Posts Tagged

hardware

What is Bluetooth?

Elizabeth Technology January 31, 2023

Specs

Bluetooth behaves a lot like ordinary WiFi, but over much shorter distances. It’s wavelengths fall between 2.402-2.48 GHz, which, as you might remember from the WiFi article, is fairly low-powered. The max range that most consumer devices can reach is only about 30 feet. This works to its advantage! Bluetooth was designed in a time where rechargeable batteries were either small or high-powered, but never both. As a result, it’s one of the better ways to control peripherals. How many times a year do you have to replace your wireless mouse’s battery, after all?

Bluetooth is currently at version 4, and at the cusp of version five. Version 3 saw major upgrades to speed, but no decrease in battery life; version four delivers all of that power for less consumption.

Bluetooth standards are maintained by an outside, not-for-profit body of experts, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. If something wants to be called Bluetooth, it has to go through them first – they oversee the licensing of the term for businesses worldwide.

The History

Bluetooth and WiFi have a lot in common with each other. The lower bands of their wavelengths actually overlap some, and they’re both capable of transmitting a lot of complicated information to and from devices. The very first traces of something Bluetooth-like started in 1989, and its first major use cases were unfortunately places where battery use blocked it – the 1990s was partially known for obnoxiously large mobile phones. Getting any info anywhere without a cord could get expensive resource-wise. However, the creators didn’t give up! The team that created it was pretty small, but they wanted to see it used elsewhere, and so they made it public – other people could get in on ‘short-link radio’, and it’s first working version was on two competitor’s devices, a phone and a Thinkpad.

 From there, it’s been everywhere. Bluetooth first saw commercial use in 1999, with a wireless, hands-free headset. The first phone with Bluetooth rolled out in 2001, and Bluetooth version 1 had a top speed of about 721 kbps. It was barely enough for the compressed data from a phone call to get to the headset and back, and it wasn’t nearly enough for music, but it was still incredible. Hands-free phone calls! Hands free phone calls!!!

Bluetooth Version 2 doubled that speed and also made pairing much easier, and both of these made speakers more possible. Version 3 was even better, so much better that it could stream video wirelessly between devices – its data transfer speeds were up to 24/Mbs, because it established a connection directly to the device’s Wifi protocols. Versions 4 and 5 promise even more – all of this, minus the heavy battery consumption that can come with using WiFi to stream things. As rechargeable batteries improved, so did Bluetooth. Where WiFi failed or was impractical, Bluetooth swooped in on machinery and appliances.

Today

Bluetooth is still in use everywhere today! Where cords and cables can’t do the job or would be inconvenient, Bluetooth swoops in.

Mice. Keyboards. Radio dongles. Car infotainment systems. Headphones. Speakers. Truly, Bluetooth revolutionized the way people thought about their peripherals, and turned serious, irritating issues with file transfers into minor inconveniences. WiFi ad hoc was the prior protocol – it was very annoying to set up and maintain a connection, but the only other options were often cords. And, unlike WiFi, walls usually don’t stop Bluetooth transmissions!

Better yet, the tech has slowly improved over the years, and now it can transmit at speeds it’s previous versions could have only dreamed of. Version 4 transmits at speeds up to 25 MBPs, on par with it’s earlier versions but with much less battery consumption.  Bluetooth can stream between devices with very minimal delay, making it a popular choice for soundbars and other similar peripherals.

Flaws (and Fixes)

Much like WiFi, Bluetooth can be interrupted by the microwave, if it’s not properly shielded. If your headphones begin to act up whenever said microwave is on, it might be time to replace it! WiFi too – if your devices won’t pair, it could be because the Bluetooth band and the WiFi bands are overlapping. Move your device further away from the WiFi so it can connect, and then move it back once the devices have paired. Bluetooth is also (usually!) very short-range, and most consumer devices only broadcast to about 30 feet. It’s designed to be convenient, not powerful. Still, the newer versions of Bluetooth are able to reach further and further.

Connectivity issues are also unfortunately common. Bluetooth Smart, a low-energy version of Bluetooth from before 4.0, doesn’t get along with older versions of Bluetooth. Similarly, new versions are backwards compatible, but old and older versions may not be able to communicate if they’re both from before Bluetooth became backwards compatible in the first place.

Getting two devices who are compatible to communicate can be annoying too! And since so much of Bluetooth is hidden to the user, it’s possible to get stuck in a loop of turning both devices off and back on again to try and get them to connect. Especially if it’s something like a speaker or a pair of headphones – if it doesn’t connect while the other half is actively looking, you’ll have to start over. There’s not really a way around it: Bluetooth can’t be actively looking for the connection forever, and not every device can have a screen for users to monitor the connection’s progress.  

All that said, though, Bluetooth is still generally the most convenient wireless option that still delivers quality sound.

