47: Key-Hoarding

00:00SPEAKERAll right. Look, I woke up this morning. I was in a good mood.

00:02SPEAKERI got like 10 hours of sleep last night.

00:04SPEAKERHoly crap. That's a lot of sleep.

00:05SPEAKERI had a bunch of packages out for delivery.

00:07SPEAKEROoh. And they all showed up.

00:09SPEAKEROoh. And none of them work.

00:12SPEAKEROh. Some stuff kind of works. Some of it doesn't work at all.

00:15SPEAKERI am my mood.

00:16SPEAKERMy mood went very south today.

00:19SPEAKERI'm going to go and say in in the realm of things,

00:23SPEAKERlike in the realm of problems, the ones I don't mind,

00:27SPEAKERthe ones that just don't work at all.

00:30SPEAKERAnd I don't mind the ones I love, the ones that I can fix easily.

00:33SPEAKERI look at him like, oh, I know what caused that.

00:35SPEAKERThe ones that sometimes work and sometimes don't work are the ones that break me.

00:38SPEAKERYes, that's exactly what I've been living in that space, that liminal space,

00:42SPEAKERthat limbo for weeks. And it's killing me.

00:46SPEAKERI don't like it when I was younger.

00:48SPEAKERI used to be the kind of person that like if I if I messed up my computer,

00:51SPEAKERI just wouldn't sleep until it was working again.

00:53SPEAKERYes, 100 percent.

00:54SPEAKERI don't do that anymore because it's unhealthy.

00:56SPEAKERAnd I just try not to break my computer now.

00:58SPEAKERYeah.

00:59SPEAKERWas that ever underpinned by a sense of indignant for you?

01:03SPEAKERLike, do you ever feel angry at the problem and the technology that's causing it?

01:06SPEAKERAnd just like there's there's for me, there is a certain stubbornness that goes along with that stuff of just like,

01:11SPEAKERI'm not going to let this this fucking inanimate object created by man to serve man is not going to master me.

01:18SPEAKERI am going to defeat this thing and I'm not going to rest until I do.

01:23SPEAKERI think for me, it's more like I really don't like entropy.

01:27SPEAKEROK, so when things are working, you're fighting against the eventual heat death of the universe when they're not.

01:32SPEAKERYou're succumbing to it.

01:34SPEAKERA vain attempt to establish order is always the end goal, right?

01:37SPEAKERYeah, that's what I'm here for. That's what that's that's what life is all about.

01:40SPEAKERThis podcast got very like philosophy of technology all of a sudden.

01:45SPEAKERI mean, I guess I guess the thermodynamics people are going to be like, well, look, if you're taking entropy,

01:49SPEAKERif you're adding if you're taking entropy away from one system, you're probably adding it to another.

01:54SPEAKERSo I'm literally killing myself by staying up late to try to fix these computers.

01:58SPEAKERThat's that's a good point. I never thought about it that way.

02:00SPEAKERYou are a biological piece of technology yourself, it turns out.

02:04SPEAKERYeah. At the end of the day, the heat death always wins.

02:19SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod. I'm Will.

02:43SPEAKERI'm Brad and I know that I am breaking established tradition here.

02:47SPEAKEROh, no. Welcome to the show, Brad. We're glad to have you here.

02:49SPEAKERBy referring back to the cold intro, the cold open in the body of the show.

02:54SPEAKERI don't know what you're talking about. I've never heard of this before.

02:57SPEAKERWe haven't recorded that yet even.

02:58SPEAKERThose intros are recorded by entirely separate people who just happen to sound and be exactly like us.

03:03SPEAKERWe actually got machine learning voice robots to replicate ourselves.

03:07SPEAKERWe just feed sample scripts into GPT-3 and then it generates the dialogue that the machine learning robots say.

03:14SPEAKERI'm getting I'm going off on a tangent that is itself spawning off of a tangent here.

03:18SPEAKERBut I spent a bunch of the afternoon looking through no name video capture hardware because you can't get any name brand video capture hardware right now.

03:25SPEAKERNope. And one of the pages on Amazon where the product listings had a video included.

03:31SPEAKERAnd I was like, oh, the video might have some information because this poorly written product description sure doesn't tell me what I'm looking for.

03:36SPEAKERAnd I clicked on it and it was very clearly machine voice reading copy that somebody had written in competent English.

03:44SPEAKERIt was it was it was it was one of those rebadged, you know, like no name out of Shenzhen or whatever.

03:49SPEAKERBut like hearing hearing the computer man voice come out of the instructional video on the Amazon page was just a very like profound like, wow, robots are really expanding into every role.

04:00SPEAKERWe have I we have friends who have a startup where you can record like an hour or two of your voice and they feed into the machine and then it generates an Alexa type thing that will talk with your voice.

04:13SPEAKERJust an hour or two?

04:14SPEAKERIt can be very little, very, very little.

04:16SPEAKEROK, I've heard about that.

04:18SPEAKERWe've discussed having it done before.

04:20SPEAKERBut what I what I was told was that the amount of reading you would have to do, the amount of data that you would have way less than you would think was was just too much of a pain to deal with.

04:30SPEAKERBut that's it's all right.

04:32SPEAKERWell, so if you use a script that they provide, then they can do it in a really shockingly short period of time.

04:38SPEAKEROK, if they're using sampled audio, it's clean.

04:42SPEAKERThen you have to use more.

04:43SPEAKERThey probably structured the script like they have all the phonemes that they need to capture laid out pretty methodically, I'm sure.

04:49SPEAKEROK, that makes sense.

04:50SPEAKERAt the same time, though, I don't actually now that I think about it, maybe it's not so wise to enable somebody else to replicate your voice at will.

04:58SPEAKERI feel like there are some implications that come along with that that I maybe I'm not comfortable with.

05:02SPEAKERBut the thing that occurs to me is that with that and GPT-3, we could literally pay someone to transcribe the podcasts that we've done so far and then feed that and our voice samples in and generate podcast scripts off of the GPT-3 thing that read.

05:21SPEAKERI don't know if we have enough sample data in 45 podcast episodes.

05:25SPEAKERWe're getting there, but I'm talking to somebody next week and we can find this out.

05:29SPEAKERThis is all the type of stuff that I get really excited about right up until I remember that evil exists in the world.

05:35SPEAKERAnd then I'm like, oh, we're going to use this for stupid. We're not going to use it for evil.

05:38SPEAKERYeah, but what if it falls with the wrong hands?

05:41SPEAKERWell, all right. I don't I don't mean to derail this episode.

05:44SPEAKERWe got a lot of material. The whole reason I brought up the intro is I just wanted to say that I acknowledge how ridiculous it is to care about problems like the trinket I bought off of Amazon doesn't work.

05:54SPEAKERThings things are rotten right now for a lot of people. And this is a pretty this is a pretty good problem to have all things considered.

06:00SPEAKERThat's true. But when you buy shit, it should work. Yeah, it's a fundamental. I know it's one fundamental truth.

06:06SPEAKERI just I just wanted I just want to give myself a reality check and be like, you know what? Not that big a deal.

06:10SPEAKERYou know what I love that works? What's that? My keyboard. Does it? Yeah, it's really good.

06:16SPEAKERThat was a rhetorical question because I can often hear it working just fine.

06:22SPEAKERLook, I'm using cherry red linear keys. They're nice and quiet for mechanical. OK, we're going to talk about mechanical keyboards today.

06:30SPEAKERIt is a conversation you and I have had because you were like, why do you want a mechanical keyboard? It seems loud and annoying.

06:35SPEAKERAnd it's like anything that you would not want. Let's not let's not put words in my mouth. OK, so perhaps a skewed paraphrasing of what I actually said, what do you wish to recall, which was probably more along the lines of, you know what?

06:47SPEAKERPeople are perfectly entitled to their hobbies. And I absolutely understand that the passion that everyone feels for their topics of choice.

06:56SPEAKERI just don't know that I personally see the use case. This this 10 year old Mac membrane keyboard is good enough for me.

07:03SPEAKERI think it's what you said. So quiet. Hang on. Let me open the show notes. I'm typing into the show notes right now.

07:11SPEAKERDo you hear anything? You just need a better noise gate if you want to have a loud keyboard.

07:15SPEAKERI will just let me just say up front, I learned to type on an IBM 286 with one of those keyboards.

07:23SPEAKERYeah, you know the ones I totally get it. I fully understand the satisfaction of using keyboards like that.

07:30SPEAKERIt's it's very OK. So so, yeah, I was on the same boat as you is where I was going with this because years ago I was like, I don't want a loud clickety clackety keyboard.

07:39SPEAKERIt is purely the consideration of I have a microphone here and I need to try to not make too much noise.

07:44SPEAKERYeah, and I have a small house and I don't want everybody in the house to hear every single time I mash a key.

07:51SPEAKERAnd then I got a mechanical keyboard. Somebody sent one into us, it tested and I brought it home and I was like, oh, holy shit, this feels so nice to type on.

07:58SPEAKERAnd I can mash all the keys at once and it works. And I never lock up the keyboard by pressing four or five keys in the wrong zone at once when I'm playing a game.

08:08SPEAKERSo I kind of but I've I've I am not an expert on this. I have just dipped my toe in the least possible amount by buying mechanical keyboards that are made by other people and not really having to deal with them, with the exception of one or two that I made for testing years ago.

08:27SPEAKERAnd and like it's very, very satisfying. It's easy. It's also easy to get really, really deep in the weeds here. And it's also easy to spend a fairly offensive amount of money on things that are functionally equivalent to the thing that came free with your PC from Dell when you bought your your Dell or whatever.

