Attention, People of the Future (Oh Wait, That’s Us!)

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Steve Spalding reminds us of just how amazing the age we live in is (at least for those of us privileged enough to be enjoying it),

Right now, right this very second, hovering above your head is a series of satellites that can tell you, to within a meter, exactly where you are located at almost any point on this planet. To access this magic, all you need is a device about the size of a deck of playing cards that you can pick up at your local Best Buy for $100.

In your pocket or by your bed, or socked away inside your glove compartment is another device that allows you to call anyone on the face of the planet, surf the web, write an essay, or shoot HD quality video. This device costs you about $70 a month, and you recently bought one for your 8 year old daughter so you could keep track of her at soccer practice.

On the other hand, can you image telling someone at the start of the 20th century that there’d be this worldwide network of computers that would be used extensively (primarily?) for transmitting explicit sexual images around the world?

When I was a kid, I had to guilt trip my parents into getting me an Apple IIe and then a Commodore 64 and thought I was uber-1337 for pirating the hell out of games for both systems (passing floppies of Archon around at lunch — good times!) Kids these days don’t realize how good they have it with torrents … at least that’s what I’ve heard …

Damn I’m glad I grew up to live in the future.

Unicomp Space Saver Keyboard

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have these crappy mushy USB keyboards. We had keyboards that took up most of the desktop, weighed 15 pounds and sounded like a dot matrix printer going full bore when you were typing on it. And we liked it!

Seriously, I type about 150 WPM and detest most keyboards made over the past 10 years. I finally got fed up with this a few weeks ago and decided to go find an old school clicky keyboard. After a bit of research on the Internet, I hit up the Unicomp site.

Unicomp makes keyboards based on technology from Lexmark International which manufactured all of those wonderful keyboards for IBM back in the day. And their keyboards are every bit the awesomeness that I remember from hacking away at an IBM PC during a summer job at the Department of Defense in 1984.

I bought the space saver keyboard below for $69. The “space saver” designation is a bit of a misnomer as this keyboard is larger than most of the recent keyboards I used. Its just not as ginormous as the full-sized IBM-style keyboards which are fraking huge.

It definitely has that clicky-ness to it that some people apparently find annoying, but it is not so loud as to disturb anyone unless you have extremely oversensitive coworkers or roommates. Otherwise, the bottom line is this is simply how a keyboard should be.