Sources: https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-bluetooth-4038864

https://www.androidauthority.com/history-bluetooth-explained-846345/

https://www.pcworld.com/article/208778/Wi_Fi_Direct_vs_Bluetooth_4_0_A_Battle_for_Supremacy.html

https://www.techlicious.com/how-to/how-to-fix-bluetooth-pairing-problems/

Is It True Macs Don’t Get Viruses? Short Answer: No!

Elizabeth Technology January 24, 2023

Absolutely not. Here’s why!

Apple devices are slightly harder to weasel into from outside, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. A virus has to be crafted differently to even function on an Apple computer. For the same reason that Apple needs its own version of browsers and games, it needs its own version of viruses, and with Microsoft being the default for most ‘sensitive’ systems, like pharmacies, school networks, and hospitals, hackers and other malicious individuals just don’t seem to care that much about Mac devices.

But not caring that much is not the same as not caring at all.

Apple’s known virus count is slowly creeping up, although viruses that use weaknesses in the system to get in are quickly made obsolete by updates. Apple viruses are a special kind of pain to deal with because the person who made them surely made them out of spite – as said previously, Mac’s system is not compatible with Microsoft’s, so viruses are custom tailored.

Their recommendation is to completely avoid third party apps – for good reason. The primary way that malware ends up in the computer’s system is via scam downloads. Those can look like a couple different things. Everybody (or almost everybody) knows not to click those flashing banners at the top of blog sites that advertise “FREE iPAD! CLICK NOW!” because it used to be the most common way to steal information from non-tech-savvy people.

“Free Flash Player!” “Free Game! Connect With Friends! Download Now!” are it’s equally outdated cousins. Anything that tells a Mac user that they need to download it has the potential to be a virus, and if the user is unlucky enough to get a virus prepared for a Mac, they’re in for a headache. But it’s tough to trick people with those flashing banners anymore, right? So…

The next easiest way is to fake an email from an app publisher, or even from Apple itself! This still won’t get a lot of people, but the people who fell for the flashing banners the first go-round might fall for an email that looks juuuuust official enough to make them doubt themselves.

One version of this scam involves sending an email with a downloadable attachment to ‘fix’ a ‘virus’ that ‘Apple’ has detected on the device. That’s not Apple, and there’s no virus until the recipient downloads the attachment. That was the goal! And now the virus is on the computer. Oh no!

Alternatively, if you’ve downloaded some game or another that you trusted, even though it was third party, and then received an email about a big patch that needs to be downloaded, you might fall for it! Depending on the game, they could have your email to send patches to, right? Official platforms like Steam certainly have their user’s email.

And that’s not even the game download itself! Downloading a game off of third party websites can lead to some nasty results, which is why Apple goes out of it’s way to warn you every step of the download, and also warn you off of third party downloads in every help forum. The risk that what you downloaded could be malware is just not worth the inconvenience of waiting for that game to come out on an Apple-licensed platform.

Long story short: it’s very possible, albeit difficult, to get viruses on a Mac computer. Don’t download attachments from strangers!

Source: Apple.com resources

What is RFID?

Elizabeth Technology December 27, 2022

Definitions

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and it’s usually used in the context of a chip! There are active and passive types: an active RFID chip has a tiny battery with it, while a passive one is powered by the energy of the reader’s signals alone. Active chips can be read from much greater distances, but the battery makes them heavier and more expensive. Meanwhile passive chips have to be blasted with the RFID signal to be read.

How do they work?

RFID chips are great because they’re small, and they don’t take line-of-sight to read like many other cataloguing techs do.

There are three major parts to an RFID chip: the microchip, an antenna for receiving and broadcasting signals, and substrate to hold it together. RFIDs work with radio waves, a form of electromagnetic radiation. They actually got their start during the end of WWII, where a Soviet engineer created a passive listening device activated by radio waves, which would then store a small amount of information about the transmission. It wasn’t really the same as what we use in security tags and inventory systems today, but it was a tiny passive chip with information stored on it passively, and that’s close enough! 1973 saw a real attempt at the kind we have today, and ever since, they’ve been shrinking in size.

RFID chips can also come with read-only or read/write memory, depending on the style of that chip. Essentially, it has a very small amount of memory on it, just enough to store things like batch number, serial number, or address, in the case of pet tags. They’re not very complex: in the case of an active tag, the reader simply dings the RFID chip, which then responds on a compatible wavelength with the relevant information via that antenna.

Some chips broadcast constantly, while others broadcast on a regular interval, and some wait for the RFID reader to ding them before they send their data. In a passive chip, the RFID reader has to ding the chip so hard that it absorbs enough EM radiation to respond – energy hits the antenna, travels to the chip, and powers it enough to activate the antenna for signalling, which then causes the chip’s signal to travel back up the antenna and transmit to the reader. Neat!

