This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,791 from Monday, 13 February 2023.
Today's show is entitled, My Hardware Problem Keyboards.
It is part of the series Hardware Upgrades.
It is the first show by new host Star Shiptocks and is about 24 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I'm always looking for new computer hardware.
This is about my keyboards.
Just a warning that this episode was recorded and traffic on a previous date, so you
will hear some background noise.
Thank you.
Good day.
My name is Star Shiptocks and this is my first episode for Hacker Public Radio.
I'm going to call this my keyboard problem.
I made a few more hardware problems episodes in the future, but there's ones about my
keyboards.
Now, this isn't a problem that I have at keyboards or my keyboards don't work.
I'm always searching for the bigger, better, faster, more fit to me keyboard.
It started a long time ago, growing up.
I was a child of the 80s and 90s grew up on IBM PS2 computers and had those nice
clicky model in keyboards, and that's what a keyboard to me should feel like.
So in trying to replicate this later, I went through lots of cheap keyboards, whatever
came with my computer at the time, whatever was on the laptop at the time, and nothing
ever quite felt right.
I went through Microsoft ergonomic computers, membrane, things like that, and as I said,
nothing ever felt quite right.
A few years ago, I started getting into the tech space on YouTube and watching many videos
and starting to learn a little bit that there's actually a lot of keyboards out there
that you can make yourself, you can buy, and there are just dozens and dozens of options
that you can choose from.
So I decided I was going to buy me a very nice keyboard.
So I started with a ducky brand, it was a ducky one, it was RGB, and it had the cherry
MX blues on it, and I actually really like this keyboard, but I made a mistake.
So in trying to force myself to touch type more, I got a 10 keyless version of the keyboard.
And this did suit my purpose for a while, it actually did force me to use the number key
rope a lot more, but I did a lot of bookwork, and a number keypad stuff before, and
I found that this was not the proper keyboard for me, all I loved the switches, I loved
the quality, feel of the keyboard, I needed that 10 keypad, and so I started looking
for another keyboard.
At the time, I didn't have a lot of money, so I think I picked up like a, I was an apex
steel keyboard, a full size keyboard with the number pad on it, and did this for a while.
But the switches just were not the same, they did not have those cherries, I don't know
what brand was on that keyboard, but I once again, it didn't feel quite right to me.
So I bought a Razer keyboard, my bought a Razer keyboard, white keyboard with green switches
on it, and tried that for a while.
These were closer to what I wanted, but still just not quite the same feel as those cherry
MX blues.
So I gave that one to my wife, and she still uses it today, although I'm thinking about building
her another keyboard sometime.
Also, I gave that apex keyboard to my daughter.
Now I had given her my duckie, keyboard the 10 keyless one, now the problem of giving a
keyboard to a kid is no matter what the quality it seems, these keyboards do not stand up
to spills, and so that keyboard, while the keys still worked, shorted out the RGB with
a spill, and only a few of the lights lit up, there's no way to control them anymore,
and being a bit OCD on things working properly, it just hip up me.
So I ended up one day down at MicroCenter, which was one of about three hours from me, and
we were building my daughter a new computer, so during the time we just grabbed a keyboard,
started being a good parent, is passing on your problems to your children, so now my daughter
is addicted to mechanical keyboards, she prefers a nice clicky blue switch, similar to what
I have had in the past.
So I bought her a cheap red dragon keyboard, I think it was about $40, it has Otom blue keys
on it, and while not my personal preference, I find them a bit harsh a bit stiff.
I, she likes that keyboard.
Now I also, in that time, bought me another keyboard, it was a 96% keyboard from KeyCron,
and this also could be wireless, it was Bluetooth, it could connect multiple devices,
I thought this was going to be great, and at the time I used a standing desk, but the
keyboard on my standing desk did not raise with the desk, so I would have two keyboards
messed up, and use one as my primary, and then I would use the keycron as a secondary.
However the keycron came with the gator on blue switches, and a different profile on them,
I think there it's an OEM profile, and the angle just did not seem to fit my hand right,
and I found the gator on blues to be a bit scratchy, they just didn't have the smooth feeling
that the Cherry MX blues had had before, so I just kind of kept trying to figure out what
I wanted, I would use it occasionally, but most of the time after getting rid of my standing
desk, it just sat in the closet as a secondary keyboard in case I had a reason to pull
it out.
