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.
"
I'd really like to see a keyboard with a few programmable LEDs, or even better, a LCD screen. It'd be cool to have the memory/CPU use or something like that there.
But all I see instead is keyboards with annoying power buttons I tend to press in the least inconvenient moment. I just don't get it, what's the point of having it there? As if I needed to turn the computer on and off every 5 minutes.
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.
this kit would work best with apple keyboards - they are translucent plastic and would let you discern the key legend in the dark. on a regular keyboard it just lights the gutters between the keys.
But the PB keyboard backlighting illuminates each letter on the surface of the key, not just the space between/around the keys.... in a low-light situation, _that's_ the real benefit... seeing which key you're about ot press, not just seeing a field of silhouetted key blanks.
Don't hit me with that chain again.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:fzTelghCGyoC: www.neontrim.com/keyboard.html+Computer+Keyboard+L ight+Kits!&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8
both the cache and the link in the article appear to be extremely slow
There are 5 comments up as I post this, and the site is already being slashdotted -- it's horridly slow. Last night I noticed on the Guerilla News Network story that the poster had gone out and asked the site admins if he/she could link to them prior to submitting it to the editors.
It is relatively well-understood that /. cannot mirror sites, for a large number of reasons. Moreover, the admins here are taxed (well, maybe...) as is, and aren't willing to fire off emails asking permission to post a link to someone's site every time they get a story that ends up on the frontpage. Nor should they have to.
Perhaps, though, we as posters could be mature and responsible? Asking for permission before DOS'ing someone's site via a link here would at the least be polite.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
The server seems dead, but here is a mirror, be nice to it. http://www.moderngeek.com/keyboardlights/ This does not compare the the powerbook lighting at ALL, it looks cheap :p The powerbook lights up the lettes on the keys, and this just lights up behind the keys.
Close up
Neon
Keyboard
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Ok, take it easy on me here...
pic1
pic2
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
fully illuminated keyboard, $99
Auravision EluminX Illuminated Keyboard
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I think that the real rwason to envy anything that apple sells is the graphics support. If you look at ANY other laptops on the market, do they have decent graphics? NO. The powerbook has a slightly dulled GeForce 4 w/ 64MB VRAM. That's better than the card on any desktop from a major PC retailer for under $1000. Also, if you ever look at the specs for a cheap ($700 or less) brand name PC, they have their graphics built into the motherboard. Yet they still claim that their P4 will make games dreamy and your downloads go faster. It's disgusting.
Help I'm a rock.
First, the site is already slashdotted...
However, there were a few convenient mirror images and a similar product from thinkgeek.
Honestly though, isn't this just something to take to a LAN party or something; that is, just another way to mod your PC. The light from the monitor (at least CRTs) is enought to illuminate the keys for the most part. And if you are spending enough time with the computer that you are typing in the dark, you shouldn't have to look at the keyboard much anyway, right? This is cool-looking, but useless aside from wow-factor. Especially if you don't already have translucent keys, in which case only the between-keys area is lit anyway.
Real Geeks can type in the dark anyway, this is just another add on for your thirty one thousand one hundred and thirty seven machine.
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
yeesh, why would I want to backlight all the gunk that gets trapped in my keybord over all the years? Why don't we just make it a blacklight so any mystery stains (like, you know, coffee) can glow?
And why manufacture a mod kit, why not just build a keyboard?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
first off these look the best on a black keyboard..
BUT, if you are the type to leave your computer on all the time I would paas on it.. these "light wires" have a very VERY short lifespan. they will start to get dark-spots and even lose sections of the "wire" to darkness..
I have used lots of this stuff, and seen even more of it in poser cars that after only 100 hours of on time they start looking like crap. In this use as indirect lighting I would gather that the darkspots and other "failure" modes of the wire will not be as bothersome.. but when a customer comes back 3 weeks later with their trick case bitching that the light wires you routed a nice slot around the edges for and looked Schweet when they pickked it up look like hell.... you stop reccomending a product..
I personally reccomend staying away from this light wires based products until someone starts manufacturing something that has a much better lifespan.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...but all the crap, gook, bread grumps, cat hairs, and all the other assorted nastiness that tends to collect there. Eww, thanks but no thanks.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Oh, hooray! Now that I can illuminate the gutters between my keys, I (as well as my friends and family) can see with perfect clarity all the dust and hair that builds up in there. How delightful!
Although I admit the extra five words probably came from the Pepsi can I glued to my tower's exhaust port.
When I finally save up enough box tops to get a "Type-R" monitor sticker and a genuine copy of a fake Recaro executive chair I'll be the fastest damned typist in the world.
You'll probably waste your time doing shit like *practicing.*
Hoser.
KFG
If you really want to improve your typing speed, spend a lot of time in IRC. I used to think IRC was a timesink. Wrong. It improved my typing speed to the point where I now have my first decent job since the end of the Dot-Bomb era.
Now, if I could just fit that spoiler on my Model MII I might just crack the 60wpm barrier. Oh yeah...gotta paint it bright yellow and put those Kanji stickers all over them. Heh heh heh...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
--been thinking about this. You know how some places when they are under a drought water restriction, they have odd/even days for watering? People with odd numbered addresses on one day, even the next, and so on. Keeps the water supply from getting slashdotted.
What would be nice is an honor system "when to click over to a hot new link" regimen.
Something like this, open for review and tweaking. You look at when the story was posted, note the time. Wait to the next full quarter hour before the onslaught begins. That's your start point. Here's how it gets divvied up. Now you take your real name-you only have to do this once, then remember the number-you do a normal letter/number substitution, first letter of first name, first letter of last name, transpose to the correct numbers, add them together, add again if double digits, until you have a single digit. Just a normal numerology deal there with the alphabet, 1 -26 numbers. That final added together digit is your permanent static name number, that you use with the "time" number to click over. Every 5 minute increment from the article post time start point full quarter hour, counts as a digit starting with 1, etc. When your static name number matches your honor system time-digit number for the article, then it's cool for you to click over.
This way it gets spread out better, instead of all at once when the article is posted. Voluntary non-anarchy, being polite to the server, and maybe everyone can actually get to the link without it crashing the server.