Have you gotten tired of mechanical keyboards with all their physical feedback?
Have you considered... A completely flat keyboard?
Surprise! the plastic cover can be lifted up. The keyboard layout is on a piece of paper.
I think the middle two might be host connectors (AT and PS/2): you can hook a regular keyboard up through them.
The rightmost one is RS-232 serial, most likely
So it's by Logic Controls, apparently.
if you want the DOS version you gotta ask for it.
WELL that info isn't on their page anymore... but I'm gonna ask.
The other thing is that apparently you can program it without connecting the serial: serial is fully optional. So it must use some kind of out-of-band PS/2 messages to program it.
As much as I want them to provide the files, I will be 0% surprised if they just reply "bruh it's 2020"
https://t.co/op7ByWT9au
Dunno if you still need, but this page has a 7zip which includes DOS [supposedly, I have looked in the zip, but obv can't verify its usefulness - it seems cobbled from sources by the folder names in the zip]https://t.co/okmAr6FPIn
— 'ingie (@yngling) December 23, 2020
I'll have to grab a more generic computer and try it there.
Like this one!
Have you ever wanted to type on alphabetical comic sans?
no? Fuck you, you're gonna.
Surprisingly little, for how incredibly heavy this keyboard is.
(the case is sheet metal!)
There's some missing parts: I think that's because this one has the serial port but doesn't actually support serial. That's an optional function, so those missing chips are probably serial-TTL chips
This is a RAMTRON FM24C16, a 2 kilobyte FRAM.
FRAM is ferroelectric RAM, it's non-volatile storage, but acts much like a RAM chip for simplicity.
2K is about how much storage is needed to store the keyboard layout.
More from foone
Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
— Star Trek Minus Context (@NoContextTrek) January 28, 2021
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?
How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?
So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.
They're definitely not USB.
And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.
It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?
So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.
They're definitely not USB.
And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.
Flip it over, bend it in half, and now you can plug your SD card right into a USB port pic.twitter.com/jeBefP2xU1
— foone (@Foone) May 2, 2020
It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
More from Tech
I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
The tragedy of revolutionaries is they design a utopia by a river but discover the impure city they razed was on stilts for a reason.
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 19, 2016
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
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