I’ve got a new keyboard, and it’s a fabulous beast. Regular readers may remember that I have been using a Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro 2 (HHKB) for some time (about 6 years, as it turns out). That was my first mechanical keyboard since the days when mechanical keyboards were the only ones you could get. I’ve loved it to bits, but for the past few months I’ve been having pain and discomfort in my hands and wrists, and decided it might be time to look around for a more ergonomic replacement. After a lot of research and deliberation, I ended up getting an ErgoDox EZ. I’m still tweaking the configuration a bit, but I love it. It has already done wonders for both the comfort of my hands and my writing efficiency.
One thing I love about blogging and friendly social networks is that they can be a great source for finding out about cool things that you might not otherwise have come across. However, this can also open up dangerously enticing rabbit holes in which to fall, often involving spending money when you get to the bottom of them! So when Jack Baty posted about Roon, I was intrigued. At the time, I had a quick look and liked what I saw, but thought, “I don’t really need that as I’m quite happy with iTunes and Apple Music”.
For several years, I’ve used a 20” iMac at work — one of the older model, plastic shell models, which was the first of the iMacs to have an Intel chip. It has served me well, but it’s starting to get rather long in the tooth. It’s slow, a bit unreliable, and cannot be persuaded to run Mountain Lion. Since I already had a MacBook Air 11” that I used for my portable computing needs, I thought that I might was well switch over to that as my full-time computer: it’s easily fast and powerful enough.
I’ve been meaning to write this review for quite a while, but I’ve been trying to think how to go about it. How do you describe a tactile experience? It’s intangible. No, that’s completely wrong — the whole point is that it’s very tangible: it’s just extremely difficult to put that physical experience into words. Perhaps I should start with a bit of history about my preference for keyboards, and work my way up to the difficult bit.
I haven’t yet written about the other item I bought with my birthday money: a Fitbit wireless tracker. It’s really a kind of fancy pedometer that tracks the number of steps you’ve taken, the number of flights of stairs you’ve climbed (it has an altimeter), and various other estimated measures like calories burned and distance travelled. There are a couple of reasons why I really wanted to get one of these units.
A little while ago, I bought a couple of nifty stands for my iPhone from Piolo. There’s not much to them, really: they are just a nicely molded piece of plastic with a slot in one end just wide enough to grip the edge of an iPhone 4 without a case. The idea is that you attach the Piolo to the edge of the phone and you can prop it up in either portrait or landscape mode.
One of the things that I have really come to value about Twitter is the recommendations you get from like-minded fellow human beings for all kinds of stuff from vegan fish and chips to films: it’s great. However, sometimes it can get expensive…
First helgeg tweeted about some new headphones he had bought. They were made by Bowers and Wilkins, and I hadn’t come across them before. So I visited the site to have a look and was rather smitten.
