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On 01/07/2014 05:29 PM, Harry
Binswanger wrote:
A relative gave me a Rosewill 9000 which has a good, springy feel and is a little less expensive (and smaller) than the Das Keyboard. unfortunately, Rosewills are hard to locate at the moment -- sold out at most of the big vendors, as far as I can see. I am typing this, Harry, on a Das DASK3MKPROCLI from Amazon that arrived early this evening. here's the scoop for the curious: until the end of last week I had been looking in desultory fashion for an Adesso M135B to replace the one that had gone south, which is unusually low-priced for a clicky keyboard -- I had actually come across it quite by accident at a Staples a few years ago for something like 60 bucks -- I only later discovered that the secret to its solid feel was the MX Cherry switches. it seemed to me reasonably well-built, and if I could have found one on short notice, I might have bought another. the original reason for replacing it was the M key somehow lost its click -- the key would register when pressed, but without the feedback before recoil. for 2-3 weeks, it was a minor nuisance -- then last Friday I felt a twinge in my right elbow, a disturbing discovery, and I switched to the Lenovo netbook and went to work finding a replacement. the fruits of an hour and a half's research: although half a dozen hardware OEMs catering to gamers/custom systems produce MX Cherry Blue keyboards, finding one without extra geegaws on it (backlighting, trackball, exploding scoreboard) turned out to be difficult, and I couldn't do without one for more than a couple days. since I couldn't find anything else, I focused on Das -- although their site lists a handful of retailers, the only one with a Cherry Blue MX keyboard in stock was Amazon, naturally, $150 all told. (I wonder if the Apple-powered fashion of chiclet keyboards -- to my fingers they are an improvement on the weak-sprung cheap generic $20 keyboards I used to have to use when I was temping, but only just -- has something to do with the scarcity.) I like the feel of the Das, which not surprisingly is the same as the Adesso, and hopefully if I treat it a little more kindly it will last a little longer. this one is far from perfect: the labels on this model's keys are a miniscule, rather pretentious square font, which isn't particularly appealing -- though I don't often need them, I do sometimes need to see the labels on the function keys, which are a quarter of the size the letter labels, presumably to make room for the blue FN labels which correspond to laptop FN functions. slightly more annoying is the placement of the Windows key, which is where I am accustomed to finding the Alt key. I guess I could reprogram but for the nonce it's easier to reprogram my index fingers. congratulations on the Forbes gig, by the way -- I did some golf stuff for them a few years ago, they pay on time! -rafe |