Utility

An RFID chip’s low profile and small size makes them great for inventory management. Since the chip doesn’t need line-of-sight like barcode scanners do, production doesn’t have to worry about maintaining a certain orientation towards cameras for their items, they can just pass them over an RFID scanner and they’re good to go. Radio waves can pass through solid objects!

The RFID chips are also good at tracking inventory while in the store: you’ll notice many big box stores have an exit with detectors alongside the doors, which prevents unscanned or active chips from getting out the door. It also sometimes triggers on nametags and items the cashier had to scan in the cart, but most of the time it works as intended.

RFID chips are great for livestock and pet chipping – they’re small, and not only are they less painful than a tattoo, the data is also unlikely to migrate or blur like ink could in a pet’s ear. The initial wound is also smaller, which makes infection less likely. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but they carry a lot more information for less relative risk to the animal.

On the human side, RFID chips are frequently used in employee identification badges – the theory is that it’s harder to copy and easier to read than a barcode scanner for restricted areas. Some people go so far as to get them implanted, but the ethics of that are… iffy, to say the least, even if they want the implant. The long-term effects in humans just aren’t that well-known, and while pets are a good indicator that nothing should go wrong, pets also don’t have to worry about getting their phone hacked because their pet tag carried a virus along.

RFID chips are now popular in credit cards! The chip in the card is (in theory) safer than the regular magnetic stripe, and it’s supposed to be much harder to copy. Of course, early versions still had their issues, but now they’re difficult to signal from a distance.

Flaws

RFID chips aren’t free from flaws.

Security can be a problem, especially for active chips, which can be read from hundreds of meters away. Most vendors have some sort of protocol in place, but for a hot minute, RFIDs in cards were a potential security nightmare. Remember all those anti-RFID chip wallets? That’s because readers were able to access the chip as though they were being used for a purchase. It just wasn’t very safe before protocols were established.

Secondarily, a bunch of folks went out of their way to prove that the more complex RFIDs could become transmission sites for computer viruses – one guy had one implanted in his hand, and if the virus could infect that hand, then the virus could get anywhere he could wirelessly. The perfect crime! Airgapped networks were no longer safe if RFIDs were on the table.

Incompatible readers can make inventory transfers more painful than they need to be, as well – the ISO sets standards for which channels get to be used for what purposes, but the companies have to comply with them first. They also have to have the right kind of reader – is it scanning for active or passive chips? The two have very different needs. An active reader might not be able to find a passive chip!

There’s also the sticky issue of privacy and destruction. How do you get rid of the tag on the product once it’s no longer needed for inventory? RFIDs can be destroyed by microwaves, but that doesn’t help if they’re attached to an electronic, which can also be destroyed by microwaves. They can be wrapped in foil a couple of times, and stop transmitting long distances – on some objects, that makes them unusable. It takes special equipment and some professional skill to actually scan a building for RFIDs, but it’s not totally impossible.

It just takes work, the kind of work a stalker or government agent might be willing to put in if they needed info on a person so badly that they’d want to see what items they had in their house. This is also more difficult than it sounds because most chips go by something vaguely specific, like a batch or serial number with no product name attached, but it’s not impossible. It would just take quite a lot of effort when stalking via binoculars is much easier.

It’s also still possible to clone RFIDs – passports with RFIDs in them could be an especially large problem for both the original holder and the government of that country. The obvious option, credit cards, are still cloneable too, although with modern banking it’s often not worth the investment for the scammers.

However. With tech improving every day, it may be possible to limit what chips respond to which scanners, which would make it much more difficult to invade privacy. Chips get smaller and smaller every day, so it’s entirely possible a password- or signal- protected RFID may some day come into power.

Sources:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224328848_Impacts_of_RF_radiation_on_the_human_body_in_a_passive_RFID_environment

https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-insider/active-rfid-vs-passive-rfid

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/rfid.htm

How the EMV credit card chip works and why it matters

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-vaccine/fact-check-magnet-test-does-not-prove-covid-19-jabs-contain-metal-or-a-microchip-idUSL2N2N41KA

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-microchip-gates-ma/fact-check-rfid-microchips-will-not-be-injected-with-the-covid-19-vaccine-altered-video-features-bill-and-melinda-gates-and-jack-ma-idUSKBN28E286

How Much Thinner Can A Device Really Get?

Elizabeth Technology December 8, 2022

What’s the final goal of these wafer-thin devices?

You’ve likely noticed it in your own electronics – they get thinner. New phone upgrades are thinner, new business or casual use laptops are thinner. Smaller. And it frequently comes at the cost of features.

There was a time when the phone’s camera was flush to the surface of the phone. Now, the phone’s thinner and the camera’s better, but the lens protrudes from the surface. There’s nowhere else for it to go. The plug-in parts of chargers slim down too, so they don’t hold the weight of the phone if it’s lying flat on the table and charging, but it makes the cord weaker.

Thinner has not yet become a problem at this stage.

Feature Loss

The Mac Pro was fast, cool-looking, cutting edge, and it was priced to match.

However… it lost its optical drive, the place you put DVDs and CDs on most computers. Optical drives are now available to buy separately, because the optical drive has a minimum thickness it has to be, so removing it is the only way to break past that barrier thickness. Folks still need them, though, for things like software downloads and old movies only stored on discs.

HDMI cables are also disappearing off the sides of devices (from all brands). USB ports are being cut, too. Much to the disappointment of photography fans, the SD card is no exception: Apple removed the SD card reader from their MacBook Pro, leaving them stuck with wireless connection. Supposedly this was done to encourage camera manufacturers to build a more robust wireless system, but it looks an awful lot like ditching useful features for the pursuit of a thinner device and selling them back to the customer with adaptors.

Apple’s not the only one falling into this trap, either! Dell laptops with no disc reader leave people with no ability to install older software stored on discs – if you upgrade your computer, you might very well be dragged into upgrading your printer, too, or downloading an emulator to play a game that you used to be able to play on your old computer. Optical readers can be expensive, especially if you spring for Apple’s name brand, on top of the ever-increasing cost of the actual computer.

What’s the goal, here? What is the final, perfect device? Shaving millimeters off at a time surely isn’t worth the cost of a separate optical drive, right? Eating away at features, boosting the price, all while selling the device as thinner?

Material Strength

Aluminum. It’s great. Lightweight, it’s an excellent conductor of heat, and it bends, instead of cracking, when under strain. It’s a popular choice for encasing machinery – planes, cars, and electronic devices all use aluminum or aluminum alloys to get that perfect lightweight strength. However, lately, electronics casings have been getting weaker. The cases bend. They twist. They flex, and put strain on the inside. Why? It’s still the same aluminum – but it’s thinner. The iPhone bending under weight wasn’t purely the aluminum’s fault, the whole thing was thinner, with a bigger screen!

There’s a ratio! Nobody wants the brick phone, but making the laptop into a pancake and removing features just to get thinner is becoming unsustainable. If you’re big into gaming, you might have noticed a recent trend towards mechanical keyboards for desktops – the buttons are big and chunky, and make a satisfying click when pressed. Bigger desktop machines with lights flashing inside them to show off the mechanical components are also rising in popularity. These increasingly thin laptops are sacrificing a lot of user experience all for the sake of being thinner than a single-subject notebook.

Not to forget feedback!

People generally like physical feedback – I can tell when I’ve missed a button just by sound on a regular keyboard, but on the slimmest of Macs, where the button barely depresses? Can’t tell. The buttons just don’t have enough space to make a clicking noise. I respect that! It’s incredible engineering, but it’s the kind of thing that drives users insane over time unless they didn’t want tactile feedback. I expect keyboards to be clicky, so when something subverts that expectation, it doesn’t feel right.

At some point, a laptop can’t be as thin as a tablet. There’s just not enough places to shave off from, and yet computer manufacturers are still trying to get it to a quarter inch thick. It’s making the machine physically weaker, and worse at withstanding the user opening it. Can that paper-thin screen handle me opening it from the corner? It makes me deeply uncomfortable to try. Besides bending, blunt force trauma is also a bigger threat to thinner, lighter machines – there will be no ‘kinetic therapy’ for these machines. Less aluminum and thinner internal components means it suffers more when it’s dropped, too.

Please. It already fits in the bag. It doesn’t need to fit in a folder, too.

Sources:

https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/22/4866504/apple-macbook-pro-with-optical-drives-discontinued-but-13-inch-model-remains

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-superdrive

https://www.howtogeek.com/204867/how-to-use-cds-dvds-and-blu-rays-on-a-mac-without-an-optical-drive/

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-superdrive

How To Break A Hard Drive

Elizabeth Technology December 1, 2022

1. Those Fancy Neodymium (or Rare-Earth) magnets.

Strong magnets can erase credit cards and fuzz (or even destroy) VHS tapes, and magnetizing hard drives is actually a commonly advertised way to completely wipe the information from it. A hard drive contains thin glass disks coated in magnetic film that can be modified and read by the head attachment, and therefore shouldn’t be exposed to other magnets.

As for decorating your PC stand, fridge magnets are probably not strong enough to wipe the machine from the outer wall of the PC stand, but it’s not exactly recommended.

Go for a couple of stickers instead (not over the air intake ports, of course). (As a side note, when I was looking up information from this, I found a lot of freak MRI accidents. Industrial magnets are terrifying!)