08:49SPEAKERSo. I think we should I guess I don't know, I guess just get into it. This is a long jump in. It's a lot of notes, a lot of lingo.

08:58SPEAKERThe first line of this the first line of this document is why mechanical keyboards, which even though we've talked around it a little bit, I think is probably the best place to start.

09:06SPEAKERSo then to understand why you have to explain how membrane keyboards work, like your Apple keyboard that's on your desk right now, and basically the idea is that there's a membrane and on the bottom of the membrane, there's some conductive stuff.

09:19SPEAKERAnd it kind of domes up a little bit. When you mash the key down, which has a spring and a guide on it, it pushes that membrane into to close a circuit on the board underneath it, which means that in order to to have a key press happen on your keyboard, you have to actually bottom out that key.

09:37SPEAKERYou have to push it all the way down. It has to hit the bottom stop on the on the key with a mechanical. You can press it. I'm pressing it. I'm not bottoming out right now.

09:47SPEAKERInteresting. Yeah, the keys actuate at a different place depending on the type of switches in the key.

09:53SPEAKERSo, OK, see, I'm learning something already. I had no idea.

09:56SPEAKEROh, yeah. Well, you're just wait. You get depending on the type of switch you choose, you can get feedback when you type.

10:05SPEAKERSo like the clicky clacking and the bump that comes with that click often line up with the actuation point for the switch.

10:12SPEAKERSo you'll feel that bump before you press the key all the way down and you don't have to actually bottom out the keys between you can type faster, more, you know, less, less finger movement in general.

10:23SPEAKERAnd you're not always smashing the keys into the bottom of the keyboard. People when I asked the discord because we have a keyboard section in the discord.

10:33SPEAKERYeah, I'm sorry. I just have to say that when you created that keyboard channel, I think is the most excited I have seen anybody on the discord get about a new channel being created.

10:43SPEAKERLook, and just to be clear, we have people who have worked in and around mechanical keyboards since this kind of started.

10:49SPEAKERAnd like I feel I mean, I feel like mechanical keyboard people have been around for probably 10 years now, but it got kind of big in like 2014 when the Cherry patent expired.

10:58SPEAKERThe patent for Cherry switches expired. And all of a sudden there were a bunch of clones for the standard switch that had been around for a really long time.

11:06SPEAKERWhat's the typical duration on a patent like that?

11:09SPEAKERTwenty five years, I think. I don't know.

11:11SPEAKERSo it was like early 90s when that probably probably yeah.

11:15SPEAKERWhat was that being used for then?

11:17SPEAKERLike one company's keyboard, one company made all the switches.

11:21SPEAKERThat's what I mean is mechanical. Yeah.

11:23SPEAKERBut there was no subculture back then is what I'm saying. Right.

11:26SPEAKERLike, well, I guess I guess what I really mean is like, do you know how they were being sold or distributed?

11:29SPEAKERLike where were they ending up?

11:31SPEAKERBecause people weren't building their own back then as far as I know. Right.

11:34SPEAKERNo, but but like you could buy a key.

11:36SPEAKERYou've been able to buy a Keytronics mechanical switch keyboard for the last 30 years.

11:40SPEAKERThey've been selling those for for decades.

11:41SPEAKEROK, OK. There's a bunch of companies that made mechanical keys, switch mechanical switches for a really, really long time.

11:48SPEAKERThey just were not popular because they cost five times as much as a memory keyboard.

11:52SPEAKERThat fills in a little kind of historical gap for me, because I always assumed it was like, you know, those IBM,

11:57SPEAKERthose big clunker IBM keyboards were around in the 80s, which is what I wanted to type on.

12:01SPEAKERAnd then I assumed there was a gap there where all you could get were those shitty Dell membranes and so on, so forth.

12:08SPEAKERAnd that's why I assumed I assumed that's where the subculture came from was like, oh, people learned or figured out that they missed that stuff.

12:14SPEAKERYou're like, you know what, let's bring that back. But I didn't realize it had been around this whole time.

12:17SPEAKERIt kind of never went away, but it was really small.

12:19SPEAKERSo like when Logitech Logitech designed their own mechanical switch, I don't know, like 2012, 2013, 2014.

12:28SPEAKERAnd when we asked them why they didn't just use Cherry switch switches, they were like, look,

12:34SPEAKERif this is a moderately well-selling keyboard for us, it will wipe out the switch supply for the entire world for X number of months.

12:42SPEAKERAnd we don't we can't make a business decision based on that.

12:46SPEAKERBut now they make a Cherry MX compatible keyboard. They're like everybody's doing that now.

12:52SPEAKERSo the upshot is the things that people like are you get feedback when you're typing the travel distance of the keys is configurable based on the switch you choose.

13:01SPEAKERThey're easy to repair. Like if you have a switch go bad, you don't have to chicken the whole keyboard like you do with a membrane keyboard.

13:06SPEAKERYou just pop out that switch and put a new one in RSI reasons because you're not necessarily having to bottom out.

13:11SPEAKERYou can do what you need or you can have it. You can buy a keyboard that's split and all sorts of other crazy stuff.

13:20SPEAKERA couple of people said that they can be really beautiful. Some people said they make typing feel great.

13:25SPEAKERA lot of one of the common threads was that people wanted if they're using it's like a mattress or a chair,

13:31SPEAKERit's something they spend a significant amount of their life using and they want it to be exactly they want it to be good and they want it to be customized explicitly for what they want to do.

13:40SPEAKERSo, for example, instead of having if you're a programmer and you use a bunch of macros to lay out to set up files and stuff like that,

13:47SPEAKERyou can store the macros on the board on the keyboard rather than have like a little program that runs on the computer with the macros.

13:53SPEAKERSo your macros are always there. And then one person reminded me of end key rollover, which it's been so long since I used a membrane keyboard that I completely forgot.

14:01SPEAKERBut if you mash down like six or seven keys on your Apple keyboard, it's going to freeze up and it's only going to it's only going to show three or four of those.

14:09SPEAKERWhereas I can do all of these keys at once and we're going to Google Docs.

14:14SPEAKERI'm mashing the keys. My brain is sitting here rejecting what you're saying.

14:17SPEAKERYes. For whatever reason, when I hear you say that my mind says there's no way that could be true.

14:25SPEAKERAnd now I can tell you opened up a bunch of shit on my computer. Now I can tell you that's totally true.

14:29SPEAKERYeah, that's that's that's shitty. Yeah, I should just throw this thing in the trash.

14:36SPEAKERI mean, look, it's not if you're just typing, it doesn't come up that often.

14:39SPEAKERYeah. Yes. Right. But if you're playing games and you have like if you're playing a game where you have leans and action items and crouch and all that stuff like I've locked up, I've locked up keys before.

14:51SPEAKERAnyway, why not? You got a keyboard with your key with your PC.

14:55SPEAKERIt was free, probably, or it was like 20 bucks if you bought something that's moderately fancy.

15:01SPEAKERThey're loud. They're expensive. And it's there's an infinity of products on the market.

15:06SPEAKERThey're often not all available. And like often often they're like customer small batch things.

15:12SPEAKERSo like instead of like going to Best Buy and looking at one of the three thousand keyboards that you can buy and clacking on it and seeing what sounds good, you have to pick like what board you choose, what case you choose, whether you do backlights or not.

15:24SPEAKERWhat kind of switch it uses, what kind of keycaps it uses. Do you do ABS or PBT or double shot or laser cut or die sub or like what's your what's your choices?

15:33SPEAKERAnd it gets really confusing really fast. So we're going to help.

15:37SPEAKERIt's a deep rabbit hole. This might be two episodes. I'm just going to set that up right now.

15:42SPEAKERA lot of bullet points left here. Yeah, we're through the first like three segments here.

15:49SPEAKEROK, so I think start with the board because that's where everything starts. You have to pick which keyboard you want.

15:55SPEAKERIn this case, that means like literally a circuit board with a plate that the keys snap into or lock into and maybe a case often.

16:07SPEAKERAnd they come in a bunch of different literal form factors, like, you know, the standard one hundred and one slash one hundred and four key ANSI ISO 6940 or whatever it is.

16:19SPEAKERKeyboard is the thing that we all grew up with. It has, you know, your your 80 number key alphanumeric keys with shift and enter and all that.

16:29SPEAKERThen there's like the little block with the arrow keys and insert delete keys and the print screen and screen lock and all that stuff.

16:35SPEAKERThere's function keys across the top. And then there's a numpad with ten ten keys on the side that that basically like you can do fast number entry.

16:42SPEAKERDid it go from 101 to 104 when the Windows key came about?

16:46SPEAKERThe addition of the Windows key, the menu key and well, it used to be there was a Windows key on either side.

16:55SPEAKERMost keys now have a function key for like changing your function keys to immediate keys and stuff like that.

17:01SPEAKERNow, did Apple sorry, I don't want to derail this too much. Did Apple have I'm trying to think back to like the school library when I got to use Macs.

17:11SPEAKERDid they have an option key way back when they had an option control and closed Apple is what option control and all ended up being.

17:18SPEAKEROK, I guess what I'm really asking is, like, were they ahead of the curve on that on moving to 104 ish?

17:23SPEAKERDid they have those extra keys way back when I did? My brain is a jumbled mess of I think the Apple two was only like an 80 key thing.

17:31SPEAKERI don't think it had. Well, I'm thinking more like was this early 90s, early mid 90s Macs.

17:37SPEAKERSorry, I didn't I didn't have it. I don't have a lot of experience with mid 90s.

17:40SPEAKERLike I started using Macs in the late 90s, really more than I didn't use any of the early color Macs or anything like that.

17:48SPEAKERBut but so control option, all they had analogs, except for they had the command.

