x220 and (unrelatedly) Portable Keyboards

So I finally got a new machine. A lenovo x220 laptop. It's kind of a lightweight, but even with an i3 and only 4gb of ram, it easily doubles the specs of my netbook (RIP, battery). Speaking of which, I also got a 9-cell battery for the new box. The cost of this unit was much lower than usual because of a promotional code I stumbled upon. I haven't actually had time to take it for a spin, but the battery came about 20% charged and told me that this would be enough for 2:30 hours of operation. That. Is. Awesome.

The drive in it still has Windows on it so I didn't poke around much like I said. My plan is to toss an SSD in there and throw in Debian as usual[1]. That hard drive is going to be a pain in the ass though. It is a standard 2.5 inch SATA drive, but it's very slightly shorter than the OCZ units I have lying around. That leaves me three options

1. Go buy a new SSD for the laptop (plausible in a little while, but I'm sort of shopped out at the moment)
2. Mod the laptop to accept slightly taller drives (this kills the warranty, and the laptop is still covered so I don't want to fuck with it)
3. Mod one of my drives to fit a smaller space (this also kills the warranty, but my drives are long out of their warranty period, so I give precisely zero fucks)

Three is the obvious winner for the short term. I may still go get a new hard drive later; this unit supports SATA3, so I can get an extra little speed boost by shelling out. Sadly, it looks like SATA3 drives don't come smaller than 120GB, which means ~$200 or so. Incidentally, a SATA2 32GB drive is down to the $60 range these days, so if you're a Linux user that still has a 7200RPM, or even a 10k, you may want to pick an SSD up at these prices. The difference is noticeable.

Time Passes...

So that's done

Except that "mod" turned out to be a bit of an overstatement[2]. I literally just removed the case[3], braced it in the laptop drive bracket using some rubber stoppers, and secured the whole thing with some electrical tape. I'm not about to get fancy for an internal component; it just needs to work, and this does.

That's the old install of AMD64 Squeeze I already had on the drive, and it works mostly fine but I'll still need to re-install. The ethernet drivers in Squeeze don't support Intel's 82579LM; it's already been patched in Wheezy. There obviously aren't any plans to push new changes to the stable release, so I guess I'm moving up to testing. I don't anticipate any problems; unetbootin is running as we speak[4].

I have done a little bit of typing on it by this point; my intention was to finish this article with it, but the lack of network connectivity of any kind put a stop to that. I did notice that the keyboard was improperly set; the right side was ok, but the left side was actually vibrating with each keystroke. Undoing the keyboard screws on the back and re-setting it fixed that easily.

Installing Debian is pretty close to a non-event around here in terms of the attention it requires. Really, I've been thinking about prototyping some things. Firstly, the password-logger is proceeding apace, though I still don't have enough done to consider publishing. I'm at the stage where I can have it remember multiple passwords, cycle through them, and output them on a single button-press. Right now I'm playing around with a little 1x11 numeric LED display I picked up so that the unit will be able to display a label for each password, and I still want to put it together in such a way that I can add/change/delete passwords without having to recompile the thing.

In other news, you already know that my plans involved building a prototype of the chordite, but I've also been looking at other layouts and ideas for the same purposes. I'm only about half-way through building a chordite, but here are my preliminary thoughts about all the designs I've taken a look at[5].

Chordite

Pros:

• one-handed (that lets you use the other hand for balance, for example, in a public transit situation)
• data entry doesn't use fingertips (makes it easy to chord)
• standard configuration covers 84 keys (the default key mapping reference is in that zip file)
• simple construction (only 8 switches to wire up, and the rest can be built with a bit of cardboard and some wire coathanger)

Cons:

• chords entered in serial (so it doesn't seem like you could easily use Emacs keystrokes of the style C-x C-h, and it seems like this would kneecap your speed since you're doing two or three effective key-presses per keystroke)
• strapless (which may or may not be comfortable, but it does mean that you thumb needs to support the board rather than being available for its own keystrokes)

joestutes Wearable Keyboard

Pros:

• one-handed
• non-chording (each switch is one key; I'm assuming that this would be more accurate and faster than chording; it also seems like it would make it easier to memorize)
• provides "mouse" through thumb-operated joystick

Cons:

• emulates 40 keys total, so you need a reduced character set; this is not a coding keyboard
• requires high level of precision control from each finger (I'm actually not even sure if this is a human thing, or just my mutant hands, but I can only reliably do fine-grained independent control with my index and middle finger; the ring and pinky fingers, even on my main hand, can't really move on their own very well and almost certainly wouldn't be able to do the sort of multi-directional movement that this thing seems to need)
• construction involves wiring 40 separate switches and a joystick. That's not exactly simple.

Ergo Electronics Keyglove

Pros:

• tons of keys
• glove-based (you're not actually holding anything, so you can easily switch between typing and doing something else)
• one-handed

Cons:

• requires high-precision movements with all fingers (it works with some fairly densely packed contacts, and assumes you can hit them, with various levels of hand-contorting movements, with each finger).
• single keystrokes, so doing Emacs chords seems difficult if not impossible

Carsten Mehring Keyglove (first prototype)

Pros:

• tons of keys
• glove-based
• Emacs-style chord capability

Cons:

• two-handed (even though you can switch between things easily, you need both hands dedicated to typing with this one; not sure if it would work that way in practice)
• demo video translation is typeset set in Comic Sans (I'm still a designer, dammit)

Carsten Mehring Keyglove (second prototype)

Pros:

• glove-based
• one-handed

Cons:

• not entirely sure how the keystrokes are generated, and therefore how many can actually be generated (it looks like it doesn't do Emacs chords either)

Twiddler

Pros:

• one-handed
• strapped (so your thumb is used for modifier keys)
• provides "mouse" (mini joystick operated by thumb)
• thumb operates modifier keys (so Emacs-style chords are easy to hit)

Cons

• none that I can see, actually

Like I said, these are very preliminary thoughts. It's possible that actually using some is easier/more comfortable than I imagined based on the demo videos. A priori, it looks like the ideal is a strap-using, portable-joystick-style keyboard, or a two-handed glove model. Granted I've got different problems than the average user. Emacs use means I need to be able to chord multiple keys, and Tiling WM/keyboard reliance means I don't really want a pointing device most of the time.

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Footnotes

1 - [back] - The documentation tells me that I'll actually need to set up one piece of non-free software to run my wireless card, which is sad, but I don't really have the time or patience to go hunt down an atheros-based card this week.

2 - [back] - Which is why you don't see pictures.

3 - [back] - Which is not nearly as dangerous for the drive on an SSD as it is on a traditional platter drive.

4 - [back] - Those of you who already have a Debian machine set up can actually just apt-get install unetbootin

5 - [back] - Ideally, I'll actually put together one of each and take them for a test-drive, but I have no idea how long that will actually take me.