2. Dropping the machine.

Don’t do that. Blunt force trauma can break the computer by dislodging components inside it. Most good-quality computers do their best to prevent breakage by just making the machine’s insides a little tougher, using bigger pins or more solder, but at some point fine machinery is fine machinery and dropping it might break it.

The same goes for “percussive maintenance” – a computer wouldn’t last very long in the real world if the user could never get away with tapping it, or setting it down a little too fast, but hitting anything inside the PC tower, directly, even if you recognize the part, is a major NO. The hard drive especially. Remember, it’s insides are made of glass!

3. Freezing it.

Freezing the machine is sometimes recommended for hard drive failure, but it’s… not ideal. You know how putting cling-wrap over something that’s still kind of warm will lead to water collecting on the inside of the wrap? The same thing happens when a computer is put in the freezer. Water can collect inside the machine and cause issues.

Besides the risk of condensation, freezers can completely brick up LCD screens, which rely on temperature to change color. If you’re trying to save an older laptop with this hack, that alone can match the cost of the hard drive IF it works, which is far from guaranteed. The potential for saving a hard drive vs. harming other parts of the computer is not good enough to be worth it. Anecdotally, Gillware Data Recovery’s article on the subject says that they’ve never seen this trick work in the first place!

4. Cooking it.

On the other end of temperatures, don’t remove the cooling fan for being too loud. Overheating a computer can lead to hard drive failure (heat makes magnets less magnet-y); the fan being too loud is much better than the hard drive going dead silent, and there’s other fixes for a too-loud fan. Dell, a large computer manufacturer, has a troubleshooting guide on the issue.

5. Drowning it.

Getting the machine wet can cause a short circuit, which can then lead to hard drive failure. Don’t balance your drinks on top of your PC stand! It’s not so much the liquid itself as the things dissolved inside it. Chemically pure, laboratory-grade water is actually a pretty poor conductor, but tap water and even regular grocery-store distilled water have some amount of dissolved minerals in them, which are conductors. Not to mention things like soda or juice. Just keep drinks away!

6. Choking it.

Don’t go opening the hard drive seal in a non-dust free environment. It does require lab conditions. Don’t try to DIY hard drive repair in the same garage that’s regularly opened to the outside; getting dust in that part of the computer can cripple or ruin it. Even if you know what the problem is, the machinery in the hard drive is so incredibly fine that dust invisible to the human eye can damage it.

7. Confusing it.

Try not to delete critical software and/or firmware. If you’re going to take advice from strangers online to avoid a computer repair shop, maybe do a little more research after they’ve suggested a solution – sometimes, people give wrong instructions on purpose just because they can. It is also important to note that it’s not impossible to damage hardware with software, or a lack of software.

If you do accidentally delete critical software, don’t restart the machine after turning it off. The odds of getting your data back go down every time the computer has to struggle to re-boot after a major failure, according to Data Recovery Labs.

Did Always On Displays Get Good?

Elizabeth Technology November 24, 2022

‘Always On’ for phone displays is a relatively new development. Of course some apps and programs have tried it before, but the cons are numerous: it consumes battery. It can make it hard to tell if the phone screen is off-on or on-on and ready to be unlocked. It used to cause pixel burn-in, where the design on-screen becomes ‘stuck’ there. (In fact, depending on how long you’ve had your phone, you may be able to spot burn-in from your battery and WiFi indicators when you go full-screen on a video on your current device.)

It seems things have changed, and both the iPhone and Pixel are coming out with phones that have optional Always On Display built in. How do they tackle the issues this style of display used to cause?

1) Battery Life

Outside of the brick and suitcase phones, handheld consumer cell phones are as big as they’ve ever been. The screens are huge, many topping 6 inches, and while the devices haven’t gotten much thicker (sometimes even slimming down) the actual components needed for computing keep getting smaller and smaller, freeing up space for the battery.

Ultimately, ‘Always On’ didn’t get much cheaper to use energy-wise, but phone batteries have gotten truly massive in the time between the first notions of it and now. Many new generation phones boast multiple days of battery life given you’re not running Minecraft, location services, and Youtube on said phone at the same time.

Battery life is no longer the limiting factor in Always On settings!

Additionally, the iPhone has announced that Always On will not activate when the phone is face down, when it senses it’s in a pocket, and when a bedtime routine is set. Users can also turn it off in settings if they so choose. This limits how much power that function actually takes.

2) Is This Thing On?

The Pixel turns off the pixels surrounding the phone’s clock display, and keeps the clock itself at a very low light. Essentially, only the clock zone and any notifications are actually ‘on’ onscreen, and in most lighting conditions it’s not hard to tell whether your device is off-on (which won’t accept touch to activate it) or on-on (which will). The new iPhone still turns on the entire screen if Always On is active, but it shouldn’t be hard to differentiate as long as your brightness preference when you’re actually in your phone’s menu isn’t set to the lowest setting.

