Yes, those keys used to say "N" and "M" on them. Wearing the paint off your keycaps? That's for amateurs. Not only do I wear the paint off, I inadvertently carve scars into the plastic. But it's the left "Alt" key that deserves special notice:
It is nearly worn through. That's just how meta I am, man.
Apparently you type with steak knives and brillo pads?
Now I'm curious to see what your init.el looks like.
Good Lord! If anyone can destroy an IBM Model M keyboard it looks like it could very well be you (along those lines, if you do ever do consider an IBM Model M keyboard, the keycaps are replacable, but I do realize that keyboards can be a religious issue).
Flat rectangular keyboards are dead to me.
Yeah, it's flat and circular, or nothing at all.
They truly can be--I have a large supply of MS Natural Keyboard Pros. The original kind.
I've been nursing my MS Natural along since 1996. I cringe at the thought of replacing it. It's the only MS product I've ever liked (as opposed to "tolerated").
Yes, but you don't get eight years out of a MS Natural. Well, maybe YOU do. I don't. I've used a series of them for doing Closed Captioning, and at best, I think I've managed to get three years out of one. One day, they just die. I've long been envious of JWZ's fancy keyboard setup, but I can't justify spending $600 for a keyboard, if I could even find that keyboard. No wonder the ALT is worn down to a nub.
I was fortunate enough to grab a bunch at like $20/piece. I think they were salvages from the first dot-com fallout but most were new. I should hang out outside Yahoo all this year and wait to loot their corpse.
If you haven't tried out the MS "Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000" you should. I had a thing for the original Natural Pro as well, and once mine died I tolerated a couple of the other ones in the meantime, but the current-model 4000 truly follows it its footsteps. The build quality is solid, the layout is pretty much the same as the original Pro (the standard 101 keys are all in the same - right - spots, finally), and all of the annoyances I personally had with the other models are gone. It's definitely the best one they've made since the original.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
They're not as invulnerable as people like to spaz on about. I've destroyed two - one with spillage (I think - the membrane inside looked all scorched and was damp), the other just kind of got crazy and sent the wrong letters or too many of the right letters.
They aren't waterproof, despite claims. There's a plastic subhousing between the keycaps and the keyboard circuitry with upturned ridges that fit within the caps when they're depressed. It keeps splashes of liquid off the circuit board.
A full-on dousing is going to get water into the electronics and you are never going to get that shit out. The plastic subhousing is now allied with the enemy because you can't get air between it and the damp circuit board. You can disassemble the keyboard if you try and have the right tools and the time to pop off each freaking keycap. Meanwhile everybody with old-school Apple Extended II or Dell QuietKey boards are laughing at you because when those get wet, you just hang them by a cord to let the water run out and air dry for a couple days.
Also the membranes themselves are exactly as flimsy as any other keyboard's. When I destroyed the first one I totally disassembled it and tried to put it back together for novelty value. The membrane was just fried.
I have a PCKeyboards one now and meh. The action doesn't feel as nice as my old one, and the 8 key types double most of the time. Pretty lame.
Ahhh...my favorite keyboard, period. Nothing is more satisfying than the metallic "clack" of an XT keyboard. As far as I'm concerned typing at 75+ wpm should send pets and small children running with their hands over their ears. Nothing else is nearly as satisfying.
*sends a care package of a angle grinder with a carbide disc to help you trim those nails*
You have goblin nails. I am not surprised by the scratches.
what do your fingers look like?
niiiiice.
Are you a xenomorph? Do come out at night mostly... mostly?
Fun Fact: JWZ has talons.
What is that thing at the lower left of the second picture?
A special key that lets him launch this?
It's another metakey, because Emacs consumes metakeys like Vim emits beeps.
I do the same thing. My 'A' and 'S' are worn off and starting to groove, and around 40% of the 'N' and 70% of the 'M' remain. And that's a keyboard I've had for around four years.
Must be too much calcium, or something.
