Everything New Is Old Again

 Disclaimer: This post has not been sponsored by 8BitDo. 

I got a new keyboard. It's from the fine folks over at 8BitDo. Not only do they make some awesome controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but they also have some mechanical keyboards on offer. I'd been eyeing one for some time since Logitech, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue the G413 Carbon (and replace it with some pale imitations and alternates) and I was worried about the impending day when it would stop working. I have a backup for my mouse, but the closest thing I had to a backup keyboard was the Nimbleback I use with my iPad. It's a fine keyboard, but I want to keep it available to carry with my iPad rather than be tied down to the Mac mini. 

As for 8BitDo, this came in a few different flavors, the first two themed after the original NES and its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. When I checked their site a few days ago, I found not only had they expanded the keyboard to include a number pad, but they had two other styles of the original, including a translucent green XBox themed one (which was very tempting with its early 2000's aesthetic) and the one I ended up buying, based on the Commodore 64. 

Put simply, and if you'll forgive the pun, it was love at first byte: The large print on the dark brown concave keycaps, the tan body, and all topped off with a rainbow sticker along the upper edge and a big, red LED indicating that it's on and connected.

For perspective, I was born in 1981 and my first computer in the house was an Apple IIgs circa 1986, which is the equivalent of having a brand new Porsche as your first car. I have no real nostalgia for the Commodore 64; I don't even think I'd heard of it until the 1990's. According to Wikipedia, it was discontinued in 1994. Needless to say, a IIgs and a C64 look nothing alike, and have even less in common under the bonnet. I saw plenty of other computers and typewriters that looked more like the C64 in terms of the color scheme, so maybe that's where my nostalgia lies. 

As for the typing experience, it's phenomenal, though the backspace key is a little difficult to reach as the whole keyboard as a substantial slope (it doesn't even have feet on the underside to prop it up). It is notably louder than my G413, especially the space bar, but that's due to it having tactile keys rather than linear. Linear keys, like those in the G413, have all the advantages of a mechanical keyboard switch, namely not needing to press the key all the way down for it to register the keystroke, with the added benefit of letting you subtly control the volume of the keypresses. If you press softly and deliberately, it's no louder than any other keyboard, including non-mechanical ones. Think of it like slamming a door or closing it slowly depending on your mood. As for the C64 keyboard, there's really no minimum or maximum volume, as each key emits a distinct click for each press. Another notable difference is the lack of a resonance. On the G413, there's a metallic clang with each keypress, especially the space bar. I'm not sure what causes this besides a lack of dampening in the housing. With the C64, no such noise, only the distinct plastic-on-plastic clunk of the keys, and I love it. 

If I ever fall out of love with it, it does give me the option of swapping out the key switches for any other variety of my choosing, which I'm almost tempted to do for the space bar. It just sounds so different from the other keys. Then again, it's technically two keys being pressed down instead of one, so maybe that's why it sounds different. 

Pardon the rambling. It's the hype of having a new keyboard. I've been in more of a writing mood than a drawing one of late. My art block that's plagued me over most of last year still hasn't left. I also rediscovered a website called Writer (from Big Huge Labs). It's a browser-based word processor/note taking app that offers a minimalist, distraction-free writing experience (which is a little ironic given it's on a browser rather than a standalone app). Its biggest perk is the ability to select the color scheme of your background and text, which I've set to values consistent with an old school amber display. 

It almost makes me wish my monitor were smaller so I could put it on its side like some vintage workstation from Xerox. I've learned recently that you can purchase iMacs without their stands, opting instead for a VESA mount, so you could conceivably orient it sideways. I only wish they came in colors other than their muted rainbow variety. If they made a brown that matched my keyboard, I'd go for that. I could have sworn they had a black one available, but maybe I'm thinking of an older model. There's a light silver one, not even Apple's enigmatically inconsistent Space Grey. 

I can respect Apple and Microsoft not giving users this level of customization in their respective word processing apps, Pages and Word. To be fair, they do have accessibility options to create a high contrast or inverted color version of the display that can kind of sort of recreate the experience of an old school monochrome display. Even the browser based version of Word gives you the option of a dark mode.