17:54SPEAKERThey had the command control and all the keys. Windows had control and all at that time period.

17:59SPEAKERSo adding the Windows key brought key parity to Microsoft.

18:04SPEAKERGot it. OK, yeah, so four factors that I have to say, like watching that keyboard channel and watching people post pictures of their builds and et cetera, et cetera.

18:17SPEAKERMaybe this is maybe the thing that has struck me the most is that this that the keyboard is an ever shrinking thing.

18:23SPEAKERWell, so like I think about it about eliminating the numpad, but holy shit, people are really just the beginning.

18:30SPEAKERThe numpad is just the start. I'm a ten keyless guy. That's an 80 percent keyboard is what people call it sometimes.

18:36SPEAKERAnd it's basically like the normal ass keyboard minus the numpad. Right. And I like that because of RSI reasons.

18:42SPEAKERIt means I don't have to hold my hands at a weird angle when I'm using the mouse and keyboard at the same time.

18:46SPEAKERAnd it means my my typing hand can be really close to the mouse compared to having the extra like four or five inches about.

18:53SPEAKEROh, I never thought about that before. Yeah. Oh, man. Now.

18:58SPEAKERIt's the easy way to remember this is that usually you're losing about like since it's one hundred and one hundred and four key keyboard, the percentages are like one to one for the number of keys you're losing.

19:12SPEAKERA sixty five percent is no numpad, no function keys, but includes the arrow keys and the insert delete home block usually.

19:23SPEAKERWhich I use a lot. I'm a writer. Insert, delete, page up, page down. I use all those with keyboard shortcuts to move around the page a lot.

19:29SPEAKERAlso for like coders would as well like navigating, navigating code and stuff.

19:34SPEAKERThe 60 percent is no numpad, no arrow keys and no F keys.

19:39SPEAKEROK, the 40 percent is where you get into the real crazy business.

19:46SPEAKERThis is these are these people are maniacs where I said I like I love these.

19:49SPEAKERI've tried to use them. I'm incapable of it. Forty percent gets rid of the number row key.

19:55SPEAKERAnd then there's also like all sorts of like novel ergonomic variants.

20:00SPEAKERThe ergodox is a famous one that's a split columnar.

20:04SPEAKERSo that means where your normal keyboard that you'll get right now is staggered, where like the S is kind of between the W and the A is kind of between the Q and the W.

20:13SPEAKERA columnar means that those keys are aligned vertically without any stagger into columns, you might say, into columns.

20:19SPEAKERExactly. And like the ergodox is a columnar split keyboard.

20:25SPEAKERSo it's two physical halves. Each half is the same.

20:29SPEAKERBut instead of having like a space bar, there's a little module where your thumb goes, where your thumb can hit.

20:37SPEAKERWhat would be like your space bar, your shift keys, your caps lock, your home and insert and delete and backspace and all that stuff.

20:44SPEAKERSo you're literally just keeping your fingers on the home keys and you're using your thumbs to do all of the extra kind of like, you know, keep key press plus stuff.

20:57SPEAKERI am old enough now that I have decided it is probably too late for me to learn to type new ways.

21:05SPEAKERSure.

21:05SPEAKERI've tried switching to Colmak. I've tried switching to Vorac. I tried using an ergodox for a really long time.

21:11SPEAKERI'm just a QWERTY guy at this point. That's the layout of the keys on the keyboard.

21:17SPEAKERDo you know of any cognitive reasons that some of those alternate layouts are supposed to be beneficial? I mean, obviously the mechanical, the physical RSI and some factors like that are pretty clear.

21:30SPEAKERBut in terms of like just your brain parsing things, is that a factor at all?

21:36SPEAKERMost of them are designed to reduce mechanical stress on your fingers and wrists.

21:41SPEAKEROK, so for example, like Colmak moves the most frequently used keys under your home keys so that you're you're doing the dangerous stretches for the keys that you have to press less.

21:54SPEAKEROne of the nice things about mechanical keyboards is since the keys often are usually the key caps are movable.

22:00SPEAKERThe key caps are the things that go on top of the switches and are what you think of as the keys on your keyboard.

22:05SPEAKERProbably you can try different layouts and move the switches around and it kind of works.

22:13SPEAKERThe other thing about all these smaller variants is that often the keyboards support layers.

22:19SPEAKERSo you can hit a keyboard shortcut to change from like the main layer, which is the QWERTY layer, down one level to like a thing that puts a numpad on the right hand side of the alpha numeric keys and stuff like that.

22:32SPEAKERThat is definitely the most important topic to address with these smaller ones, right, is like, yeah, I just assumed this to be the case, but all that functionality is still accessible in some way, right?

22:42SPEAKERIt is. But, you know, it's not like using the function key on your laptop to control brightness and stuff like that.

22:47SPEAKERIt's it is it is literally changing the functions of every key on the keyboard.

22:51SPEAKEROh, interesting. Often. So you're like you go you go from layer one to layer two and layer two is the typing numbers layer, like on a 40 percent key keyboard.

23:02SPEAKERYou'll have a numbers layer that gives you access to all the symbols that are normally on the numbers row.

23:09SPEAKERAnd you'll probably also have a numpad layer in there, too, and maybe some other stuff for games or whatever.

23:13SPEAKERSo like, for example, on a 60 percent that has no function row, it's not like you're holding modifier and hitting, say, numeral five to get F5.

23:20SPEAKERIt is literally you are descending to the function layer and then all of the function keys are just active.

23:26SPEAKERIt's kind of up to you, right? Like you can do it that way if you want.

23:30SPEAKERI think the common wisdom in the way most people I know that use those super small keyboards do is that they set up.

23:36SPEAKERSometimes people some some people do courting where you hit like four keys and it does a different thing than if you had just three of those keys.

23:43SPEAKERAnd it does a different thing if you use two of those keys.

23:45SPEAKERThat's a lot. When people say they want this to work exactly to explicitly what they needed to do, they really mean that.

23:53SPEAKERLike you can, depending on the board you choose, you can use the opportunities for customization and how the keyboard works are limitless.

23:59SPEAKERThat's cool. So can you can you rewire which switches are which key at the hardware level so it just works universally no matter what you plug it into?

24:09SPEAKERDepends on the keyboard. But yeah, like on the on the Ergodox, which is the one I spent the most time programming,

24:16SPEAKERyou determine what the key layout is on the firmware level and then you upload the firmware to the board and then it's just there forever.

24:24SPEAKERBecause I just even in my very limited experience with this Apple keyboard and Windows, it treats I don't know, I don't want to get this backwards here.

24:33SPEAKERIt treats command, which should be alt on a PC keyboard as Windows and it treats option as alt, which should be Windows.

24:40SPEAKERThey're backwards is what I'm saying. Yeah. So I mean, the nice thing is if you get a nice mechanical keyboard,

24:44SPEAKERyou can set it to be the way you've become accustomed to by using that keyboard on Windows for the last ten years.

24:48SPEAKERWhat I was going to say is doing it at the software level. Like it's like you'd have to do like registry hacks or some app that will do that for you.

24:54SPEAKERBut like certain games won't respect those settings. Like if you plug it into another machine, you're right back where you started.

24:59SPEAKERLike that's a shitty solution. So doing it at the hardware level is super cool.

25:03SPEAKERI know people who use multiple languages also or multiple typing schemes for different languages.

25:11SPEAKERYou can you can assign them to different layers, too. So you have like your Spanish layout and your French layout on two different layers or German and French if you're in Switzerland, whatever.

25:18SPEAKERAll right. Last question before we assume move on for form vectors. Again, don't want to malign anybody's preferences.

25:24SPEAKERI get eliminating the numpad. Yeah. Beyond that.

25:31SPEAKERIs there a point of diminishing returns here? I think I mean, look, as with any hobby, you get into extremes and there's like novel this.

25:42SPEAKERI know like I know people who are programmers who work in specific languages and they use specific keys.

25:50SPEAKERAnd when they're right when they're writing code, they they know exactly what keys are going to need. Right.

25:55SPEAKERSo they put the parentheses and the brackets and the and the quotes in the places that they need them.

26:01SPEAKERAnd then they get rid of all the other stuff. And they use these little tiny 40 percent keyboards to do that.

26:06SPEAKERI absolutely believe there are people who are incredibly efficient with these tiny keyboards.

26:10SPEAKERI just from the outside looking in, there's definitely I definitely wondered if there was an aspect of like minimalism as philosophy rather than utility.

26:20SPEAKERI think I think probably both. Right. I mean, but also I think a lot of the 40 percent keyboards are travel keyboards that maybe if you are going to like a desk at work, you carry that thing and you plug it into your to your desk at work or or whatever.

26:33SPEAKERActually, I mean, I can say from experience like having to go somewhere and perform on unfamiliar input.

26:38SPEAKERI mean, there's a reason like e-sports players bring their own keyboard and mouse to tournaments and stuff.

26:42SPEAKERRight. Like like you do want the familiar thing because you're going to fumble all over the place if like the height of the keys or the action is different or whatever.

26:49SPEAKERLike it's it's very disorienting. I mean, you probably carried MacBooks for the last decade or so.

26:54SPEAKERBut I switched to a Windows a cup. I've used a couple of Windows laptops in the last few years and it is incredibly disconcerting how hard it is to switch to be like to a Razer laptop because their function key is a half a three quarters key.

27:08SPEAKERAnd it's where I expect all key to be. So there's so much muscle, in fact, aside from the noise issue.

27:16SPEAKERThat's the other reason I use Apple keyboards on PCs is just because going between laptop and PC, there is no adjustment period.

