You may find this a bit strange...

Some of you may not think this is a good subject for a blog post, but who really is to say what a person might find interesting. The subject is my keyboard, or more importantly, how comfortable I am with it, and how long it has lasted.

As a writer of any kind will tell you, unless you feel comfortable with your writing device, very few words will ever be written. The words need to flow and having the right device can make all the difference in the world!

For those interested, the keyboard I use is a Kensington Ci70. At $50, it was by far the most expensive keyboard I've ever purchased, but I've been using it now for over 4 years and it still performs as well as it did the day I got it. Quite a statement from someone who regularly eats at their desk and rarely remembers to push the keyboard drawer in.

And while others might proclaim a similar ability with their keyboards, few can do it without physically taking the keyboard apart to clean the crumbs out now and then. You can, however, do that with this one. A few sharp taps on it's edge will dislodge most any crumb and have the keyboard working properly again. Very important for people like me who are, shall we say, less than tidy when they eat.

So after 4 years of service, I have yet to dismantle this keyboard for any reason, and in fact would not know how to do it if the need ever did arise. So hats off to you Kensington, for designing a piece of equipment for us slobs. Bravo!

OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Just one of the many announcements made on Monday (June 10th) by Apple at it's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC), if you were an enterprising soul you had no problem locating a copy of the first developers preview (DP1) just shortly after it was announced.

Being one of those people, I quickly had a copy downloaded courtesy of the friendly buccaneers who reside in a bay on the internet. Having a copy is not the same as having it up and running though, as often these early releases require one to jump through several hoops to get them installed on a Hackintosh.

I tried the easy way first, myHack had been updated to a beta version to deal with Mavericks, but that experiment did not turn out well. Then I found this tutorial and followed it. This one proved successful and I got to take a look at the new OS on my GA-P35-DS3L system.

As usual with a prerelease, several things didn't work right. The Mail app for me proved unwilling to accept my main email account so no way to use that. I did however get the internet working and was able to play around with the new version of Safari.

Having working internet also allowed me to preview the new Maps app. While nice, I still prefer Google for this task. They have been doing it a lot longer and theirs is much more complete and accurate.

I also managed to install it on my newest system, the Foxconn G33M. Video was a bit wonky on this system however so I didn't experiment much with it. Tomorrow is another day and I may explore further then.