It never fails to impress me the evolution of the word processor, from something boutique to something pedestrian. It's like the influence of the Gutenberg press bringing literature to the masses, then mass market paperbacks, and now ebooks and web pages. The craft of writing belongs to everyone, and my goal in life at this point is to grow into an old man hunched over a keyboard, probably driving the neighbors in the retirement village batty with the clickity-clack of my mechanical keyboard some kid probably custom-built for me out of sympathy to the cause. Maybe they were forced to visit the home as some kind of community service or church program and took an interest in my setup. They continued to visit long after the program ended, checking to make sure everything still worked, swapping out key switches and waiting eagerly to see if I approve or not. One day maybe they'll come and get told the bad news that I passed away the previous night, found at my desk slumped over the keyboard mid-documenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

I'm The Type to Block Things Out

I realized I've been lying to myself the past few months. I've been writing a lot about my keyboard of choice and my potential efforts to preserve the typing experience by buying a backup (made difficult by it being constantly out of stock at Logitech). What I haven't been very honest about is my alleged love affair with the sound and feel of the keys. 

I'm wearing headphones right now. 

There's even a dark ambient mix playing in a YouTube tab as we speak. It hasn't completely blocked out the G413 Carbon's Romer G tactile switches, but it has taken the edge off of them. I'm reminded of something Sir Alec Guinness once said about writing, how amateurs will go in full of enthusiasm only to get bogged down. The idea of a clicky, tactile keyboard always seems delightful... for about five or ten minutes, then you've got to get some real work done. 

There is an upside to this. As being clicky goes, the switches in this keyboard are something of a worst offender. Logitech's site has a comparison of the various key switches, including those in the G413's. Put simply, you can do a lot better for not very much in the realm of pricing. 

Speaking of blocking things out, I've learned something about WordPress that I feel rather embarrassed about. I had thought for the longest time that embedding videos was behind a paywall. In a way, it kind of is, but not to the extent I'd previously thought. If you want to upload a video file directly to the entry you're writing, that requires a plan. If, however, you're simply embedding a video from YouTube or Vimeo, there's a block for that. Maybe it's a newish feature, but I wasn't aware of it until a few days ago when I was trying to see what I could do with my current WordPress theme. It's not bad, but I'm not sure I like the way it's structured. It was chosen because it closely resembled the one I use for Blogger. You've got your main body of text, next to which is a sidebar with a few widgets and an index of all previous entries. My Wordpress theme is technically set up the same way, only there's a wall in front of it, so to speak. Instead of showing you the most recent entry in full and with the sidebar and widgets fully visible, it shows you a "highlight" reel of sorts. You see excerpts of the entries in chronological order, but with no sidebar and widgets. You have to click on an entry in order to get to a place that's closer to what I've got going here on Blogger. I don't know if there's a way to restructure that, but it's only really a minor annoyance. 

Speaking of mild annoyances, there's one thing I think WordPress does better than Blogger, and that's inserting images. Here, it's kind of a hassle to upload (I had quite a time with an entry from some months ago about old videogames) and once you've inserted it, it's another struggle to get it to fit in with what you're already writing. on WordPress, everything is separated into blocks. I don't have to worry about infringing on the caption of the photo I've uploaded. I don't have to worry about empty space above or below the image. I don't have to readjust the alignment of the text. Best of all, I don't have to adjust the size of the image based on some arbitrary "small, medium, large, or original" selection like I do here. It justifies it to the width of the text column. 

None of this means I'll be leaving Blogger for WordPress. There's still plenty of things I don't like about the latter. It also wouldn't feel right to simply migrate this site over there. Granted, it's not like I've built up some large, loyal following that I'd have to impose upon. I'm sure I have a few regulars and a few curious passers-by. Of course, when comparing WordPress and Blogger, one must consider who's footing the bills. Blogger is owned by Google, after all, and they don't have much vested interest in upgrading or overhauling it. In fact, I'm convinced the only reason they keep it around is it doesn't cost them very much to keep the servers running and it would probably be a small headache in and of itself to shut it all down. WordPress doesn't have such a sugar daddy. Automattic isn't the tech giant like Google is. It's not even close. Sure, a number of websites are powered by WordPress, but that still doesn't translate to the kind of figures that Google deals in. 

