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1000-key Emoji Keyboard Is As Crazy As It Sounds
hypnosec writes: A YouTuber named Tom Scott has built a 1,000-key keyboard with each key representing an emoji! Scott made the emoji keyboard using 14 keyboards and over 1,000 individually placed stickers. While he himself admits that it is one of the craziest things he has built, the work he has put in does warrant appreciation. On the keyboard are individually placed emojis for food items, animals, plants, transport, national flags, and time among others.
Why? What's there to appreciate? A tremendous waste of time and effort? :)
I appreciate all the free time he has compared to myself.
alternate link
http://kotaku.com/guy-builds-c...
Tom's videos on CS subjects are really good too. Check his youtube channel!
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
I feel crackberry beating a path to his door.
Requiem for the American Dream
It's....a gigantic keyboard. For...communicating entirely in emoticons....? I think?
(It's slashdotted, so can't RTFA, but I feel like I'm too old to get this anyway)
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Agreed. At first when I read the title I was thinking Asian languages. But what in the world is this doing on slashdot? A dozen keyboards on a table all hooked up to a laptop, and all to print variations of :) and :( ...
Aren't many emoji combinations or modifications of other emoji? I seem to recall this was done (for among other reasons) to accommodate different skin colors and such?
This was the best I could find after a bunch of googling:
http://www.unicode.org/reports...
Please help metamoderate.
By the time you find the right emoji, you already forgot what you wanted to .... uhm ....
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Why not just assign 2 emojis per key, and use Shift/Caps Lock to toggle between the sets? He could have used 1/2 the hardware and 1/2 the space.
Agreed, what a waste of time.. He created something that has no practical purpose..outside of his own amusement .
That's what I was thinking.
Western languages with alphabets around the common 26-letter model construct concepts by grouping letters into words and then words into sentences. Eastern languages with logograms like Hanzi or Kanji can have their logograms 'built' as they can be reduced to a combination of particular strokes that when put together create a specific meaning, so in effect, keyboards for Eastern logograms can be assembled through keystrokes in a fashion similarly to how they're drawn through brush strokes.
This Emoji keyboard is silly, especially as a form of logogram, Emojis only contain so many varieties of each type of characteristic. That's why we used to type them on our keyboards using ASCII or extended ASCII, because we could represent the expression without having to have a specific icon for it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't see a reason for any of them. I didn't even see a reason for the two faces featured in 256-character code-page 437 ASCII. The only times I've ever seen them used as display characters it's been gratuitous and unnecessary, like the interface designer threw them in because they happened to be in the code page, not because they contributed anything.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Wouldn't it be easier to have a touch pad and toggle through all the different emoji sets???
Karma: Bad
The faces on the standard ASCII table serve a very important purpose: to let you know that your C/C++ code is outputting garbage, and you need to check your pointers.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
Direct youtube link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Because that's what you were looking for anyway.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Which one? U+1F404 or U+1F42E?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Seriously, all those emoji glyphs and not a single crudely-drawn penis.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Why? What's there to appreciate? A tremendous waste of time and effort? :)
Why? See, right there you used an emoticon. It took you two whole keystrokes.
Tom could have typed it with one!
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Idiocracy predicts the future again...
You can't handle the truth.
Seems redundant. I am not exempting myself during my teenage years from this perspective either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A visual demonstration of the sillyness and pointlessness of emoji.
I've never used one. Why would I? I have words and, on occasion, an old-fashioned ascii smiley :>
(Why the >? Look at the name. That's why.)
I suspect that the faces were chosen because they were already there, not created specifically for that purpose.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not nearly xenophobic enough; please hand back your white hood.
Requiem for the American Dream
Use facial recognition to map current facial expression to emoji :-)
love is just extroverted narcissism
He was so preoccupied with whether or not he could that he didn't stop to think if he should.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Looks like it's just a bunch of non-modified keyboards (except for adding stickers) taking up X times a usual workspace. From the description it sounded like there was more to it. Maybe there's more info in the slashdotted and unreadable link, but overall seems like it's =[.
I was thinking he may have actually hacked together a bunch of 104 keys to create a giant 1000 key keyboard. This is boring. It's 14 keyboards plugged into a USB hub, some "fancy software", and key mapping.
Well, it looks like he didn't even really make a keyboard, he just took some existing ones, put emoji stickers on them, and then remapped their buttons to emojis through whatever means. I thought it would have been something like this.
It's a BOMB!
But it would have taken him ten minutes to find the key.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
If it hadn't been for those two characters, playing Rogue would have been a lot different.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Which is true, if you're limiting yourself to Western European languages. If you limit yourself to English, you can get rid of silly accented characters too.
