[BiOzZ] wanted to try a different keyboard layout than the ubiquitous Qwerty, so he grabbed an old keyboard and converted it to the Dvorak setup. This was accomplished by first popping off all of the keys from the black keyboard seen above, and boy did he find a mess underneath. It was nothing that a trip through the dishwasher (for the case only) wouldn’t fix, and the next step was to replace the keys in a different order. He found that a couple of them wouldn’t just go back in a different place, but had to be rotated 90 degrees to fit. Not a huge problem, you can see that he overcame the visual speedbump of letters facing the wrong way by adding his own letter labels. From there he walks us through the process of getting Windows to switch to the Dvorak layout.

I went through a similar process at the end of last year. I was experiencing a lot of pain in my hands from my prolific feature writing here at Hackaday so I chose to try out the Colemak keyboard. The white keyboard above is the one I repurposed using that layout. I found it quite easy to switch between two keyboard layouts using Ubuntu. After you’ve set it up in the keyboards dialog a layout icon appears on the panel. It wasn’t hard to pick the new key locations up, but it did reduce my typing speed by a factor of 8. In the end I found that adjusting my chair height and keeping my hands warm did the trick and I’m back on the Qwerty where I belong.

Microsoft is showing off five concepts for added mouse functionality. All of them seek to replace traditional move-and-click with touch sensitivity through either capacitive sensing, video recognition, sensor articulation, or laser scanning. We’re excited about the prospects of some of these features but at the same time wonder what this does to the price of this much-abused peripheral. After the break we’ll touch on each of the devices, along with time references for the video embedded above.

Capacitive Mouse (0:00)

The first offering is the closest to what we have now. It is a standard mouse that has a capacitive pad covering the body. This pad detects and reports any touches, demonstrated by on-screen blotches where the hand makes contact. We see this as a laptop touch-pad wrapped around a desktop mouse. Wrap it up and ship it out, we want one!

Video Multi-touch Mouse (1:52)

The next concept uses a curved piece of acrylic as the part of the body where you’d usually find the buttons. The secret to the sensing is a built in camera that passes image data to the computer. The touch sensitivity is provided by analyzing the image data. We’re a bit skeptical that this processing can be done inside of the mouse but we guess that’s for the R&D guys to work out. Also, how clean does the acrylic need to be to get a good image for processing?

Articulated Mouse (3:28)

Definitely the weirdest of the bunch. This is three mice in one, with a traditional mouse senor under an articulated pad for your thumb, and another for your pointer finger. The third sensor is in the mouse body itself where the palm of your hand rests. Tactile buttons can be added to the two satellite pads. We’re sure someone has a great use for this, but it would probably be no more popular than trackballs were.

Orb Mouse (4:56)

The orb is another camera-based design. Instead of a curved sheet of acrylic it utilizes a dome-shaped piece. The same concerns about video analysis exist but make sure you watch the demonstration of this used as a one-handed FPS controller.

Side Mouse (6:34)

This mouse makes your desk into the multi-touch area. It uses infrared laser scanning to pick up finger presses and motions in the general area around the mouse body. This reminds us of the laser qwerty keyboard and may be just as cool, who knows? We would anticipate some degree of a learning curve in using this device.

Conclusion

We’d love to see new and improved input devices readily available at a bargain price. Are those goals attainable? This really is inventing a better mouse(trap).

[via Mashable]

[Thanks Alex]

[skeezix] has got his hands on one of the first Pandora dev kits to make it out the door and took a few photos. This is 1 of the 20 MK2 devboards that were produced. Although, not final it certainly is close to the version they’ll be shipping. Pandora is a Linux based portable game console. The main chip in the clamshell device is a TI OMAP3530. It has OpenGL hardware acceleration and an 800×480 touchscreen. A QWERTY keyboard is included along with analog and digital game controls. WiFi, bluetooth, USB host, TV-out, and dual SDHC card slots round out the package. The team has already presold 4000 devices.

[morcheeba], who you should remember from CVS camera hacking, picked up a Peek and took some pictures while tearing it down. The Peek is a $100 QWERTY device with a simple OS designed only to check email. The device is being sold by T-Mobile with a $19.95/mo data plan. There’s nothing too spectacular to see other than 16MB of flash memory and a TI OMAP processor.

[via Make]