>But it's the left "Alt" key that deserves special notice:
>It is nearly worn through. That's just how meta I am, man.
At first glance, I thought it was melted.
But that'd take a whole other typing talent. And possibly supernatural powers.
I think you have some acidic sweat or something in addition to your demon claws... you didn't even mention the neck of your leather jacket dissolving.
So you're the one typing NOM NOM ... everywhere!
You could try swapping between using emacs and vi every three years. It would probably double the lifetime of your keyboard - your HJKL keys look pretty fresh still.
Or ... maybe not.
How about cutting your nails periodically?
You know, what you oughta do...
You should work on retracting your claws before you type. I realize the idiot content of the internet makes this difficult.
My goblin nail/talons don't actually come in contact with the keys, hence the lack of grooves on my keys. Looks like your pinkie just slides right off that alt key but it's damn impressive to have such evidence.
I don't think it's a failfield that half-kills a keyboard in 8 years though, that's likely way over the design spec.
the hatterThis happens to me too!!! i thought i was the only freak that melted and killed keys... i particularly feel sorry for mr A key... followed by S....
one keyboard was so bad if you couldn't touch type.. don't bother using my keyboard!
I'm a pretty fierce keyboard hammerer on a daily basis but I don't think I've ever worn down a key like that, though I have occasionally faded a letter or two.
The D key on my MacBook has a little dent in it. It's no where near the size of the gashes on your M and N, but the MacBook is also less than a year old.
My hands dissolve the things I touch regularly, from the silver on my flute to the "leatherette" on my steering wheel.
My Macbook's keyboard has now acquired a nice shiny look to all the buttons, and that's from a 6 month old keyboard unit (the palm rest on the old one cracked, stupid cheap plastic - "I dunno what's wrong with them" said the 'Genius' in the Apple Store!).
My Model M is quite old and I'm only just managing to wear the spacebar down.
A lot of the keyboards where I work are knackered, but that's because I work in a school and children cannot be trusted with anything nice.
Yeah, but the Apple keyboards are truly hideous things. I have an OEM PC keyboard that I'm still using after a decade that's perfectly fine---not even worn keycaps---and yet my MacBook Pro has a lovely dent eroded into the space bar and surrounding case after just a year.
I tried to scan your QR code. It didn't work.
ah, I bet LJ have mangled it too much. It seems to work OK on my T-Mobile G1 though.
Can't remember what's in it, I think it's my website URL :)
Extra-acidic sweat genegraft?
Maybe he's actually a Changer.
Looks like some of my past space bars, heh. Cracked countless of them, and my present work on is worn smooth to a polished, mirror shine by millions of strokes of my thumb.
That usually happens to my keyboards after about 2 years. Most people complain when they visit that all the letters are missing but then I remind them that if they cannot even use a keyboard without toe tapping then they don't need to touch my computer. See it as an added bonus.
'M' and 'N' are usually the first keys to go.
OMG. CUT YOUR NAILS ALREADY.
i demand pix of your super and hyper keys
with what part of your appendage(s) do you press that left alt? i am trying to visualize the usage pattern that leads to that and i'm coming up blank.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
I'm convinced one of my colleagues hasn't actually typed anything in years, aside from control characters and left parens.
I'm pretty sure that making everybody like that is part of the Visual Studio roadmap.
It's not just keyboards and other machinery. It's software too. I've been watching you lose the battle against our turing overlords (lispms -> unix -> linux) for almost 2 decades.
Face it guys, computers suck. VMS sucks. Unix sucks. MS-DOS sucks. The whole thing, they all suck. Not only that but they're going to kill us all. --something you said on the bbdb list in the early 90s.
He knows.
That particular paragraph is painfully, painfully true.
Keep an eye out for Sylar.
I used to have a Samsung keyboard - I managed to wear a hole into its space bar in a little over a year. Right shift was also rather worn.
Five months into using this laptop, the labels on the keys have started to come off :/