That's the dynamic. Blogger is a little clunky and outdated, but it's more or less completely free and full-featured for it (there are some paid features, but you've really got to dig for them). WordPress is a far smoother and more straightforward user experience (theme customization notwithstanding), but they try to nickel and dime you every step of the way. It's a little like with my keyboard; it's familiar, but clunky and not entirely pleasant. Other keyboards are more expensive, but they offer a smoother and more engaging typing experience. 

Not My Carbon

Logitech lied to me. I asked to be put on a waiting list to be notified when the G413 Carbon is back in stock. I recently received the notification and was all set to buy up my backup. When I clicked the link, however, I found it was only the G413 silver version. Similarly, they've made another G413 called the SE, which splits the difference between the silver and the Carbon in the worst possible way. 

The silver is the same keyboard as the Carbon under the bonnet, only with an aluminum faceplate and white backlighting. By no means an ugly keyboard, just not what I'm looking for. Also, I refuse to believe more people prefer white-lit keys to red. 

The SE is black like the Carbon, but uses white backlighting. There's also a TKL version that's still white-lit. As I said, I can't believe some people would prefer white to red when it comes to ambient lighting on their desktops. 

I only wish I could turn the LEDs on the Mac mini and SpaceMouse red. Guess I'm going for that 8BitDo keyboard sooner rather than later. That's not backlit at all, nor is there a number pad, but it will give my setup more of a vintage vibe rather than a Batmobile interior sort of look. I'll consider that a fair trade. 

I've never participated in NaNoWriMo. At least not in any official capacity. Frankly, the workload terrifies me. I once used it as a jumping off point for a shorter novella project I wrote some years ago from October until around mid December. It was released as an eBook for the exorbitant price of a whole dollar. I later made it free and even posted the first chapter to my DeviantART. It's probably aged far better than anything else I've written, though I'm sure if I took a good, long look at it, I'd end up sitting down and rewriting it from page one. 

There is another story of mine I thought of a few weeks ago that I might want to take another swing at. It was about someone checking themselves into triage by way of a robotic receptionist. It didn't have much meat on it in narrative terms, a quick jab at the bureaucracy of the healthcare system, the dehumanization of automation, and a cozy, wholesome interaction between a nurse and a patient. Now, years later, I want to make it a horror story, the robot now going haywire and posing a threat to everyone in the wing. I doubt I'll go through with it. My days of writing about monsters tearing people apart left me in around the end of middle school. We were learning a writing technique called "sensory imagery" which is best described as "Tell, don't show." Being the age I was, this meant an awful lot of gore and bizarre creature designs. 

Although November is now 2 days behind us, I do hope some of you consider continuing work on whatever writing projects you were thinking about during National Novel Writers' Month, even if it's only al sort of catch-and-release approach and it never moves far beyond a file on your desktop. 

My Not Quite Office Setup

When the Apple Pencil debuted, there was a quiet debate in the community as to how Steve Jobs would have felt about it. The starting point for this discussion was a talk he gave about the iPhone, in particular how frustrating he found the idea of a stylus. 

The counterpoint to this is that Jobs’ issue with the stylus was how it was used as a workaround for a bad user interface, that of a scaled-down desktop OS rather than something dedicated and befitting the medium. This is the reason for the whole tile-based, gesture-controlled philosophy of iOS and, by extension, Android. This was definitely a risk, and not a well-received one at the time. 

As a card-carrying member of that initial camp envisioning the iPad as an OSX-enabled touchscreen-enabled laptop akin to some of the tablet computers HP had out at the time, I remember being legitimately annoyed at how the iPad was just going to be a giant iPhone. I’ve spoken before about this disconnect between people like myself who seek more productivity-focused devices and the average consumer who simply want to watch videos and read emails. In my defense, I wasn’t totally wrong about the target market and the initial capabilities of the iPad. Between the price and the size of the app store on launch, it was an over-engineered e-reader, a digital picture frame with a battery, anything but a productivity-focused piece of hardware. It had creative potential, no doubt, but it felt like it had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from that casual market who saw it as having their toy taken away to be a mere tool. 

