Cases and keyboards

View 718 Monday, March 26, 2012

We are working on the new Sandy Bridge machine. I have a huge pile of components from Thermaltake, including a power supply that Eric says would power a village, and the most spectacular case I have ever seen. It will all be in the column.

There’s also a gamer’s keyboard. It has mechanical keys, and they feel great, but it also has the compact layout that, I guess, killer gamers prefer: that layout is too small for me. I love the key feel, but I want the keys further apart; but then my goal is not to be a gaming challenger. This keyboard is for killers, with its high polling race, and I suppose gamers like keyboards with a more compact layout. I’m impressed with this Ttesports MEKA by Thermaltake, but it won’t be the keyboard that replaced my wonderful old Ortek.

I’ve been making do on most of my systems with Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboards, and I do like them, but the keys don’t feel right compared to my wonderful old Ortek. I sure wish I had bought half a dozen of these old keyboards when they were available, but as time goes on machines are more and more demanding USB keyboards, which of course the Ortek wasn’t.

I have a ton of mail on this subject and I am sure I will get more, but I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about the keyboard situation.

What I need is a full sized keyboard, not curved – I thought I liked curved but I seem to be able to type faster with straight lines – and clicky. I like having programmable keys. And I want a full sized layout.

Construction of the new machine continues. We’re using the Thermaltake case. It’s costly – but I already wish I had had that available when we built Emily, the Intel Extreme system that this new one will replace. I am fond of Antec cases, and they have been standard at Chaos Manor for years, but the model we chose for Emily turns out to have been an experimental design that just didn’t work. It attempted to do what the Thermaltake has done – make it very easy to maintain and upgrade hardware on a high end system. Full writeup coming, but I would have paid for this Thermaltake case when we were building Emily had I But Known. It is really designed to make life easier for those who have to update and maintain high end systems. So far we have not got the system done so I can’t recommend it yet, but I love the design. The Thermaltake is so fancy in presentation that you at first don’t appreciate the design features which make it easy to get at the components and change them without having to use tools and pull the system out of its installation. And the internal cable routings and such are very nice. More when we finish it but my first impressions are highly favorable, and while the cost is high, anyone who has to maintain high end systems will realize that it’s worth money to save time and frustration – or so I have learned trying to keep Emily up to snuff.

Again more later when we have got the new system running, but as Eric just noted, it’s a bit like building a sports car and finding out that they’ve really worked on making the maintenance easy.

We have had a brushup caused by a bad DVD blank disk (a generic – don’t use them!) rendering Emily unusable then requiring a restart from power down, and of course the horrible case – again you can’t buy one of that design, it was a temporary and it seemed pretty good when we installed it, but it uses a goofy hinge front system that breaks easily – anyway the horrid case cost an hour of mucking about getting Emily running again so we could burn a Windows 8 disk. Finally all is well.

The Florida Zimmerman/Martin case continues to take up time and energy, but it is clear enough to me that there are unresolved – perhaps unresolvable – ambiguities, and we aren’t going to settle it on general principles. We have a conflict of rights situation, and the details matter. Martin had every right to walk through the neighborhood. Zimmerman acted a bit like a snoop but apparently didn’t threaten Martin; if there was any interaction it’s not reported. And then everything went to hell.

If ever there was a matter for local authorities to sort out, this is it; and there is no reason for all this national attention. But this is an election year and we have a President desperate for an incident to raise his popularity above the deadly 43% mark. Perhaps this can be made into something. And here we go.

In the meantime there have been dozens of homicides in the US. And there will be more.

Bill Gates seems impressed with the rising CO2 enough that he prefers nuclear power to natural gas. So do I. I agree that we don’t want to run an open ended experiment on how much CO2 we can put into the atmosphere. On the other hand, India’s cows can produce enough CO2 to keep the atmospheric amount rising. If we seriously have to eliminate CO2 additions to below what the ecological system can absorb we are talking about really drastic measures.

More likely we come up with some means of increasing the ecological reduction of CO2 amounts. The method that used to be discussed was adding iron to the sea to cause plankton blooms. A couple of experiments give less promising results than enthusiasts had expected. After that the experiments seem to have stopped. I have lost track of why. I’ll see if I can find out. Clearly, if we are going to limit the CO2 in the atmosphere, we have to find ways to take it out, or change the way we live. Drastically. And probably limit population. That is a formula for war without end.