Slashdot Mirror
DIY Ambient Light Keyboard Kit
An anonymous reader writes "
Do you envy new Apple 17" PowerBook keyboard?
Here's keyboard light
kits for all most any keyboard no matter which OS you are using. There's
NINE choice of colors (Light Blue, Deep Blue, Hot Pink, Yellow, White, Purple,
Neon Green, Lime Green, and Red) available but unfortunately not coming with
light sensor.
"
How long before we can have multicoloured ones? And then, how long before someone comes up with a cool hack to make the lights flash!
Lucky its not microsoft made, or you'd see patches coming out from day one to prevent script kiddies from taking over the control of the lights and annoying you senseless.
Pretty soon we'll have a story about some guy who put a VTEC sticker on his keyboard and replaced the cable with a thicker one, and claims it increased his typing speed by 30 wpm...
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
There are so many new Slashdot stories featuring case mod kits and the like. These are filed under the 'hardware' subject which sometimes contains actual legitimate, interesting stories about hardware, as opposed to stories about glowing things which crack babies attach to their hardware in order to make it glow.
Apple introduces a somewhat practical keyboard which illuminates when dark, so that the symbols on the keys are readily visible. This is nice, and seems like a useful feature.
The case mod subject/response here is a type of glow strands to be routed between the keyboard keys so that the spaces between them light up, which is useful if you have no tactile sensation of touch in your fingers and therefore don't know where the keys are. If you do know where the keys are, but are just looking for the key symbols, you're out of luck because PC keyboard keys are opague and don't benefit in any practical, functional manner from this mode of illumination.
Therefore, IT IS A WASTE OF TIME, equivalent in absurdity to cargo cults fabricating mock stick and canvas airplanes. "Almost like a Macintosh!" - when you were a kid, did you also fasten cardboard cards with clothespins to the spokes of your bicycle in order to make it sound like a moped?
Couldn't there be a separate subject for case mods? That way I could filter this stuff right out. I propose the icon representing the subject should be a baboon's bright red arse, the color of which also serves no functional purpose but nevertheless appears to attract other baboons.
Anyone remember Apricots from the 80's ? They had an alphanumeric lcd with programmable function keys under it, neat idea, no idea why it didn't catch on.
Because the keyboards weighed 156 pounds each, and after a few hours of use the surface temperature approached the boiling point.
Bit of a showstopper, that.
I write in my journal