mg.to - Comments

Cures RSI, speeds up programming and makes you happy

Pasi — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:42:51 +0000

I use TrackPoint keyboards whenever I can, both at home and at work. Besides being a charm to use it cured my RSI! I have become so addicted to the device that the existance of a TrackPoint is now the main requirement when choosing my next laptop. Too bad there is no wireless keyboard with TrackPoint as I really hate it when I can´t use a TrackPoint with my HTPC. I guess the main problem is the power consumption of TrackPoint devices (?).

wireless

aramis — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:06:17 +0000

Almost seven years now since you wrote this little homage to the trackpoint. And still: there’s no wireless trackpoint keyboard out there. Not even one! What’s wrong with that world? I mean: how is mankind supposed to evolve any further without it? Imagine all the time we have spent already moving one hand from keyboard to mouse (or touchpad) and back again. Altogether it might sum up to decades, even aeons — aeons of useless time wasted on a redundant zero-sum movement. We could have done better. All the precious source code we could have written instead, all our wonderful thoughts that would populate the web — if we’d had the time to write them down — are now lost forever, just because of some copyright issue. The lasting absence of human settlements on mars is clearly IBM’s fault. No doubt about that!

Besides, I love to work and study and read and surf the web outside in the open loggia of my apartment. In winter I put on a sleeping back to keep myself warm and place a wireless keyboard on my lap, so I can keep my arms inside the bag while typing. Yeah, It might look weird: sitting there in my sleeping bag, motionless, staring at the text prompt in front of me, but it’s totally worth it for working outside raises a unique awareness and creativity. Anyway, a wireless trackpoint keyboard would be nice for that!

I am also trackpoint lover

zamroni — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:30:06 +0000

I am also trackpoint lover and don’t like touch pad. If configured properly, trackpoint is a very nice pointing device. When the laptop is in my lap, e.g. while sitting in car or in airport boarding room, nothing beats trackpoint. Patent licensing may cost something, but I thing the main cause why trackpoint is because manufacturer does not default it to useful setting (heaviest touch + fastest mouse speed).

Internet Explorer Downfall of Internet

Corey Manshack — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:55:21 +0000

Internet Explorer has so many different things wrong with it. I was surprised to find this when I was searching about two letter domain names.

Funny

Sam — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 22:24:49 +0000

I never thought of the trackpoint this way. Since I have both trackpoints and mousepads (plus usually an external move) on every laptop I use I’ll give it another try. In fact, I often try not to use the mouse at all, by using window managers (xmonad) and web browsers (firefox+vimperator) easily controllable with the keyboard only.

I lose $17/hour when I don't use a trackpoint.

Visitor — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:57:49 +0000

I’m an average to above average speed touch typist (75 wpm) and a computer programmer; when I’m coding I’ve timed myself and found that I can generate 20% more code per hour with my trackpoint vs a touchpad. I bill 100/hr, what this means is that it costs my clients 20% more when I work on my Mac vs my Thinkpad. When i’m billing by project vs hourly then it means I’m only earning $83/hr if I budget the project using my normal algorithm ( which I developed while working on a ThinkPad ). That’s a big paycut… So it costs me $17/hour to use a computer without a trackpoint! This is what makes Macs expensive, not their actual pricetag.

Why people dislike trackpoints:

1) it has no benefit to anyone who is not a touch typist. if you need to glance at the keyboard frequently to type then you can’t take advantage of the speed increase that comes from keeping your fingers registered on the keyboard at all times. 2) in a default configuration with pointer speed set to medium, trackpoints are very slo…ooow. In order to make the most out of trackpoint the pointer speed has to be set to the highest speed, and enhance pointer precision has to be turned on. 3) learning curve is 2 hours. people don’t have patience for something they can’t learn instantly.

Lenovo Thinkpad Track Trackpoint Keyboard 55Y9003 works with Mac

BillH — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:36:31 +0000

Lenovo Thinkpad Track Trackpoint Keyboard 55Y9003 works with Mac MacBook etc!!!!!

