Tag: PC Hardware

Keyboard light: no more groping in the dark!

A humorous video review from CNET on the Lenovo Design Matters blog (yep, these guys have a blog where their designers interact with their users – a commendable idea!) compares the Thinkpad X300 to the MacBook Air. Nicely done – take a look.

Interestingly, the reviewer mentions one favorite feature of mine in the Keyboard Light on Lenovo Thinkpadrecent ThinkPad notebooks that many users may be barely aware of: a little white LED in the screen’s frame that illuminates the keyboard. This is useful for when you work on an airplane at night and prefer to leave the overhead reading light off (whether out of consideration for your co-travelers or for your battery life – in the dark you can work at the screen’s minimal backlight intensity).

This LED in itself is a great design idea, but I’m even more impressed by how you turn this lamp on: you depress the Fn key and the PgUp key together. Why is this impressive? Because these two keys are located diagonally at the opposite corners of the keyboard; this means you can find them – by touch – in absolute darkness, which is where you’re at if you need a light in the first place.

Incidentally, this is how I discovered this feature during one long flight – I was groping to find the Fn key combination for increasing the backlight level, hoping to have the screen itself illuminate the keyboard, and I accidentally hit the right keys. And there was light!

Activation keys for Thinkpad keyboard light

Paying all over again: non-transferable accessories

I upgraded recently to a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, from an IBM T42. Good road warrior that I am, I had the T42 accessoried to the hilt, notably with a bunch of extra batteries to last me through the long flights across the Atlantic. Since the new machine was also a Thinkpad, you’d think I would simply reuse the accessories in the new machine, right?…

Thinkpad Batteries

Wrong. The power supply can’t be used because it has a different output voltage – you can’t argue with that. The 3M privacy screen can’t be used because the screen’s a different size – fair enough. But the batteries?!!ThinkpadBatteries2

The batteries are very similar, but their plugs differ. Intentionally.

Look at the photos to compare the Bay Batteries of the two machines; exactly the same dimensions, same voltage too… but the plug is just different enough to prevent reuse. Hard not to harbor cynical thoughts about the reason…  🙁

Mighty Mouse: the best XY input device out there!

So many XY pointing devices have been developed over the years… I’ve used light pens, graphic tablets, trackballs, touch screens, joysticks, touch pads, trackpoints, even that weird HP desktop machine, the HP-150 from 1983, where you pointed at the screen and your finger intercepted IR beams crisscrossing the raised screen bezel (this last failed miserably – how could they ignore fatigue from repeatedly raising the arm to touch the screen?!)

But the king of all XY input devices is without question one of the earliest: the Mouse. Only the QWERTY keyboard has greater tenacity (unfortunately, in this case). Invented in 1963 by Doug Engelbart and later commercialized by Xerox PARC, the mouse remains the most popular device in the family, and this is (IMHO) because it is simply the best – it maps extremely well to the brain-hand-screen-eye-brain closed loop, making its action so intuitive as to be transparent. It just doesn’t get any better than that. And interestingly, the exact shape of the mouse is unimportant: almost like cars, they went from blocky to streamlined as time went by, but are just as good in any shape. It’s the basic “movable box with buttons under the fingertips” that is the winning factor; the rest is window dressing.

Here’s kudos to a great design!

Mice (computer and porcelain)

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