27:22SPEAKERYou know, so there's something to be said for that.

27:24SPEAKERYeah, sure. And like going to work like, you know, we have a studio set up and occasionally like, oh, the keyboard broke.

27:29SPEAKERYou might have to go grab whatever you can find at the last minute for the stream.

27:32SPEAKERAnd it's like, oh, shit, I have to I have to play Starcraft on this keyboard I'm not familiar with.

27:36SPEAKERAnd that's not going to go well. It's going to hurt your APM for sure.

27:38SPEAKERYeah. OK, so the next question is going to do a DIY versus prebuilt. My assumption is if you're going to do a DIY, you probably don't need to listen to this episode.

27:48SPEAKERWe're not going to talk about. Sure. We're not going to talk about that too, too much.

27:53SPEAKERBut there is more flexibility with a DIY. You can usually get like if the vendor you have is selling a DIY board that doesn't have the switches that you want.

28:04SPEAKERYou can buy just the board that you can buy the switches someplace else, assuming they're compatible. You can put them put them together.

28:10SPEAKERYou you if you want really specific features like the ability to have addressable RGB lights so that you can have your,

28:18SPEAKERyou know, Overwatch will change the color of the lights when you switch from DIVA to to to a Brigitte, you're good, right?

28:27SPEAKERThat's how that sounds like an Overwatch character. Sure. These are all Overwatch characters, I'm sure.

28:33SPEAKERBut if you're just starting out like a good place to start is an MX compatible.

28:40SPEAKERSo Cherry MX compatible, like prebuilt from Corsair or Logitech or Razer or something like that.

28:46SPEAKERI think I think you can't go wrong with that. Really. Sure. Let me ask just one question about DIY.

28:52SPEAKERIs it safe to assume that you can start as from scratch as humanly possible at this point, like short of short of like designing and fabricating your own chips, obviously.

29:01SPEAKERBut I mean, like circuit board switches, you know, name the component parts of the keyboard.

29:07SPEAKERLike, can you get all that? Can you source all that stuff individually and truly build your own at this point?

29:14SPEAKEROh, yeah. OK. Yeah. I guess the circuit board would be the you can even design the boards you want, but then you're into it.

29:21SPEAKERYeah. Like you can get boards made really easily now compared to 10 years ago. Interesting.

29:26SPEAKERI mean, that's so that's why this has all happened. Right. Is that Chinese fabs will make boards for pretty much anything.

29:31SPEAKERAnd the tools to make to design the boards are way more accessible than they were in the past.

29:36SPEAKERRight. And you can get like a really fast turnaround on those board designs even now.

29:42SPEAKERYeah, I totally forgot about that stuff. Even just dabbling with the mister, I've become acquainted with like PCB way and some of those services where you just literally upload your designs and they create a PCB and send it to you.

29:52SPEAKERWell, and like if you're really into this and are like a board designer, you can even buy a router that you can use to cut the traces on your own boards.

30:02SPEAKERRight. Like it's like this is all possible. Sure. So so, yeah, like I feel like the other thing about the pure DIY is often you'll spend a lot of money.

30:13SPEAKERSo like you're talking about, you know, 100 bucks for a board and 100 bucks for a set of keycaps and 50 cents a switch and a metal case.

30:22SPEAKERAnd like you can spend three or four hundred dollars. Like it's it's it's not easy to spend three or four hundred dollars.

30:28SPEAKERBut if you if you're if you have very specific taste and you want something specific, it can get expensive.

30:33SPEAKERSo it's like that's the thing you want to do once you know what kind of switches you like and whether you want to do a backlight and what kind of case you want and stuff like that.

30:42SPEAKERThe nice thing about this in general is that the resale on these remains pretty good even after fairly even if you use them.

30:49SPEAKERSo you can try something if you don't like it, you can sell it to somebody else and try something else.

30:57SPEAKERSo, OK, when you're when you're picking this stuff out, here's here is the thing you need to look at.

31:01SPEAKERYou need to decide what kind of board you want. Does it is it programmable? Does it support a backlight?

31:07SPEAKERWhat kind of switches does it use? What layout is it?

31:12SPEAKERAnd once you pick the once you decide those things, you move on to the picking out the switches and you move on to the picking out the keycaps and go on from there.

31:21SPEAKERSo I guess we've talked about form factor. I think switches is probably the next thing to dig into, maybe, unless you feel like you have other questions.

31:28SPEAKERNo, no, I will definitely say as an outsider, the switches are the thing you hear about the most.

31:32SPEAKERLike Cherry MX, Cherry Reds is a phrase that has been rattling around in my head for years without really knowing what it was.

31:41SPEAKERThose are the ones I like, right? That's the jargon I think that most people are exposed to when they kind of come into some contact with this subculture.

31:50SPEAKERYeah. So so, OK, so switches are the thing that make the keyboard work, obviously.

31:56SPEAKERThere's two kind of specs. There's the electrical physical connection with the board.

32:02SPEAKERAnd then there's the keycap mounting. And usually those things are paired, like you don't get one type of electrical connection and different kind of keycap connection.

32:09SPEAKERThat would be pretty weird. But, you know, you've got to be aware.

32:14SPEAKERSo MX compatible means it's compatible with the Cherry MX switches, which I think the patent expired for that in 2014 or 2015, somewhere around there.

32:23SPEAKERAnd they're they're really accessible. There are a ton of clones.

32:26SPEAKERThere's bazillions of Cherry MX compatible switches in all sorts of configurations.

32:32SPEAKERSo you can get almost anything you want there. There are some other higher end switches like Topre and I didn't write down the other ones.

32:42SPEAKERBut anyway, there are other higher end switches use different mounts, different electrical connections and different cap connections.

32:50SPEAKERI for the most part, we're going to talk about Cherry MX and MX compatible stuff today because it is the the bulk of the market.

32:57SPEAKERAnd also those other switches are really expensive because the tooling is different form and all that stuff.

33:04SPEAKERThe colors, so so often you'll see somebody say like it's a Cherry MX red or Cherry MX blue, the colors indicate what the behavior of the switch.

33:14SPEAKERSo whether how much force is required to press it, the where the actuation happens, where the switch actually fires, how much noise it makes and whether it has a tactile bump, whether whether you can feel it, feel that that actuation and the different colors.

33:29SPEAKERJust to back up for a second. Sorry. So you could basically look at Cherry MX as a general form factor.

33:35SPEAKERIs that accurate? Cherry MX is it's like ATX.

33:38SPEAKERSo it says, hey, there's physical connectors and electrical connectors in these places and it'll fit in this size hole.

33:44SPEAKERRight. But the action of the different kind of the different types within that is what fairies is the color generally.

33:50SPEAKERI mean, not everybody uses colors to indicate that stuff, but but enough do that.

33:55SPEAKERThat's what we're going to talk about here. So there are I'm I'm on mechanical keyboards dot com slash switches.

34:03SPEAKERIt is a page that scrolls about 50 times with a million different kinds of switches on it.

34:10SPEAKERBut like I said, the colors people generally are following the color scheme that Cherry established with blues and reds and browns and blacks and clears and greens.

34:21SPEAKERAnd the things that we're going to talk about here are let me go back to my notes page.

34:27SPEAKERWe're going to start with the force. So the force is usually measured in Newton's a higher number means you have to press harder to get the spring on the switch to go down.

34:35SPEAKERAnd generally speaking, you want a lower force for games and a higher force for typing, because with my Cherry MX red or red clones on this keyboard,

34:46SPEAKERif I rest my hands on the keyboard, sometimes I'll accidentally mash D a bunch or spacebar bunch or whatever.

34:53SPEAKERThe next thing is the actuation, which is where where the press happens on the reds. It's like halfway down the stem.

35:00SPEAKERSo that means you can actually type. And if you're watching as you type, you can let off your you can train yourself to let your fingers off before you bottom out the key,

35:08SPEAKERwhich is one of the two places that the keys make noise. You know, one is on the switch clicking. The other is when the key bottoms out.

35:15SPEAKERNext is the noise. Cherry MX blues are the famous switch for being clickety clackety, and they have a mechanism inside that makes a clicking noise at a certain percentage of the push,

35:29SPEAKERwhich often is either before or after the actuation. Yeah, it's that here.

35:33SPEAKERI hear it in the background on the on that keyboard was debating when to bring that up. No, it's I should just give a shout out right now.

35:40SPEAKERYeah, shout out. Yeah. So, yeah, we started that keyboard channel on the Discord and one of the most prolific participants there is Twinkle Twinkie,

35:51SPEAKERwho did me the incredible kindness of building me a custom mechanical keyboard out of spare parts that he had.

35:59SPEAKERFrankenstein parts. Yes. Well, I don't want to conjure the image of something built out of the parts of cadavers.

36:06SPEAKERThis is like it's very, very nice. It is extremely well done. Yeah, it is. I'm going to say better than anything you can buy in a store.

36:16SPEAKERI mean, with my sample size of one keyboard, they gave you a bunch of different keys.

36:21SPEAKERYou can see what what the kind of different fields are like, which is important for this.

36:25SPEAKERAnd yes, since you mentioned the switch, just the caps lock is the is the click.

36:30SPEAKERThis is the you hear this. I don't know if this will come through in the audio recording and I might cut this out if it doesn't. But when you hit that, there's two two sounds.

36:38SPEAKERRight. You hear the click. Yeah, it's a you hear a mechanical click and then you hear the key hitting the bottom of the bed, which is a physical smack of plastic on plastic.

36:47SPEAKERRight. Yeah, exactly. And then the tactile bump.

36:52SPEAKERSo you can have tactile keys that have a bump that you can feel the click that don't make a noise.