That said, this is a new feature, and it’s going to take consumers a bit of time to adjust. Notifications on screen are generally interactable, but while the screen is “off-on” (in a state where it would be off under the old display rules), they won’t be.

3) Burn-In

While many screens on all sorts of devices, consumer or not, have improved, it’s tough to say whether or not they’ll be able to hold up to the demands of Always On without getting some burn-in. The thing causing burn-in is not the screen staying on and displaying pictures – it’s that those pictures don’t change. It’s why the TV displays showing movies in Best Buy and restaurants don’t get burn-in despite being on for far longer than any ordinary consumer would leave them on. Meanwhile, restaurant menu boards aren’t doing that annoying thing where the menu disappears for an animatic to play because they think you want that, they’re doing it so that if the menu ever changes, there’s not the ghostly image of “Double Cheeseburger – 6.49$” over top whatever they’ve swapped it out with. If they just left it as it was, it’d burn in. If the screen is brighter, the effect is usually worse.

It will likely come down to how the consumer stores their phone. Some people do leave their phone facing up on a coffee table, and those people are going to be subjecting their phone to Always On for much longer than the people who store their phone in their pocket or face down. Again, it’s too early to tell how susceptible the phones will ultimately be to burn-in, but the odds are better than they’ve been in the past.

Qwerty Board – Why?

Elizabeth Technology November 3, 2022

The Typewriter

A typewriter works (roughly) like this: you press a key. On the other side of the keyboard, a key hammer, via a series of internal springs and levers, lifts to the paper. Right before it does, a ribbon with ink on it is pushed up by mechanisms inside of the machine, tied to the ones you’re activating when you hit the keys, and the end of the key hammer smacks the ink, imprinting it into the paper in the same shape as the hammer’s head, which is the same as the key you pressed.

Does this sound complicated? It is! And all of it is purely mechanical.

Initially, the typewriter’s keys were laid out in two rows, alphabetically. The design had some small updates, but it had one very consistent, very annoying issue – striking two keys next to each other with too small of a gap between the key presses meant those keys would hit each other and get stuck, which was annoying to stop and fix. The Qwerty board not only separated the most commonly used letters to avoid the keys getting stuck, it also did so in order to slow down the typist. The first iteration of the keyboard was too efficient to use efficiently!

The New Keyboard

There’s a term for using old designs for new items, or why we kept the qwerty keyboard even as computer keyboards removed the mechanical issue at the heart of qwerty design – it’s known as a skeuomorph! Skeuomorphs are items that take design features from older versions of themselves to make the newer version less confusing, scary, or difficult to learn. For example, the first phones with buttons arranged the buttons in a circle to make the transition easier from the old rotary phones.

Typists of the time were used to qwerty, and so qwerty is what ended up on the electronic keyboards in front of the first consumer computers. Specialist keyboards like stenography machines and split kinesis boards are entirely different beasts and developed on different evolutionary pathways.

Alternate Layouts

Dvorak is interesting, and the most common letters are in the home row, so the hands travel less while typing. Despite this, it’s not significantly faster – it forces the typist to use both hands on almost every word, and takes practice just like Qwerty.

Colemak keyboards are much the same, in a different orientation. Even more of the typing takes place on the home row on a Colemak keyboard, so much so that it might be a disadvantage!

This leads to the Workman keyboard, which is designed not to be mostly on the home row and instead, the keys are clustered together according to commonality – this results in less movement than the Colemak keyboard. While less space between keys sounds like it would lead to less movement, it doesn’t! Not with home-row centered typing. The H + E combo on the Colemak in particular was awkward to hit. The ‘E’ key is in about the same location as the ‘K’ key is on a Qwerty board. With a bit more space between the most commonly-typed-together letters, the Workman keyboard is quickly picking up a fandom.

For now, though, Qwerty is the default!

How to Clean Your Electronics

Elizabeth Technology October 25, 2022

Water is obviously out. You can’t use water on your electronics without the risk of them shorting.

1) A VERY Soft Cloth

Quality microfiber cloths are about as good as it gets for hard and plastic screens. Make sure you get the kind specifically rated for glass lenses or electronics (car microfiber cloths have a little more leeway in softness as car paint is not as soft as screen plastic, and as such we don’t recommend them) and voila, you’ve got a solid option for cleaning your screen that’s reusable, washable, and easy to store. One big note to make is that you do need to wash it – if you’re not careful, and you pick up a lot of grit or dust, you can end up sanding your screen or electronics with said grit or dust.

Swiffer products, like their dust mop, can be useful for keyboards and harder plastics, but as they can sometimes be scented (which can leave residue), are often not washable, and are usually meant for floors and hard knickknacks, the microfiber cloth is a much better choice.