While I stand by my initial criticisms, I’m happy to have since been proven wrong. I’ve been drawing on an iPad for about 4 years now and I frankly don’t want to draw on anything else. As for other types of productivity, that’s been a little more trying. I recently purchased a new Bluetooth keyboard that’s gotten me writing more. I also recently learned that newer versions of iOS have added mouse support, allowing me to unbag my Lofree Maus and use it to... well, that’s still in a trial phase. 

Mouse support is actually something that’s been present in iOS for some time, as part of the accessibility setup for people with mobility issues. With the recent release, it’s now more discoverable to people who wouldn’t have otherwise given the accessibility part of the menu the time of day. The cursor appears as a dot which seamlessly morphs into the more familiar vertical line cursor we’re used to seeing in word processing apps, and if you’re not happy with only the single click nature of an Apple mouse, you can customize the buttons for other functions. Windows users know mice have a left and right click (as well as a center click and scroll, but we’ll get to that in a moment), one being for selecting, the other being for a kind of context-sensitive menu. Fortunately, iOS has this, though it’s not activated by default. It takes a little getting used to as it’s not quite the same as right click on Windows, but the added versatility is welcomed. The scroll wheel seems to be reversed depending on the application and has a bit of lag on it, but I think that’s just another session of rummaging in the menu away from working as it should. Then there’s middle click, and we hit a very big wall. 

Not every Windows mouse has this, typically the more gimmicky or stylized ones, and chances are even if you’re aware of it, you can count the instances in which you’ve needed it on one hand. If you work in 3D at all, whether it’s full modeling or simply viewing models, you know how essential middle click is to that workflow. If you’re going to do any kind of CAD work, you need that middle click. That’s why if I were going to do more CAD work at home, I’d likely spring for something in the Surface line. I can certainly do some 3D work on my iPad and even use my Pencil for some of the more complex features, but this is only good in a pinch. I’m certainly not going to be asking our IT department to take my desktop back. 

In the end, I think the “is it a computer yet?” approach to iPad functionality is the wrong mindset. The computers I grew up with are not the computers used today. The very fact that I use “computer” to refer to a desktop or notebook (remember when we called them laptops?) itself is an arbitrary choice, as even pocket calculators are computers, yet we don’t criticize them for not allowing us to read email. 

PC Master Race... Leans Left?

This is a partial paraphrasing/rewrite/expansion of an article I wrote on LinkedIn about something I meant to talk about on DeviantART (and may still since I want this to focus on gaming and not art) but that's about as complicated as this story gets... maybe. 

A lot of artists I know use graphics tablets, with many of them calling their mice bars of soap and about half as useful for drawing digitally. It surprised me, then, to learn from Ash Vickers of Megacynics that vector art is primarily done with a mouse. It made sense the more I thought about it, especially as I started experimenting with vector graphics. I also started doing CAD for work, which also uses a mouse (Solidsmack has a wonderful article about using a stylus for CAD, by the way). Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me. This made what happened next a little more scary than it normally would have been. 

I'm right-handed (that's not the scary part) and one morning, I found that I slept wrong somehow and my right arm was extremely sore. It more than likely would have gone away on its own (and it did), but given that I had a full day of design work ahead of me using that very arm, I would be playing a dangerous game of either keeping my arm in pain or making it worse. This made me really anxious, if rather pitifully so. I sat down at my desk, looked at the arrangement of peripherals on my desk, and took a calculated risk. The keyboard got shifted to the right, and the mouse hopped over it and landed on the left. My left hand was going to have to learn CAD and vector work the same way sadists and deadbeats teach nervous kids to swim, chucking them straight into the deep end. 

There wasn't even five seconds of adjustment. 

Seriously, I didn't even need to switch the left and right buttons in the control panel. Using my middle finger for left click and my index finger for right click felt every bit as normal as the opposite arrangement on my right hand. Okay, there was a little bit of a learning curve in the precision and accuracy department when it came to clicking and dragging, so let's bring that five seconds up to about five minutes. This was all about a year ago, and I have no intention of going back. In fact, I'd like to invite all of you to give it a try. You can switch the left and right mouse buttons if you want to, but you may be surprised how intuitive the setup truly is. If you're skeptical, and you're at your desk while reading this, I want you to look down at your current arrangement of mouse and keyboard. Unless you're using a small laptop or you specifically asked for a narrow keyboard, yours likely has a number pad, with a little cross of arrow keys separating it from the nation of QWERTY. Those arrows are going to become important later. This added real estate, which is wider than your hand when it's in a relaxed position, creates a rather onerous compromise when it comes to productivity. 