36:59SPEAKERBut you can't have clicky keys that don't produce a bump.

37:04SPEAKEROr at least I wasn't I'm not aware of them. OK, and and you want to pick the thing that's kind of right for you, like if you're working in a hospital where there's a bunch of people and you need people to be quiet, probably just keep a membrane keyboard because these are all going to be louder than you want.

37:18SPEAKERSure. But if you like, I don't want to make the noise and annoy the people in my house. So I went with a linear switch, which means it's a straight press all the way down with a little more tension at the bottom than the top.

37:31SPEAKERBut the actuation is like halfway down and it doesn't make a ton of noise compared to like something that has an actual mechanism to make no click in there.

37:39SPEAKERExactly. I have to say, I mean, ironically or perhaps not, the loudest one is also the most satisfying one to press.

37:46SPEAKEROh, it's the click. It feels good when you feel the click in your fingers.

37:51SPEAKERYeah, it's the closest thing to my memories of those old IBM keyboards is the one with the click.

37:56SPEAKERBut of course, it's also the one that I can't bring anywhere near a microphone.

37:59SPEAKERIt's kind of funny because like as I was doing this, I was thinking about my favorite keyboard and it was probably the keyboard on an Apple II, which was the first real computer I got to spend time with as a kid.

38:09SPEAKERAnd like, yeah, it has those round, weird shaped keys, and it just it felt so good.

38:18SPEAKERAnyway, most people, when they're starting out, go with a quieter switch unless you specifically want something clacky.

38:27SPEAKERCherry browns, cherry reds, cherry pinks. Brown is a linear.

38:33SPEAKERI'm going to get my get my my cheat sheet up here. Brown is a tactile, so it has a bump.

38:39SPEAKERIt's a medium low pressure key. So you don't have to push too, too hard. So it's OK for gaming.

38:45SPEAKERIt's a nice middle of the road switch for for people who are starting out because you do get the bump, but you don't have you don't have the click that comes with it.

38:55SPEAKERRed is just a straight linear. It's a little bit less force and you don't feel the bump.

39:00SPEAKERYou don't hear anything other than the key bottoming out. And then pink is an even quieter red.

39:08SPEAKERI think I think Cherry doesn't call them pinks. I can't remember what they call them. They call them silent reds.

39:15SPEAKERAnd then the blue is a clicky. It's nice for gaming keyboards also, if you if you don't mind the noise.

39:22SPEAKERBut it's a linear, it's a clicky key with a bump and the noise that's about the same force as the as the as the browns, I think.

39:30SPEAKERI'm sorry, I'm over here getting distracted by my keyboard. It's OK.

39:34SPEAKERIt is very entertaining and satisfying to mess with. It's pressing those buttons feels good.

39:38SPEAKERThat's why people like these. That's right. It's kind of this it's like almost a de-stresser in a way or something.

39:43SPEAKERThere's something kind of Zen about it. It is very it's very satisfying.

39:49SPEAKERIt's like it's like having a good switch to flip. Right. Yes.

39:52SPEAKERBut you have one hundred and four to forty six of them and you can mash them at one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty words per minute.

40:00SPEAKERSo the last thing when you're picking switches is if you have a backlit keyboard,

40:05SPEAKERyou have to get switches that are compatible with the backlight so that they have their clear tops.

40:11SPEAKERIf you put a black top switch on a clear LED, it's not going to do anything and you're going to be sad.

40:16SPEAKERSure. I feel like most of the switches you buy now are backlight compatible because backlights have gotten popular.

40:22SPEAKERBut if you if you just pay attention when you're buying your stuff.

40:25SPEAKERIs that why I assume that's why when I pop one of these key caps off the things surrounding the switch underneath is trans translucent?

40:32SPEAKERYes. Transparently. Whereas like I have some old Cherry MX Reds here.

40:37SPEAKEROh, I see your camera and they're OK. They're solid black. I see. OK.

40:41SPEAKERSometimes they'll have like a light channel depending on what the spec of the switches.

40:47SPEAKERYeah. If you're going to get into backlighting, do some reading before you buy anything.

40:53SPEAKERSure. OK, so we've got keys. If you don't know what kind of switch you want and you want to try something,

40:57SPEAKERyou can go on any of the mechanical keyboard sites or Amazon and buy what's called a key tester,

41:02SPEAKERwhich is like a just a bunch of switches that aren't wired up to anything in a grid that you can mash and and try,

41:08SPEAKERtry doing some pretend typing on to see which ones you like, the way they feel and how they click.

41:12SPEAKERThat sounds like my stress removal device.

41:16SPEAKERI bought a tester with every switch that was readily available in like 2014 or no, 20, 2014 or 2015.

41:24SPEAKERIt had like 15 switches on it. Now it would be a huge wall sized grid.

41:29SPEAKEREverybody's making switches. Sure. I think that's it.

41:34SPEAKERI think that's the that's the that's the switches. OK. A little easy to get lost in the weeds on that stuff.

41:40SPEAKERBut look. It's all weeds. It's just weeds on top of weeds, weeds all the way down, weeds growing out of other weeds.

41:50SPEAKERAnd yeah, it's worth mentioning, there are other switches than the Cherry stuff like the Topre or Topre.

41:56SPEAKERI don't know how to say that is they make these amazing, really, really high end,

42:02SPEAKERsuper nice, straight, linear feeling switches that that like they feel great,

42:07SPEAKERbut they're crazy expensive in my experience. And and, you know, they have a weird cap connector.

42:14SPEAKERSo you can't get like it's hard. It's harder if you get less common switches, you're going to be limited in the key cap selection.

42:21SPEAKERI was going to ask, is it just key caps? Like, could those still be used with most any chassis and PCB and so forth?

42:27SPEAKERWell, no, because the the the PCB will have specific mechanical and electrical connectors.

42:34SPEAKERYou won't even be able to mount it there. OK, well, and we didn't talk.

42:37SPEAKERSo we didn't talk about snap in switches or hot swap switches versus solder and switches.

42:42SPEAKERIt used to be that you had to solder everything in place. Now, most everything is hot swap.

42:45SPEAKERSo you just snap it in. You have a little tool that lets you pop it out. But but yeah, that's that's that's that's a whole other.

42:55SPEAKERDon't buy something you have to solder when you're just starting out. Yes. Having having done that,

43:01SPEAKERit was great fun building an ergodox and then having to realize that you had messed up the soldering on 15 of the diodes and doing it all over again.

43:11SPEAKERI think you're being sarcastic. I don't think you've considered that fun at all.

43:15SPEAKERUh, it's just it's satisfying. That's just that's my personal read.

43:21SPEAKERYeah, it's fair. OK, so key caps, make sure they fit your board.

43:27SPEAKERThis is this is there's there's a lot. This is one of the things that when you start looking at this stuff is you realize that keyboards are way more complicated than you ever realized.

43:38SPEAKERDid you know that there are different keycap profiles? I did not know that.

43:42SPEAKERWell, you have what's called a chiclet keycap profile on your keyboard, your Apple keyboard, the Apple.

43:47SPEAKEROK, but you're you're the one that you're holding there, the mechanical one is an OEM profile.

43:53SPEAKERSo I have I have heard that term chiclet keyboard for a very long time, but I wasn't 100 percent sure is that is that the height?

44:01SPEAKERIt's this it's that they're they're all the same size.

44:04SPEAKEROK, like all of the so if you look at a normal alphanumeric key, like at the G key, it's called a one U key.

44:11SPEAKERThat means it's one wide and one tall. Your shift key on the left side is usually like a two or two and a half wide to two and a half U wides,

44:20SPEAKERwhereas on the left side is maybe three. It looks like on my keyboard or two and three quarters, maybe.

44:27SPEAKERAnd and so you're looking at the width of the key. You're looking at the profile of the the face that you hit with your fingers.

44:34SPEAKERSome keyboards will slant all of the keys away from you or all the keys towards you.

44:40SPEAKERThere's some that are curved. So if you have like an ergonomic keyboard, it might have a curved profile where the top or the keys on the top rows,

44:47SPEAKERthe actual key caps are taller than. Oh, interesting.

44:51SPEAKERThen the ones on the lower rows so that you have the right angle on your on your on your keys when you're typing.

44:56SPEAKERSure. And it can get really complicated. The upshot is not all key caps are compatible with all board layouts,

45:03SPEAKERbecause if you put the wrong key caps on, you'll end up with like a weird stair step thing that is really uncomfortable to type on and doesn't feel good at all.

45:09SPEAKERSure. So you have to be aware of what kind of key caps you're looking for.

45:13SPEAKERTypically, when you're starting, if you're even if you're building it yourself, buy a kit from one vendor that has the board, the case, the switches and the key caps.

45:21SPEAKERAnd then if you want to start customizing after that, go nuts.

45:29SPEAKERLet's see the materials, there's a bazillion different materials, you don't say ABS plastic is the most common.

45:37SPEAKERSo if you look at your keys like this Logitech keyboard I'm using right now, the keys on top have gotten shiny.

45:43SPEAKERAnd that indicates that shine from just the wear of your fingers, rubbing the keys is an ABS thing.

45:50SPEAKEROK, and you have literally you've literally worn material off the top of those, right?

45:54SPEAKERI assume that's why that's why they're shiny.

45:56SPEAKERI had always assumed that that was a normal thing.

46:00SPEAKEROK, but I've been told recently that it is the ABS eroding slightly.

46:06SPEAKERThat's like that's what I assumed.

46:09SPEAKERThe PBT is another plastic that people often use.

46:13SPEAKERIt's usually more expensive. They can do some neat things with PBT, like shoot the plastic in twice into the molds twice.