2) Lens Wipes

If you spilled something a bit viscous on your screen or keyboard, and you don’t want to risk soaking your device, look to lens wipes! Few things are better solvents than water, so simply wetting a microfiber cloth can often do the trick, but if you’re worried about it dripping or otherwise ruining your device, pre-dampened lens wipes may save the day. The only downside is that they tend to be small!

A bit of 70% isopropyl alcohol (also known as rubbing alcohol) applied to a microfiber or other soft cloth can also be used to clean a screen, generally – just keep the cloth damp, not soaking.

3) Compressed Air

Compressed air is great for many things! It can often get crumbs out of crevices that cloths and dusters can’t reach, which keyboards are full of. However, it also comes with some tips – you can blow off keys with it if you’re holding it too close to said keyboard, so keep to the distance listed on the bottle. You also shouldn’t hold it upside down. If you do, the pressurized liquid at the bottom of the container will come out, and not only can it sometimes leave residue, but it’s also going to freeze whatever it touches, which is hazardous to you. And possibly the machinery, depending on what you’re hitting.

What NOT To Use

1) Non-lens Cleaning Wipes

If a wipe is wood based, or otherwise meant for something besides lenses, there’s a chance it could scratch your screen. Doubly so if it’s advertised as having ‘scrubbing power’! It’s not a guarantee – some screens are softer than others – but with how cheap microfiber cloths are, and how expensive your computer screen probably was, it’s just not worth it to use a Clorox wipe over a microfiber cloth. Over time, it might haze the screen, or scratch it immediately.

2) Windex and Other Household Cleaners

Not every solvent gets along with every plastic, but Windex especially is not great for screens. Windex works best on glass and polished metal – anywhere else, and it may slowly dissolve what it’s been sprayed on. You’re not supposed to use it on wood because it can sometimes eat varnish! If you spill something viscous on a screen and need a solvent to get it off, use something designed for cameras, water (but not so much your microfiber cloth is soaking or dripping!!), or the lens wipes mentioned above. Isopropyl alcohol is generally safe for devices, but be sure to use a soft, non-wood based cloth or wipe to use it.

Weird Keyboards

Elizabeth Technology April 18, 2022

Stenographers

Court stenographers press combinations of keys to produce certain letters, which allows them to type significantly faster than the average person on a QWERTY top row keyboard. Instead of pressing twenty-six individual keys to form letters alongside all the numbers and punctuation, they generally have 22, and press the keys at the same time to form words in the same way a pianist presses keys to form chords instead of individual notes. This allows those stenographers to type quickly enough to keep up with two or three people speaking at the same time.

The problem with these is that they’re non-intuitive and require special training, and they’re fairly expensive for what they are. Other notable ‘chording’ keyboards include things like this CyKey, which was designed for one-handed use and only features eight buttons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyKey

However, if you still want to use both hands, maybe the CharaChorder does the job! The CEO of the company boasts an impressive 500 WPM with the device, which also works by chording letters but also doesn’t make you move your hands as much. Little joysticks underneath your fingers have letters tied to each cardinal direction.

QWERTY, DVORAK, and COLEMAK

The Qwerty design itself is actually designed to slow typers down – back in the days of the mechanical type writer, if you typed too fast, sometimes letters right next to each other would hit at the same time and get stuck upright, which is annoying to fix and could smudge the paper – and, done enough, damage the machine. The design simply stuck because it was what most people were taught on, and what they’d be comfortable typing on when word processors began to take over the spot mechanical keyboards had.

Faster keyboard layouts exist, like Dvorak- or Colemak layout keyboards, which group the most commonly used letter combinations together to make moving from key-to-key faster.

The real struggle is getting the OS set up to accept them, although any decent alternative keyboard should come with a driver install alongside it.

Orbitouch

Orbitouch is a keyboard designed to allow people without full movement of their hands to type. Essentially, the user puts their hands on the orbs, and then pivots to select letters via the chording system from before, except that you don’t have to hit the key’s chord pieces all at once. CharaChorder does something similar, but having to hit the buttons all at once makes it less user-friendly than the Orbitouch, which is actively designed for typers who can’t do that.

It’s a little slower than the other options, but the Orbitouch isn’t actually designed for speed – it’s designed for people with injuries that prevent them from typing on normal keyboards. Instead of having to consistently raise and lower your hands to the keys, the Orbitouch allows users to keep their hands pressed firmly to the interface, which means tremors, muscle weakness, partial paralysis, and other such factors won’t be such an impediment to typing. It’s not for everyone, and it is 350 dollars as of the writing of this article, but if you’d rather not fumble with transcription or voice-to-text software, the Orbitouch may be worth the price.

