Daily Archives: March 11, 2020

New Keyboard

Right now I’m typing this blog post on a new keyboard. This is the keyboard that comes with my new laptop, which is a combination multi-family christmas and birthday present. This is, by dint of being purchased new, and now, now the most powerful computer in the house.

This has brought with it a bunch of infrastructural thinking. I have to set up a new laptop and that means managing logins and synchs and wondering just how badly I need this thing that I have to set up if I want to keep using it. It’s not a bad time – not really a bad thing to do a single big infrastructural audit. Do you need what you’re telling yourself you need? How many directories are full of accumulated nothing? How many look unsorted, but sorting them would be unnecessary?

Software changes and updates are interesting, because they’re these kind of virtualised things. Updating and changing them, that’s a matter of restructuring ideas in my head. But fixed to this computer is the new keyboard.

And that is what I have to just learn to use.

There’s one big change in this keyboard – some keys are going to be rarely used, which means using them will involve calling up a check in my mind. But some keys are used so much they’re basically being put together intuitively out of impulse action. That’s where stuff gets weird. Because on this keyboard, the ctrl key is split into two parts; one is a ‘function’ key and one is a ‘ctrl’ key.

And the ctrl is on the inside of the pair.

It’s remarkable how difficult this is proving to adjust to.

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