The reason for the Emoji entering our lives really stems from Apple trying to be universal. The history of Emoji is that it comes from Japan, as Japanese carriers sought to differentiate themselves by adding little pictograms. Of course, Apple had to bring their iPhone to Japan, which mean Apple needed to support Emoji as well (and for a little while, the Emoji keyboard was Japan-only)
Emoji really entered our space when it was discovered that we can't represent Japanese text with Emoji in Unicode. It was not possible to convert because Unicode was lacking the Emoji codepoints to which you could convert to.
Which is why Unicode added a pile of Emoji - because the goal of Unicode is to be able to universally represent text - and Emoji was text that couldn't be converted to or from Unicode.
Or that you catted a binary file.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
CTRL+ALT+WIN/CMD+SHIFT gives 16 chord combinations for each letter key. So you really could.
hahaha, exactly!
Bah! A true hacker would have done it using a chorded keyboard!
...that's achieved through efficient design. This is not efficient design. You're confusing the UI's of Unix with DOS.
Dealing with n+1 keyboards is hardly efficient. Once you've created something suitably flexible for 2015, then such a
a single suitable programmable keyboard could have the most often used emoji on the "default page" ONE keyboard. Much better than mucking around with n+1 them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
:-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I would have been more impressed if he had instead of used stickers, had programmed the emoji to be displayed on the key itself using a programmable keyboard.
The problem is that emojis are now purely grahics ... and generally things people expect you're going to download to your phone.
So when someone wants to have "Christmas tree, Christmas tree, Budweiser, Pizza, rabid weasel, rabid weasel, rabid weasel" ... the expectation is you've downloaded these from somewhere, and if you send this crap to your friends, they'll also download it.
It now has nothing to do with the smileys it started from, and has turned into something which seems quite different.
If someone texts me with a bunch of random emojis, I'm going to get blanks, because I don't give a crap enough to download all of your stupid little emojis.
I'm afraid I simply don't see the point of them other than appealing to a bunch of teenagers who think they're cute.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Linux people don't measure their productivity by "clicks", they measure by real productivity. How long does it take me to perform X task on Y computers, or how fast can I automate X task for Y computers. You Windows xenophobes just can't comprehend doing very much without your mouse.
I get it, and fully understand that we are different. You like to open Explorer and click through menus and objects until you find what you want. Good for you! I prefer to type it. In *nix my method is always faster than the GUI. Windows made working with CLI difficult intentionally, so in Windows you will almost always work faster in the GUI.
Now to your asinine statement above, they two are not even close to related. Imagine having to open character map and search through 1,000 little icons to find what you need. That is this 1,000 key keyboard. Whereas normally you and I would use the same keyboard and have the same ease in finding things due to familiarity and consistency.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Uh, people that want only around a hundred keys to have to choose from in order to type quickly?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The faces on the standard ASCII table serve a very important purpose: to let you know that your C/C++ code is outputting garbage, and you need to check your pointers.
And indicate where your dwarves are...
Hey it's been slashdotted! That hasn't happened in years! Congratz guys!
Is there a spacebar-sized key for the poop emoji? My daughter uses that one the most, by far.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Does it have the 'Any' key ?
Brings new meaning to the term 'hunt and peck'.
Sorry I can't stop. Where's the stop key ?
You need to stop discussing Microsoft software!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
But it would have taken him ten minutes to find the key.
Unless he remapped it to the 1000-key Dvorak Emoji layout.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I would suggest the number of views his YouTube video will get will make this well worth it. And good for him.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
You meant of priggery, moron!
Nah, just kidding, it amused me to prove your point (which I agree with).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Cut him some slack, will you?
It is obvious that Tom did this pretty much useless hack to amuse himself and, maybe, to hint at the total waste of resources the emoji concept leads to.
Tom is a really nice and interesting guy, he doesn't deserve the bleating his kludge produced here, on /.
Pfft... Back in my day we had Zork and didn't even have lower case letters. Hell, some of us even loaded our games off of cassette tapes.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
What I use every day is nowhere near as extreme, but it is conceptually similar. Basically I took a Cherry point-of-sale programmable keyboard and physically removed five of the eight rows of keys, then glued it to the back end of another, stock POS keyboard. I have changed the key labels for ones with a bit more useful color-coding, and swapped the positions of Escape and `~, but otherwise this setup has been stable for months now, after several months of daily-to-weekly refactoring.
To get tons of usable symbols, I have mapped four to each key on the "backplane" part. Lower left is unshifted, upper left is shifted, lower right is Ctrl+key, and upper right is Alt+key. I also have less commonly used symbols defined in a large AutoHotkey script of my own creation. (I know Windows is unpopular around here, but it's what I use, and AHK is the right tool for this job.) I can -- and frequently do -- type accented characters or ones resembling composite characters via hotstrings, as well as Unicode symbols. If you want to know what's in my list, why not go directly to the source and look? Anyone is welcome to modify and redistribute as they see fit, provided you don't try to do something malicious and blame it on me.