So eventually I decided that I knew which brand I liked, I really liked quality of the
duckie keyboard, and so I decided I would buy one again, but I just noticed over time
that the blues were a little bit too heavy for what I liked the time, but I believe
a 55-newton meter pressure force for actuation, and so I was talking about the O'Tomu
blues, I heard not O'Tomu blues, the gator on blues that I cared for in the keycron,
and this was a soldered keyboard, so I did not have the time or the ability at the time
to just be soldered and re-soldered in new switches, so eventually I just got rid of
that keyboard, but deciding that, I decided I liked the duckie platform, their stuff was
solidly built, good, color control, not overly wild about RGB, I don't need any unicorn,
cornvometer, rainbows coming out, but something that I can make match, and overall theme
to a set up I think is very nice, so I picked up a duckie one too, and this was a full
size keyboard, it was a 180 keyboard, which there were four keys, extra, there's a calculator
key, mute, volume up, volume down, and I liked that layout, and I very much was really thinking
about getting cherry keys, but the cherries were unavailable at the time I was needing
to get this keyboard, or wanting to get this keyboard would be more accurate, so then I took
and looked through and kind of saw bunch of stuff, I looked through the different keys,
and I had heard of the scales, and they seemed to be reasonably good, they seemed to be the
same amount of key presses at the cherries at the time, think they're rated for 50 million,
which is pretty common now, with mechanical key switches, summer up to 100 million key presses
of lifetime, so I just decided I would take the leap and go for a kale box white key in
my cherry in my duckie keyboard, I received this keyboard, and these keys have a 40-n-meter
actuation force on the kale box white keys, this, it still had a very nice click, it was
very smooth, and it had a little lighter press than the cherry MX keys, and with the box
instead of just having the little cross connection, such as a cherry MX key has, which is
almost a standard in the industry for any mechanical key now, not your reason, then the kale
box white keys also have a little rim around the outside, now that cross is where the stem
goes, it has a male cross on the key, whereas the key cap will have a female cross on it,
and this is how they are connected together, so with the kale box white on the key, not
only does it have the male cross, but it has a little box around the outside edge, which
also helps to grip the key cap and also provides a stabilizing function for these keys and the
key caps. If you ever notice, you can kind of take a keyboard key and wiggle it back and forth
a little bit, and if you have the wider keys such as a 1.25-u key, which probably on the left
side of your keyboard, your control function, all, those keys are a 1.25-u key, your regular
letter keys, number keys, those are a 1-u-nit key, the space bar is usually a 6 or a 6.25-u-nit
key, and then your shifts can be two to two and a half-u-nit keys, so on some of those wider
keys such as the control key, you can kind of wiggle that, and if it's not a very good key,
the switch in your keyboard, you can kind of push on the edge and it'll press down, but not
actuate the key, so that's called wobble, so if that key wobbles a bunch, it can be an issue.
Well, that the box keys, you reduce a lot of that wobble, it holds that key
very rigidly many times, better than just a standards one, and so you've got more accuracy on
your key presses, so these box white, it feels very stable and pressing the keys,
it had a lighter-axuation force, and nice RGB, very solid frame to my ducky keyboard,
my ducky one two, nice USB-C connection, and this is now my favorite keyboard that is
incurring daily use. Now you'd think that would solve my keyboard issue, but of course no,
if you're on hacker public radio, you probably have a tendency to mess with anything and everything
that you get, so I decided I would go looking for new key caps, so I did, I found some
HyperX keys, they were known as a putting key cap, they had a green top, the clear letter or number
marking, symbol marking, and they were known as putting, so they were the top part was colored,
but the rest of it was an opaque white, so with an RGB keyboard, the lights and the colors and everything
it lit up these keys, very nicely kind of a neat opaque color look to them, and I enjoyed this
quite a bit for a long time, I then, but and so I have used that keyboard for several months,
if not a year or more now, but then I only have the one keyboard, and sometimes I need a backup
keyboard working on Raspberry Pi, if I need a graphical interface, I have an extra monitor, extra
power supplies, extra everything, except now I was down to one keyboard, now this should not
present a problem, but you know, he can never have too much of a good thing, right?
So this should not have presented a problem, but I decided I needed a backup keyboard,
now since this was a backup, I didn't need anything special, but I didn't want just a regular
membrane keyboard or go buy something stock off the shelf, and I was, I'm curious more and more
about mechanical keyboards building my own, what all it, it goes into that, so I decided I would find
a cheap keyboard that would, would allow me to customize some, so which brings me back to my
daughter's red dragon keyboard, now this one was simple, $40, and in messing around with my 3D
printer, I printed out her a creeper Minecraft escape key cap, and well, I put it on a keyboard,
and she liked that, you know, nice glow in the dark, PLA key, wasn't the greatest thing, but
you know, it lit up kind of neat with her keyboard, her keyboard was a backlit red, but only backlit red,
and one day my daughter came to me and said, hey, that key cap does not stay on very well,
I said okay, so I took and not thinking, I put a little bit of super glue in it, put it on there,
and walked away forgot about it, came back a few days and said, hey, how's that key working?
