dhotnormal=white,black:
dhotfocus=white,black:
executable=,black:
directory=white,black:
link=white,black:
device=white,black:
special=white,black:
core=,black:
stalelink=red,black:
editnormal=white,black

Do not put newlines between the color definitions! Write them as a single line! I only did it for readability.

Update: Starting from Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx you're advised to skip the menu and menusel definitions because the those will mess up menu colors.