The other day I posted about how technology design is boring now, just a slab with a screen.

This morning I stumbled across #cyberdeck and #writedeck projects and they look amazing! Some are so sleek they could be commercial products, some are literally held together with electrical tape.

I even saw one with a beautiful hand-made wooden case, switches instead of buttons and an actual key to turn it on!

I'm not very engineering-minded so not sure I could do it myself, but it's nice to see people still care. Combine it with #cassettefuturism and you're onto a winner I reckon.

It's here!

Orthogonal keys are weird, but not that hard to adapt to. The biggest shift is going from top row to bottom, I'm sometimes a full key off. I remapped it slightly to remove two switches and get a 3-key wide space, but otherwise stock. There are two extra modifier keys to get at top row numbers, symbols, and f-keys. I expect I'll be at full speed within the week, which is surprising. This is no where near as bad as trying Dvorak ;-)

The only major pain was discovering an unpatched bug in the broadcom wifi driver shipping in RpiOS. Setting up a page to capture my tinkering. There is a lot of discussion on this Flickr thread: https://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart/discuss/72157721921183163/72157721922020629

#microjournal #writedeck