46:22SPEAKERSo they do one shot of the PBT that's one color and one shot the other for doing things like transparency on the on the letters.

46:32SPEAKERSometimes it's an aesthetic thing where they'll be a gradient on the on each key so they look like creamsicle ice cream or something.

46:37SPEAKERIt's really cool whether the tops are laser.

46:42SPEAKERThe letters are lasered on. Some people just do blank keycaps.

46:46SPEAKERSome people do lasered on keycaps where there'll be one color plastic and then you etch off the top and you get you get the contrasting color underneath.

46:54SPEAKERYeah, the keys on this keyboard, the Twinkle Twinkie sent me are I mean, they're black.

46:58SPEAKERThey're like pretty standard looking aesthetically.

47:01SPEAKERBut yeah, the lettering is on the front of the key, like down in the well where the key actuates.

47:07SPEAKERYeah, those are probably lasered would be my guess.

47:09SPEAKEROK, the you can dice up, which is a type of printing process which will apply the color on the top.

47:20SPEAKERAnd like this is the keycaps like switches, if switches are purely aesthetic choice, you pick the thing that you want based on the noise you want to make and how you want it to feel and how hard you want to press.

47:33SPEAKERThis is a style choice often.

47:35SPEAKERSo like you can get like keycap runs the board run.

47:40SPEAKERSo just to be clear, oftentimes if you want something really specific, the man, the people who make these will make one or two runs a year and you'll have to order in advance and then wait six weeks or six months or however long it takes for the boards to be manufactured and shipped over from China.

47:54SPEAKERKeycaps are the same, like you can order a set of keycaps and wait for three, four months for the delivery because they have to set up the dies and they have to do the shooting and all that stuff.

48:06SPEAKERIt's like it's like a Kickstarter situation in a lot of cases.

48:09SPEAKERYou might have gotten me.

48:11SPEAKEROh, yeah, it's the first moment.

48:12SPEAKERThere's a first moment that I have had since this whole thing began.

48:16SPEAKERYou just like waiting for stuff?

48:17SPEAKERNo, no. Where I where I stopped and thought, what if I got some new keycaps for this thing?

48:21SPEAKERYeah. What if I went out and got like a nice little color coordinated set of like maybe the modifiers could be a slightly different color from the other.

48:29SPEAKERYeah. What if I made it look like the VAX terminal that was the first computer I used when I was at college?

48:34SPEAKERTotally. Like, I mean, I had been waiting for a time to bring this up and now seems like the time.

48:37SPEAKERBut even setting backlights aside, scrolling through that keyboard channel and seeing people's different custom designs and stuff like there are some like gorgeous looking designs in there, honestly.

48:47SPEAKERYou know, like some really like amazingly attractive color combinations and different types of layouts and stuff like some really nice like some of it is almost like food like like I would almost describe some of these keyboards as delicious looking.

49:01SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

49:02SPEAKERSo there was one I think it was a wire cutter poster.

49:05SPEAKERKimbrough Streams keyboard right now has a Hyper Life Drifter aesthetic, including like the Drifter font that they used in the game on the keys. So, yeah, like you can you can get real nerdy and weird or you can have just something that's completely, completely kind of, you know, it's not representative of everything, just as attractive and nice.

49:27SPEAKERYeah.

49:28SPEAKERSo the key the key cap such you can you can get you can spend a lot of money and also have a lot of fun with key caps.

49:35SPEAKERI think caps are pretty cool.

49:38SPEAKERAnd that's that's it for that.

49:39SPEAKERThat's pretty much the that's pretty much the gist.

49:42SPEAKERLet's see. Do we talk about backlights?

49:44SPEAKERI guess we didn't.

49:46SPEAKEROh, I use the term backlight just now, but maybe that was not correct.

49:49SPEAKERLike we we talked about lighting earlier.

49:52SPEAKERSo are there other types of underlighting and so forth?

49:55SPEAKERWell, so the backlighting on keys on mechanicals usually is an LED that sits directly underneath the switch and is like the lights piped up through it.

50:05SPEAKERSometimes sometimes you'll just use that as a back.

50:07SPEAKERLike if you put key caps that are not translucent and aren't designed for backlight, that will just sit underneath.

50:12SPEAKERIt'll make light come out from underneath the keys and can look really cool.

50:16SPEAKEROK, often they'll be single color.

50:19SPEAKERSo like on an inexpensive keyboard, you'll plug it in.

50:21SPEAKERIt'll be the same color regardless.

50:23SPEAKERSometimes there are RGB lights under there that you'll program when you program the layout of the keyboard.

50:27SPEAKERSo you'll say, OK, I want this layer to be red and this yellow to be blue and this layer to be yellow.

50:31SPEAKERAnd that way that's a good way to indicate when you're switching between layers as well, which is nice.

50:36SPEAKERSure. The the kind of on the on the consumer goods front, the game companies have for a long time made keyboards that are addressable on the fly.

50:48SPEAKERSo you can run a program on your computer that serves as like a translation layer and they provide APIs to game developers.

50:54SPEAKERSo that, like I said, when you switch your character from Diva to to Lucio,

51:02SPEAKERthe color scheme changes from pink with the Diva keys lit up to yellow and green with the Lucio keys lit up.

51:08SPEAKERAnd and it's really cool.

51:12SPEAKERMy Logitech keyboard, when I turn on PUBG, it turns yellow, which tells me that my mouse sensitivity is set right for that game.

51:17SPEAKERRight. Wow. It's it's a it's a it's a dopey thing because you never look at the keys.

51:22SPEAKERBut also I didn't want to say it, but yeah, but but also it gives me an immediate way without leaving the game to make sure that my my shit is set up right for the game that I'm playing, which is something that most people probably don't care about.

51:34SPEAKERI acknowledge that if you're doing it, there are now some boutiques making addressable dynamic lights.

51:44SPEAKERThe problem with a lot of addressable RGB on a keyboard is that they draw a bunch of power compared to normal LEDs because they each one has a little processor on it.

51:55SPEAKERAnd so like some of the Corsair addressable keyboards have two USB plugs or they require USB-C because you can get more power of the USB-C.

52:07SPEAKERFor example, my Logitech keyboard that I'm using right now doesn't work with the Mr. because unless I turn the backlight off. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

52:15SPEAKERAnd then the cases are a whole other world of nightmares. You can get plastic cases.

52:21SPEAKERYou can laser cut your own cases out of acrylic or bamboo. If you have access to a laser cutter or router, you can 3D print cases.

52:30SPEAKERYou can buy cases that are made of milled out of aluminum or other metals. You can make presumably somebody's made some sort of carbon fiber case, something like I don't know.

52:38SPEAKERI want to see really like nice classic looking woodworking. Yeah. I love a good bamboo case where it comes and there's profile choices on that as well.

52:47SPEAKERYou can go with a switch exposed case that has the like it's just a flat plane that the board is flush with and then the switches are all exposed and those are going to be probably a little bit louder.

52:59SPEAKERYou can go with something that goes up and kind of scoops up around the sides of the keys before they've been pressed. Those may be a little bit quieter.

53:06SPEAKERYou won't get backlight on those. It'll only come up through the keys. Like you can get you can get that. You can get really crazy.

53:12SPEAKERI'm over here googling wooden keyboard cases now. I'm just looking for like a nice stained mahogany or something like that. Yeah, exactly.

53:20SPEAKERI was hoping to find I was hoping to surely I thought someone would have done the actual key caps out of wood, but I'm not seeing that yet.

53:26SPEAKERSo the key caps are usually injection molded plastic. So you might have something that has like a die sub texture on it that's applied that looks like wood.

53:34SPEAKEROK, but it's probably going to look janky. OK. It would be really expensive to mill something as precise as key caps.

53:40SPEAKERThose are so small. I don't the tool the tools I'm sure exist, but would be tough to. Yeah, it's it would be spendy.

53:49SPEAKERYeah, if you let's see accessories, you can get fancy cables, you can get a wrist rest, you get a wrist rest made out of wood that matches your case.

54:01SPEAKERA lot of people I actually have like a cheap 10 key 10 numpad for tax season when I have to do a lot of spreadsheet work.

54:09SPEAKERJust a separate USB. It's just a separate USB I keep in my desk when I need it. I plug it in when I don't. I chuck it back in the drawer.

54:16SPEAKERDo you use since you mentioned wrist rests, I assume you probably have something.

54:20SPEAKERYeah, I bought a cheap Griffin. It's like a it's like a graffiti is what it's called. It's from Griffin.

54:29SPEAKERNo, it's a graffiti dot com respect I got from Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes.

54:33SPEAKEROK. It's it is held up surprisingly. Well, yeah, I I kind of want to make a wrist rest that has a bunch of spikes in it so that I'll stop using the wrist rest.

54:44SPEAKERLike just put like a bunch of needles or nails or something, just kind of to remind me, don't hate.

54:50SPEAKERHey, dumb ass, don't your wrist should be higher than this. But, you know, maybe I'm too old to learn new tricks.

54:55SPEAKERIs that not in itself also like artificially like holding your arms up, elevating them without also not cause some stress over time or the pad?

55:04SPEAKERNo, no, no. Like like, well, I mean, if you're if your chair and your table are set up right.

55:08SPEAKERI see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. If you want everything to be at the right angles, you don't mean literally keeping your arms held up.

55:14SPEAKERNo, I just mean adjusting your posture so your arms are at the right angle.

55:18SPEAKERLike the other thing I see what you're saying. The thing they tell you is that there shouldn't be an angle on your wrist when you're typing.

55:23SPEAKERLike it should be a straight line from your radius and all that to your hand bones.