The macro keys are defined on a per-application basis, but labeled with their functions in GVOX Encore, since that is by far the most complex usage I put them to. Even the blue Ctrl+letter keys are occasionally "stolen" for specific purposes, if that key combination has no effect in a given app ordinarily. These assignments are not in the script linked above.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
When I read the title I thought it was going to be a 1000 character emoji. What a bummer.
They just added one more emoji, the keyboard is now obsolete...
Really? The "@" wasn't good enough?
I am somewhat impressed that at least one moderator was apparently able to pick up on this joke without any hints. Although I suppose it's also possible that the joke wasn't really that funny.
I probably could have made it a little less esoteric by explicitly linking to U+1F404 and U+1F42E, but in all honesty, that didn't occur to me at the time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...because I don't give a crap enough to download all of your stupid little emojis.
Emoji's are part of Unicode/UTF-8. They work like any other character, like the ones you're reading now. When I enter "N", you may see it in Times New Roman, Arial, or whatever you have your fonts set to, so it might not look the same as what I see, but it's still a capitalized 14th letter of the english alphabet. Similarly, when someone sends you a smiling cat emoji, it's just a character code, and your system/font may or may not display it the same as their system, or may not display it at all.
Long story short, people aren't sending you pictures, and you're not downloading pictures**.
** exception to this rule is the "stickers" feature in Google Hangouts and similar stuff. Those are pictures, not emoji, though the files themselves are not sent whenever you send them (they use something similar to & to send them).
Hey, I'm not looking to buy such a keyboard any time soon, and I agree, he probably wasted his time. But it was his time to waste.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Which is true, if you're limiting yourself to Western European languages.
I limit myself to languages I can speak so, yeah, I'm fairly limiting myself by only speaking the one I guess.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Sorry. Can hear you over the deafening roar of Internet tutting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
EXACTLY what I was thinking. It still would have been pretty useless, but at least it would have been something. He didn't even the keyboards out of their plastic shells to put into one big shell... they're just sitting on a table! WTF. And he "programmed" something so they'd all work? Bullshit. He configured the keyboard remapping. That's not programming, it's configuring a program.
I was actually hoping it'd show how to make a custom keyboard layout - I could probably find a use for a small one (maybe a row of keys to put on the front side of my desk, which is above my keyboard tray, so I can reach up with a finger and poke some volume/media/etc type of keys)
I get it that the geek dislikes the alleged "inefficiency:' of languages that are inherently and compellingly pictographic. But his objections to the use of the humble emoji to enliven conversations over what can still be very pricey low bandwidth connections makes no sense.
The rebus is four centuries old in the western world; typographic art and the emoticon as old the printing press. When Unicode opens the door to greater fun and play in the use of language and pictures, I am all for it.
I think this is cool, but the who created this should use his smartness to event things that actually gives real value to people's lives...
if you get super dexterous with them fingers, you have 2 of each (at least my keyboard reports left and right variants of ctrl/alt/shift, and you have the windows 'super key' and the menu 'super key' that are reported as Super_L and Super_R). That's 256 Combinations per key not flagged as a modifier.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Oh, come on - it is just a bit of fun, of course it is silly. They guy isn't suggesting it was anything else. And in the process of making it all work, he has probably learned a lot of useful stuff, such as developing an idea, persisting with a project that was probably quite tedious at times, not to mention having to understand how keyboards work and how their data are transmitted and processed at the receiving end. There is a lot of this project that I find positive; don't be such a wet blanket.
As for 'Eastern languages' - what is normally called CJK (China, Japan and Korea) character sets: they are all input into computers using input methods. Off the top of my head, I can only recall one that I think is derived from strokes, plus a small number of handwriting recognition systems; the rest are based on transcription into ASCII. Popular input methods systems on the Linux desktop are SCIM, XIM and fcitx; have a look at them if you're interested.
Hey, I'm not looking to buy such a keyboard any time soon, and I agree, he probably wasted his time. But it was his time to waste.
Obviouly, but that doesn't mean slashdot has to waste our time on it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Christmas tree, Christmas tree, Budweiser, Pizza, rabid weasel, rabid weasel, rabid weasel
Sounds like the call sign of a Special Forces team on acid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It only takes 16 for emoji. 256 modifier combinations is still not quite enough for all the characters defined in Unicode 1.0.1
Is that the one that puts the five most commonly used emojis in the home row under one hand? :-) :-( :-P ;-) >:(