She says, it's stuck, went, what? She's like, yeah, it won't press, press anymore, so I went in,
and looked at it, and sure enough, it was stuck. So I tried to wait, grab a key cap, pull her,
wiggle it off, and what unmanounced to me, this was a hot swappable keyboard, so I went to
yank it off, and the whole key cap and the whole key popped out. Now, I was able to clean it up,
get the key moving again, pop it back in, no problem, and she had a nice stable Minecraft escape key
on her red dragon keyboard, and also in the meantime, a bunch of her lights had quit working,
and I didn't know why I figured, once again, she spelled on it, but when she drew
Buddha computer, I would see the whole thing flash on for a moment, and then when it loaded,
it would then go back to what it where it was, so I looked up on the internet and looked up
red dragon, LED black light no longer working, and it said, hit this key combination,
it's a reset, and it should reset your lighting settings, and sure enough, all of the red
backlights on her keyboard came back on. Now, this keyboard has been going for almost three years now,
and she has not managed to destroy this keyboard, so that told me that the red dragon
keyboard had some quality, despite being as cheap as it was, it had resisted a kid,
what's who spills and things like that, also a few of their keyboards are considered as water
resistant, so this was a brand that I could look into, and now I knew that they had hot swap
of both keyboards available. So I started researching, which brings me back to my backup keyboard,
and in looking into it, found what is known as a 75% keyboard, and red dragon had one,
it would have turned out to be on sale for about $45 one day, and it did have the hot swap
able switches. It is a keyboard that has no F keys, so it does not have the top row, but it does have
number keys and arrow keys in a compact form factor. So I decided I would try this keyboard,
even though I couldn't find one with the switches that I wanted, and so we ordered this, and I
received it and I tried it out, and I liked the form factor, and but it came with a Tom Lorette
keys, which were just slightly better to me than a membrane keyboard. There was no click to it,
you couldn't feel the actual point, keys felt sloppy, a lot of wiggle to them, everything like that.
But I had planned for this. This was going to be a mess around testbed for me. I took after about
a week and ordered a set of hot swapable kale box-wise, the same as my ducky keyboard,
and so they came, and I went through, and changed all those switches out, and they seemed to
snap in fine, but after a few days, a few of them kind of quit work. So I'm just using it for a few
days. I would pop those keys back out and found out some of the pins had bent over, had temporarily
made contact with the insertion point, but I had lost that connection. But it was easy enough to take
straighten out that connection, a little pin sticking out of the back of it, pop it back in,
and then it would function again. And I had extra keys. Fortunately, I didn't have to
didn't need any of them. So changed out all of those keys, key switches, and put the key caps back
on, and had a nice backup keyboard. It felt good. It's actually sounded quite nice,
and I decided, great. Now I want to put a different key cap in the stock that they had,
because it was a red and black configuration with a couple of white keys on there,
that I just didn't, I didn't mind the red and black. The white key is just kind of through off the
whole looking the keyboard and my personal opinion. So I took off all of the key caps once again,
and bought a set of clear black key caps from eBay, I believe, and it came as a massive set.
There was something like 160 to 170 keys in this. It came with extra control keys and alt keys
and page up, page down, just a whole bunch of extra keys, so that it could fit lots of
differing. Keyboards, lots of different formats. As kind of brings me back to the razor keyboard
that I had while the control menu and alt keys on the left were standardized. It has a
on the right side of the spacebar. It has a 1-unit key, that's the alt, and then 2,
1.25 unit keys, and then another single 1-u key. And they're the only ones that I have seen that
uses this configuration. So that created a problem on that keyboard. We had changed out the key
caps from my wife, but there were about five or six keys on that that a standard key cap replacement
set did not have. Whereas this clear black one does have options for all those keys.
At least clear blacks also were in ASA style key cap. There's several different ones, and
maybe I'll talk about those later. I haven't used very many of them. Looks like I've now used
OEM, MX, and ASA style key caps, but this actually was a pretty good feel to me. Once I
took and replaced on my red dragging keyboard, I used these clear black ones, and they were
I really liked the feel of them. But without having the function keys and the things like that,
I decided I didn't want that. If you my daily driver, I could just stay the back of keyboard.
But I liked these clear black ASA keys so much that well, all of the HyperX putting key caps
came off of my Duckie keyboard on went good clear black ones, and I put the originals back on the
red dragging keyboard. So currently I am using my Duckie 1-2 with
kale box white switches, and ASA clear black key caps. My wife is using a razor keyboard
and with razor green switches, which are similar to a cherry MX blue, and she has a black
crystal key caps on hers, so you can actually see the LEDs a little more, and backlights.
My daughter is currently using a red dragon with O'Donnell blue keys and red backlight and one
custom Minecraft. As you can see, I have a hardware problem, a keyboard problem. I'm always looking
at keyboards and seeing new stuff. So I'm hoping this may help others to think about recording
an HPR episode and reach out and talk about what hardware do you have? What things are you into
that maybe you don't really think about? So hopefully this will make it to you someday,
and this is my first episode of Hacker Public Radio. Thank you, everyone have a good day.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR in this night like yourself,
if you ever thought of a coin podcast, click on our contributally to find out how easy it means.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com,
the internet archive and our synced.net. On the satellite stages,
today's show is released on our creative comments,
attribution for going to international license.