55:26SPEAKERSure. I bought. Yeah. Speaking of the stuff being durable, I bought like no name.

55:30SPEAKERI probably went to Office Depot or something back when Giant Bomb launched 12 years ago.

55:35SPEAKERI just bought a standard like gel mouse wrist rest and also one for the keyboard.

55:40SPEAKERI used to have terrible wrist problems, pain and stuff, and it all just went away when I got those wrist rests.

55:46SPEAKERSo I use a 3M gel wrist rest for my mouse.

55:50SPEAKERI had to replace the old wide one that I had when I went from the 104 key to the 10 keyless, which was a little bit of a bummer.

55:56SPEAKERBut let's see, people, if you want to make them quiet, different plates, the plate that goes between the key caps and the and the board.

56:08SPEAKERAcrylic or polycarbonates tends to be quieter than metal for obvious reasons.

56:15SPEAKERYou can also add things to the keys. You can put these little rubber rings on top of the stem where the key cap and that that slows the bottoming out so that when you're pressing the key, it hits something soft and quiet instead of just plastic clacking on plastic.

56:30SPEAKERYou can also lube the switches, which is I've never done that. That sounds like madness to me.

56:36SPEAKERBut I believe that I don't quote me on this, but I believe Twinkle did some some lubrication on your switches have been lubed.

56:43SPEAKERYes, that's my understanding.

56:47SPEAKERI would have to ask him, I wonder how long something like that lasts.

56:50SPEAKERI wonder if that's something that would wear off or break down over time or if that's something that's fairly permanent.

56:58SPEAKERSo the lubes that they use typically are Krytox 205 G0, which is bad because it has PTFE in it.

57:06SPEAKERThe stuff, the precursor for Teflon, which is an environmental nightmare and Tribosis 204 is the other one that is less environmentally tragic.

57:18SPEAKERBut the the PTFE one should last forever. It literally never goes like nothing can make that shit degrade.

57:23SPEAKERYou can fire it into the sun. It'll still be around a few million years.

57:27SPEAKERWhy are all the best things so bad for you?

57:29SPEAKERI mean, look.

57:30SPEAKERIs that the type of thing? Is that the type of thing you are yourself going to be exposed to if your keyboard has it?

57:35SPEAKEROr you're just saying it's just bad if you like threw it in a landfill and it's in the groundwater?

57:40SPEAKERThe manufacturing process for it is is horrific.

57:43SPEAKERI see. So it's not even something you're going to come in contact with.

57:46SPEAKERYeah, no, it's like, you know, those places in Fallout when you walk up and there's a whole watering hole and there's a bunch of like seven legged cows there?

57:53SPEAKERYep.

57:54SPEAKERThat's what it's like outside PTFE manufacturing places.

57:57SPEAKERGreat.

57:58SPEAKERYeah. Oh, also, if you put the keyboard on it, like if you have a glass or metal or even wood desk surface and you get one of those full desk mouse pads that goes underneath your keyboard, that can bring the noise way down.

58:12SPEAKERSo something to think about.

58:17SPEAKERI think that's it.

58:18SPEAKEROK, I think I think that's the oh, if you want to start out novelkeys.xyz drop.com, which used to be Massdrop and is responsible for a lot of people getting into mechanical keyboards, including multiple people in our Discord.

58:32SPEAKERI'm not going to I'm not going to go there.

58:34SPEAKERYou should go there. It's really cool.

58:35SPEAKERI don't need to see it.

58:37SPEAKERYou can't buy any of it right now is the good news.

58:39SPEAKERYou have to wait a few months.

58:40SPEAKERThat is good news.

58:42SPEAKERThe keyboard looks just fine.

58:43SPEAKERIt's a nice, sleek black.

58:45SPEAKERI don't need to put anything else on it.

58:46SPEAKERIt looks just fine.

58:47SPEAKERThis would be with a bunch of backlights and stuff that case.

58:50SPEAKERWait, rich, rich Corinthian leather.

58:52SPEAKERCan I add a backlight to this keyboard?

58:54SPEAKERProbably not.

58:55SPEAKERThat's usually difficult.

58:57SPEAKEROK, but also, like I said, there are good, relatively standard keyboards from Corsair and Razer.

59:06SPEAKERThe Logitech one, they don't advertise switch compatibility, which is a little bit worrisome for me, but it does.

59:12SPEAKERI have put MX switches into this thing and it worked OK.

59:17SPEAKERYour mileage may vary.

59:20SPEAKERAnd like if you're in a place where you can leave and go to a store,

59:23SPEAKERBest Buy has a surprising number of mechanical Corsair and Razer keyboards on display, so you can go try them out.

59:32SPEAKERBut I would strongly encourage you to buy a key test, a switch tester and spend a little bit of time with it.

59:38SPEAKERIf you're if you're thinking you're going to spend one hundred and fifty or two hundred bucks on a mechanical keyboard.

59:43SPEAKERSorry, I told me to get off on a tangent here.

59:45SPEAKERI just started trying to Google about Best Buy's financial fortunes when you mentioned that they have a bunch of mechanical keyboards out.

59:52SPEAKERIt made me remember that I feel like I read that Best Buy is like kind of on the upswing again.

59:57SPEAKERI feel like they've done they've adapted to our new nightmare world pretty well.

1:00:01SPEAKERYeah, in that they they're basically just using their showrooms as like like curbside pickup stores in affected areas now.

1:00:12SPEAKERI should I should look into that a little bit more. I have one more keyboard question.

1:00:16SPEAKERYeah, what you got? This is probably more relevant to people who are doing the DIY thing.

1:00:21SPEAKERYeah, but I was wondering what kind of wireless options exist?

1:00:24SPEAKERI mean, I would assume they're like really very few, even even in the retail, like the Logitech Corsair type space, like the premade.

1:00:31SPEAKERSo let's see, Logitech released a low profile mechanical switch wireless keyboard.

1:00:39SPEAKERGenerally, they don't do this because the battery requirements, the power requirements are pretty high.

1:00:43SPEAKERSure. OK, yeah. For backlight especially, you can get Bluetooth.

1:00:48SPEAKERSorry, if you have a backlight, you're not going to have wireless. If you don't have backlights.

1:00:53SPEAKERYes, there are some a lot of Bluetooth mechanicals.

1:00:57SPEAKEROK. And you can choose that on the board. I'm I don't know that this exists, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

1:01:03SPEAKERIf there's not just a little dongle box, you can plug into your into your keyboards.

1:01:09SPEAKERBecause one of the nice things about a lot of these keyboards is they'll have like a mini USB or micro USB port on them so that you get the cable sort of detachable too.

1:01:17SPEAKERAnd I wouldn't surprise me if there's just a box you can plug in that makes any keyboard Bluetooth.

1:01:24SPEAKERGot it. But yeah, if you're thinking about like getting a mechanical keyboard for your Mac, most of them are going to be you're probably going to want Bluetooth, would be my guess.

1:01:32SPEAKEROK, that makes sense. Yeah. All right. I think that's it.

1:01:36SPEAKERI apologize in advance for anything that I got wrong.

1:01:39SPEAKERIf and I have to really shout out the entirety of the keyboard and mechanical mechanical keyboard and other input devices channel on the Discord.

1:01:47SPEAKERYes, because I I was making my notes in public view for the first time.

1:01:53SPEAKERI guess this is another patron perk that's actually influenced the content.

1:01:59SPEAKERIt's real sneaky eating its own tail kind of business here.

1:02:03SPEAKERIf the snake's not going to eat its tail, who is?

1:02:05SPEAKERYeah, so that crowd is incredibly passionate and incredibly knowledgeable.

1:02:10SPEAKERI did I wanted to read a little note that that he included with this keyboard he sent me because because I think this this made me understand that subculture probably better than anything else.

1:02:21SPEAKEROK, it says this keyboard has been sent to be Shoemaker for the express purpose of introducing him to mechanical keyboards.

1:02:27SPEAKERI do not take any responsibility hereafter for any financial or personal liability that may be encountered in the endless search for one's in the game keyboard.

1:02:35SPEAKERLike that statement right there kind of made it click for me.

1:02:38SPEAKERIt's like, oh, well, everybody is out there chasing like their dream perfect keyboard.

1:02:42SPEAKERRight. And like they're never quite going to get there, but they're going to just keep rebuilding and rebuilding to get a little bit closer.

1:02:48SPEAKERFor what it's worth, like I got a taste of this and then was like, OK, this one's good enough for me.

1:02:54SPEAKERI like the lights. The keys feel good. Moving on.

1:02:57SPEAKERSo you can you can dip in and dip out. You know, it's not like they're always pulling you back in.

1:03:02SPEAKERSure. But but yeah, the so the everybody in that in that discord, including Twinkle Twinkie and Zander and a bunch of other folks.

1:03:11SPEAKERWhen I was when I posted the the shared doc, they were coming in and helping correct me when I was wrong.

1:03:18SPEAKERAnd that said, any mistakes are mine. I own them.

1:03:22SPEAKERSo don't yell at Brad or people in the discord. Just come yell at me.

1:03:27SPEAKERI like this policy. Stick with. Yeah, it's it was.

1:03:31SPEAKERBut it was hugely helpful. And part of it is that while there are some really good resources like desk authority dot net,

1:03:38SPEAKERwhich has a really great wiki that explains a lot of the differences between the switches and the technology,

1:03:43SPEAKERthe terminology is a little more in flux than a lot of things that aren't quite as grassroots as this are.

1:03:49SPEAKERAnd it gets kind of challenging.

1:03:53SPEAKERAnd then also there's a whole world of like weird mods that we could get into that.

1:03:58SPEAKERI just kind of skipped over here, like taking bits from one switch and putting them in the bits from another switch.

1:04:03SPEAKERSo you have something that has like the the the the the the force required of a of a Cherry MX Green with the clickiness of a blue or the linear throw of a red or whatever it is.

1:04:18SPEAKERSo, yeah, I guess if you have questions, send them in. As always, the email address is tech pod at content downtown.

1:04:26SPEAKERAlso, I just want to throw out if if anybody has indulged in this hobby to gross excess, I would love to hear about it.

1:04:33SPEAKERLike you just if you just have stacks of keyboards around yourself, like if you ever just woke up one morning and you were like, why do I have all these keyboards?

1:04:40SPEAKERLike, I would love to hear who has gone so far. You know what I mean?

1:04:44SPEAKERLike, yeah, you're hoarding your keyboard, hoarding stories, hoarding the vast yes.

1:04:49SPEAKERKey hoarding. That's the key before.

1:04:52SPEAKERYes, we figured finally, finally got an episode topic or title.

1:04:57SPEAKERBut yeah, you know, like your your average use case, like you need like what, one, maybe two keyboards from.

1:05:02SPEAKERI think the two or three is reasonable even.

1:05:05SPEAKERYeah, but there's but there's got to be people out there with like a dozen.

1:05:08SPEAKERI do. Somebody have like one of those one of those carousel trays, like like the Ferris wheel style ones where like they crank the side and it just pops up the this is my typing emails keyboard.

1:05:19SPEAKERThis is my browsing the Web keyboard.

1:05:22SPEAKERThis is my playing. This is my playing first person shooters keyboard.

1:05:25SPEAKERThis is my space sim keyboard.

1:05:27SPEAKERWho out there has started building custom shelving to display all of your extra keyboards?

1:05:31SPEAKERThat's what I want to know. I have seen in the past pictures of keyboards in frames like shadow boxes on the wall.

1:05:37SPEAKERI really like I said, some of those keyboards look good enough to eat, so I'm not surprised.

1:05:41SPEAKERDelicious. As always, thanks to all of our patrons for your support.

1:05:48SPEAKERTotally. You all without you all the show wouldn't be as possible.

1:05:53SPEAKERLike quite literally this week. Yeah, I literally having the document open saved me probably five hours of reading wikis and message boards and getting to the stuff that actually matters rather than the stuff that you think matters when you're just doing the surface dive.

1:06:09SPEAKERSo it was incredibly helpful and thank you all.

1:06:11SPEAKERBut extra special thanks to our executive producer level patrons, Andrew Cotton, David Allen and Jacob Chapel and all of everybody on the discord and who supports the show.

1:06:21SPEAKERWe appreciate it whether you're a patron or not. Thank you all so much for listening.

1:06:25SPEAKERYes. And thanks for telling friends. I love I've been seeing a lot more people telling friends.

1:06:29SPEAKERI don't know what we did last week when we were talking about this, but a bunch of people signed up. So thank you to all the new folk.

1:06:36SPEAKERThe discord has been it's kind of like it's funny because like I see people asking questions and then I see the same people answering questions in different channels every week.

1:06:49SPEAKERAnd it's like everybody's kind of bringing what they know and taking what they don't know.

1:06:53SPEAKERAnd it makes me feel happy and warm and fuzzy inside every time I see it.

1:06:56SPEAKERSo it is a positive, happy, fun, good time. Exactly. And that'll do it for us this week, I guess, Brad.

1:07:03SPEAKERYeah. How are you living? Feeling good these days?

1:07:10SPEAKERShould I not have asked? No, I mean, look, we've been dog sitting for some friends and that's nice because there's an animal around and it's nice to have animals around.

1:07:19SPEAKERFor whatever reason, I feel like you're the one that I see the most throwing out a day count out there.

1:07:23SPEAKERLike I think you are keeping a closer watch on how many days it's been than anybody else I know.

1:07:27SPEAKERWe crossed one hundred and fifty on Monday.

1:07:30SPEAKERYes. But I saw I think I saw you mentioned it was like day one hundred forty eight, obviously a couple of days before.

1:07:34SPEAKERYeah, it's just like, wow, really? That's that's all Gina. That's startling.

1:07:38SPEAKERWell, we started on March six, which was a week before most of Northern California, because I was looking at numbers and was like, fuck this.

1:07:45SPEAKERWe're pulling out. Yeah, no, it's things are things are like I don't know.

1:07:51SPEAKERI you know what? I have more problems than anything else. What's what should I have for lunch?

1:07:55SPEAKERYeah, I could see it like I end up eating a hot dog or some garbage, like a peanut butter and banana sandwich more often than not, because I'm like, I don't know what I have for lunch.

1:08:04SPEAKERYeah, you can only make a turkey sandwich so many different ways.

1:08:07SPEAKERYeah. So so post your best lunch. Send us your lunch suggestions.

1:08:11SPEAKERI want some lunch ideas. Oh, that's a good. Oh, you know what? She's doing some brainstorming right now.

1:08:16SPEAKERLike you mentioned doing another food episode recently. Yeah. And I was like, I don't know what new angle we could put on food because we're not chefs or anything, but like quarantine food.

1:08:24SPEAKERLike I would love to hear about people's quarantine eating strategies if you've got any way to dress up your drab ass diet.

1:08:30SPEAKERYeah, because you can't go out and get interesting food very often.

1:08:33SPEAKERLike, yeah, like I see people posting about eating salads every day and I'm like, man, that is way too much work for me. Like at lunchtime, I want to go in and chuck a hot dog in some boiling water and then eat that in a bag of chips in like 10 minutes.

1:08:45SPEAKERWhat if what if you skip the boiling water? What if you just go straight hot dog straight from fridge to mouth?

1:08:51SPEAKERI know people who are doing it. I'm not going to name Shane here.

1:08:53SPEAKERThat's a no from me, dog. I have put the hot dog in the microwave oven before.

1:08:59SPEAKEROK. You got to slice the top or else it explodes. You know what? I'll allow it.

1:09:04SPEAKERYou know what? Who's going to know? Who's going to know? I mean, I always have my secret shame.

1:09:08SPEAKERUnless you say it on a podcast that nobody's listening to this. We'll edit this part out. See you next week. Bye.

1:09:29SPEAKERAll right. I know this is self-indulgent at this point, but it's Mr. Related. Let me just ask real fast.

1:09:42SPEAKERYou were the one last, on the Patriot episode, you were like, I think we got to stop talking about the Mr. so much, but I'm going to allow it just this once, Brad.

1:09:49SPEAKERYou asked me pre-recording this show if I was powering my Mr. off of USB, which is one of the things I'm mad about. And I said, nope, let's just record it.

1:09:57SPEAKERDo you have a power switch? Well, you mounted yours in the case, right? So you got to, you must have a power switch.

1:10:03SPEAKERSo I got a set of power switches, like barrel plug, kind of pass through, you know, with just a little on off toggle. And I got some, also some barrel plug to USB to use with like an iPad charger or whatever.

1:10:16SPEAKERI have one of those. I got it from Amazon. Starkey. The switches work with the AC adapter. The USB cables work with a wall plug, USB wall plug. Okay. The switches do not work with the USB cables.

1:10:27SPEAKEROh, that makes sense. Yeah. It's probably, it's got to be a voltage drop thing, right? It's just one too many, it's one too many connectors that is passing through and it's just dropping enough voltage that it won't, like it kind of powers on sort of, but not stably.

1:10:39SPEAKERLike it actually behaves in some pretty horrifying ways. Like my DualShock 4 that was plugged into the USB was like turning on and off randomly. Like it was clearly kind of getting enough power, but not really.

1:10:51SPEAKERSo I, mine is plugged into an Anker USB port and it's one of the newer ones that has like five, I think it has five USB B, USB A plugs and one USB C plug. And it supports Chi, not Chi, but the, the USB three power standards, like the one we talked about a few months ago, like, so it can do, it can charge a switch basically.

1:11:15SPEAKERAnd it, it works with the mister, but when I plugged it into like an iPad charger, an old iPad charger, that didn't go so well. But, but I have mine, I'm doing mine so I can plug my mister in on my desk when I want to capture it or play in here.

1:11:28SPEAKERAnd I don't have to plug the, unplug the power brick from behind the TV when I'm playing in the living room.

1:11:33SPEAKERI think I should just give up on this. I should send the USB cables back and just buy another AC adapter, right? Isn't that the right call?

1:11:40SPEAKEROr you could buy more stuff. You could just buy the right USB power adapter. And also, do you need the power switch? Just unplug it when you're plugging on your desk.

1:11:50SPEAKERIt's such a pain. Like I have to, it's the way I have to contort myself to get under the desk to, to see where that plug is to plug it and unplug it.

1:11:59SPEAKERNo dude, unplug it from the back of the mister.

1:12:02SPEAKERFumble toggle switch in the dark. This is, this is beyond my skills to do blind, unfortunately, but you sound so defeated.

1:12:10SPEAKERI really, really ruined my afternoon. I'm in search of absolution and I have not found it yet. Don't even get me started.

1:12:19SPEAKERDon't even get me started on the stupid active video repeater I bought to try to fix my capture issue.

1:12:23SPEAKERLook, I, I, the switch that I made is just a big five volt switch with an LED in it.

1:12:29SPEAKERWait, you made a switch?

1:12:30SPEAKERI bought the switch and then I wired it into the back of the mister case.

1:12:33SPEAKERAlso, it's a big toggle and it lights up when it's on. It makes me very happy.

1:12:37SPEAKERThis is the first time I've really come to realize how much the Nintendo switch has destroyed our ability to talk about DIY electronics.