Seriously, why does this look weird?

Think about it, in order to center the home row of your keyboard under your screen, you have to put your right arm at almost a 45 degree angle away from your body to operate your mouse. This is a little less drastic if you have a trackball, but let's save that discussion for when we talk about Centipede and Missile Command. (let's just say if you're not tossing the keyboard aside and putting that beautiful billiard ball front and center, you're doing it wrong!). If your job involves more typing than clicking, you may be okay with this and it's entirely possible it will never pose any problems for you. Likewise, if you need your mouse more than your keyboard, then having home row off-center can be equally tolerable. In either case, though, you're missing a trick, quite possibly the ultimate office life hack.

If your HR department has invested any time and effort into discussing office ergonomics with you, it may be familiar to hear something along the lines of keeping your arms as straight as possible. This is spot-on. Arguably, your muscles can get used to being at odd angles, but 1) you shouldn't have to, and 2) your muscular system is fundamentally give-and-take. If muscle group A has to work a little harder, muscle group B doesn't. Simple isometric exercises and stretches can help with these, but like we said in point 1, you shouldn't have to. 

Here's where this gets interesting: gamers already get the most out of this clumsy arrangement, but only because of a compromise. The typical keyboard-and-mouse arrangement for something like a first-person shooter or a few other genres that involve navigating a three-dimensional space works out like this: the mouse controls the camera or where your character looks, while the W, A, S, and D keys move your character forward, left, back, and right (respectively). In this setup, the far left side of the keyboard and the rightmost reach of the mouse allow your arms to rest straight in front of you. 

You've nailed it... or have you? 

In my CAD work, I don't use my keyboard that often, not compared to the number pad. It's used about as equally as the mouse. Having my mouse on the left lets me center the home row of my keyboard, which puts my arms straight ahead, with the left resting on the mouse, and the right resting on the number pad, with those arrow keys almost equally accessible. I've even got the arrow keys on the number pad thanks to the Num Lock key if needed. 

Having my mouse on the left lets me use the arrow keys for what they arrow keys are made for. 

Yes, that sounds obvious, but if that's obvious, why is the WASD arrangement somehow "the norm"? What do you typically use the left analog stick on a game controller for? The camera, with the right analog stick controlling your movements. Funnily enough, this arrangement for dual analog controllers as pioneered in Alien Resurrection for the Sony Playstation was heavily criticized at the time before quickly becoming the norm. Now consider that in old-school gaming, especially in the arcade, movement controls are on the left. Meanwhile, left-handed arcade sticks put movement controls on the right, where right-handed console gamers operate movement controls anyway. 

Gamers are already fundamentally ambidextrous and we don't even realize it. 

It's only appropriate, then, that Razer (By Gamers, For Gamers) would be pretty much lead the charge in producing left-handed ergonomic gaming mice. There are others, but they're playing catch-up on the whole, with many content with catering to office environments where fewer buttons are required. 

Ironically, despite what I said earlier about not needing to reverse the mouse buttons in the control panel, the default layout of the left-handed Naga mouse reverses the clicks. Luckily, Synapse (the application Razer offers to customize their mouse buttons) makes the switch easy. Unfortunately, because it's an application, it's not there right away when I boot up, and there's a few minutes every morning when I have to mentally swap sides until everything gets up and running. For the sake of convenience and not dealing with adding more programs to startup, I swapped the clicks in the Control Panel. So, the left-handed mouse is actually less intuitive to my left hand than an ambidextrous one without modification. Razer, if you're reading this, worry not, for I forgive you ;) ... but if you really want to make it up to me, maybe you can put that MOBA-friendly Naga Hex mouse on fast-track to getting a left-handed version? This 12-button keypad is kinda tedious ;P