The MacBook Pro with the built-in Mac Trackpad is wonderful. Howerver, the red Trackpoint eraser head that IBM innovated into the Thinkpad Laptop Notebook computers in the 1990’s is in some cases quicker to use.

Therefore, I was VERY EXCITED when I tried to connect an external USB Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard and found that the Trackpoint works very well with my Mac!!!!

In addition, this particular model (55Y9003) of the Lenovo External Trackpoint Keyboard is VERY thin, sits nicely on top of or in front of my Mac or MacBook Pro keyboard, is VERY light, and fits easily into any Laptop case because it’s so light, thin and small

I had a trackpoint on my

Visitor — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:10:56 +0000

I had a trackpoint on my first laptop, and liked it, especially with the concave cap.

When buying a new laptop, I specifically limited myself to ones with pointing sticks. I ended up getting a Dell Inspiron, and when it arrived, there was no pointing stick! I wrote to them to ask what happened, and found out they had been removed, along with some of the ports on the back. I looked on eBay and found a keyboard with trackpoint for the same model, and installed it. It worked! But not very well. The Dell trackpoint sucked, and the thumb buttons sucked, too, and I eventually stopped using it and just used the touchpad. I wish IBM-style trackpoints were available for every laptop.

ABOUT JQUERY WITH

bhagwat sharma — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:37:08 +0000

ABOUT JQUERY WITH JSON
please give me suggation

WITH COMPLETE EXAMPLE

no AJAX?

Yudhi — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:14:57 +0000

I thought by AJAX you meant we have some kind of asynchronous javascript request to some server, sending some data to a back-end server or retrieving some data from the back-end server.. Do you know a tutorial that could show us how to do some AJAX from inside a PDF page?

Plug and play

Michael Geary — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:56:09 +0000

I didn’t use any drivers on the Mac Mini - I just plugged in the single USB connector from the TrackPoint keyboard and everything works - the TrackPoint as well as the keyboard itself.

Be sure you get the new Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard - it’s greatly improved over the old one and cheaper too.

The part number is 55Y9003 which you can Google to find sources for the keyboard.

IBM USB Keyboard w/ Trackpoint Device on the Mac Mini

Thomas — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:00:15 +0000

Hi, I just bought a Mac Mini and I want to use the IBM USB Keyboard with Trackpoint device. You said it works for you. Did you just plug the keyboard in to a USB port on the Mini and it worked automatically? Or did you have to do something more, e.g. use the installer cd that comes with the keyboard, or download drivers from the net, or something else? Any info you can give me is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Best news interview...

Ro C — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:16:53 +0000

Oh my gosh, this is HYSTERICAL! A true-life Being There!

KVMs

RS — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:44:09 +0000

These keyboards are wonderful, but they do have one serious limitation for me…KVMs. There’s only one USB cable coming from the keyboard, and it combines mouse and keyboard information. Most KVM switches proxy the real keyboard and so if you plug your trackpoint keyboard in to the keyboard slot of the KVM, you lose the mouse…if you plug into the mouse port, you lose the keyboard. The only thing that worked for me was to get a KVM that does USB peripheral switching too (I used an IOGear GCS1734 (or some earlier version of that)…this worked but the hotkeys for switching won’t work so you’re stuck with the buttons on the KVM. Supposedly some very new KVMs may be able to handle this situation correctly (same problem exists for multimedia and wireless keyboards), but I have not tried it out.

RSS & JSON

jQuery Convert — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:38:29 +0000

I would also recommend lightweight syntex highlighter called “prettyprint” used on Google Code. It is lightweight and looks very clean.

Regarding this post. I came across it while searching for RSS to JSON converter plugin for jQuery. I thought I would share it here with everybody. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to setup any server-side scripts. All you need is a jQuery.js file. Everything is done on client side leveraging Google Feeds API.

Here is an example from original post: