Optimus mini

[jkray]

Ever sincevalosonthor pointed out the extreme coolness that is the Optimus keyboard, I have wanted one. However, the company that has developed the Optimus (Art Lebedev Studios), has been relatively close-mouthed about the entire deal. They did say that there would be an announcement on Feb 1, 2006

Comments

[valosonthor]

For a while, in high school, I went through a stage where I taught myself to use a Dvorak. In the end, I found that it wasn't that much more advantageous, and I got irritated because I found that many of the reasons that Dvorak is touted as superior to Qwerty were just made up and rather propagandist.

As for the keyboard itself, you don't need an Optimus. Just take a knife, pop the letters off your current keyboard and rearrange them. Works just fine, except they won't all be tiered the same.

[valosonthor]

Forgot to mention. In addition to rearranging the keys, you have to rearrange your settings. Go into your keyboard properties and reset it to Dvorak standard or whatever the closest to that is.

[jkray]

I started to teach myself Dvorak in college, but decided not to do anything drastic like rearrange all the keys. ThinkGeek.com has a keyboard that is completely blank--which would also work well.

Maybe I'll buy an old crappy keyboard (or upgrade my current crappy one) and then rearrange one of them. :)

[valosonthor]

One thing that made life convenient for me, when trying to learn Dvorak, was that I know the Qwerty layout so well that I don't need to look at the keyboard to type. So, if I ever needed a break from Dvorak, I just switched my software back to Qwerty for a while, and left the buttons in the Dvorak layout.