Warped Board

If you find that your shoulders and upper back hurt after typing all day, a warped board may help – some keyboards like the X-Bow spread the keys and then tilt them inwards, which forces the user to widen their wrists and elbows, and therefore their shoulders. There are many hacks, tools, and tips for better typing posture, and this isn’t a holy grail – you can fudge this just like you can fudge any posture tool short of the ones you wear to force your shoulders back. But, if you just need a reminder to stop letting your shoulders creep up to your ears, this might be a decent investment for the cause. What’s nice about these keyboards is that they come in many different sizes, and the company even has a type cover option for tablets that’s comparable to Microsoft prices.

Sources:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3abavv/this-keyboard-lets-people-type-so-fast-its-banned-from-typing-competitions?utm_source=pocket-newtab

https://orbitouch.com/

https://x-bows.com/

Mechanical Keyboards

Elizabeth Technology February 4, 2022

If you like to watch streamers, or you’ve ever considered investing in a larger keyboard for gaming, you might have seen mechanical keyboards out in the wild before. They’re big. The keys are heavy. They make a lot of noise. They’re clunky. They can cost quite a bit as a hobby. And yet, they’re growing in popularity. What’s the deal?

Ever Slimmer

Perhaps it was rebellion against the difficult-to-clean and unsatisfactorily quiet keyboards of the laptops we started to see in the late 2010s. Especially Apple, which kept getting slimmer and slimmer until dropping it between the edge of your desk and the wall was a real concern.

Many of the portable, detachable keyboards designed to help solve this problem are not much better, designed to fit alongside a touchscreen device or laptop in the laptop’s bag. Slim, aluminum keyboards are designed for travel first and durability second, and this problem has become more apparent than ever when everybody has stopped travelling. Why sacrifice the convenience of a larger, easier-to-clean keyboard when you’re not going to get the benefits of that sacrifice?

Sensory Delight

In an article about Apple’s butterfly keyboards (cited below), the author discussed the sensation of trying to type on them. They were nearly flat, they were unfortunately delicate, and the key itself barely moved when pressed. It felt like typing on a touchscreen device, tapping your fingers onto solid aluminum and plastic over and over and over again with 100% resistance and no audible tell that you’d hit the key right. That’s fine for some – it was not fine for the people who’d grown up on clunky, solid, inch-thick Best Buy discount keyboards, those who were used to haptic input when typing.

Mechanical keyboards, on the other hand, offer a wide array of sensory input. You can get them nearly silent, or you can simulate the sound of typing on a typewriter; you can get thin or thick keys; you can change how much resistance your keyboard gives you; you can even get keys that light up when you type, so if you type like me and your eyes drift between the screen and the keyboard, you’ll still be getting input even if you go for a quiet option.

They come in a number of colors and with a number of accessories, too, so you can get weird with your accent and functional keys. Notable examples include a tiny three dimensional cow for the tilde key, a Japanese-style pagoda, and many more – often hand-sculpted and easily searchable on Etsy.

It’s a Good Time

Someone on TikTok has been steadily sculpting smaller and smaller magnetic Kirbys for their keyboard’s ‘K’ key. Another has sculpted every key on the board into food using a combination of polymer clay and acrylic paint. As mentioned before, you can get a keyboard that lights up with your inputs, and you can get keys in a number of colors – any color you want, if you’re good at mixing and applying plastics paint. Really, the sky’s the limit. If you want it to feel like you’re sinking your fingers into butter every time you hit the keys on the left side of your keyboard, but you need to work the right side out because you need to build up picking strength for guitar or whatever, you can do that! Many mechanical keyboard bases are set up to accept the standard scissor switch keys that everybody but Apple from the years of 2014 to 2020 uses, so you could in theory even strip the keys from the Best Buy discount keyboard and slap them into a new frame, given it’s big enough to prevent crowding. Even that’s not really a concern – size standardization benefits everyone, so most sold-separately keys fit most bases.

Shapes and Sizes

Mechanical keyboards are also available in a wide range of shapes and sizes. If you need a small keyboard that only has certain characters? You can buy it, and customize the keys with separate parts (not included usually) when it comes in the mail. If you need a split keyboard, that’s on the market. If your needs are hyperspecific, a mechanical keyboard might just be the keyboard for you.

They also tend to be much easier to clean, as many of them are designed to be easy to take apart for customization – being able to strip the board down to the contacts means you can remove every crumb of anything that could get in, and the tools to do so are generally cheap now that the hobby’s hit the big time. Apple’s weird butterfly switches were incredibly easy to break and very difficult to replace, meaning a damaged switch could kill a laptop, but many other name-brand laptops have keys too small to get tools under. If you eat at your desk, a mechanical keyboard may be a welcome break from flipping the laptop over and still not getting the ‘G’ key free from whatever’s gotten under it.

Sources:

https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is-ruining-my-life

‹  Older posts Newer posts  ›