Date: 05/14/06
From: Dagmar d'Surreal ()
Date: 05/14/06
On 5/12/06, John Chapin <> wrote:
> I've thought about getting one of those. My current keyboard isn't
> cutting it 100% of the time. I'm not sure what I would use the little
> LCD screen for... It does look better built than the typical
> keyboards in a big box store. Have plans for the little LCD display?
Well, under Linux I'm going for the basics, although I've got a pretty
complex plan laid out (still writing the formal documentation) for
handling it as something akin to a system service. At the moment I'm
using the somewhat shaky g15lcd (it's not unstable, but at compile
time it's very fragile with respect to the rapidly changing kernel
interfaces) binary utility to send data to the display, and I'm going
to use a perl program to act as a filtering layer for that so that any
software can have it's own dedicated pane that the handling programs
will simply cycle through multiple images over a time interval.
The idea being that instead of talking to the fifo used by g15lcd, I'm
going to open another fifo and take some rather similar commands, but
with some extentions/additions so that when a program request a
display pane, it will also supply the uid (unless I want to lock out
shell scripters and go for a socket listener) and a pane identifier so
that when it's about to switch to a new pane to display, it can see if
the user is still logged in (via pam_console's hints) and dispose of
that pane appropriately, so that applications don't have to _keep_
running to maintain that pane, and than when a user logs out, the
panes their applications requested will gracefully die off.
I've got two fonts (or at least one and a half sets of usable ASCII
glyphs, one for common text and another for large numbers for
temp/time) coded up, as well as the functions for generating a map
from text and combining maps, and with about 10 lines more it'll be
able to write out a single pane without trouble. (I'm more worried
about making a communications API that makes sense than I am
implementing it. Coding is easier than designing.) The first target
apps are going to be a hook for dhclient to put up a pane showing
hostname and IP address information, and then a userspace application
which is *also* being cut into multiple layers. One being an API
specifically for displaying time and weather information, the other
half being for _getting_ that weather information (which will probably
be scraping wunderground's mobile page) because I've no idea how to
get weather info for other countries.
> The other option I was thinking of was this piece of hardware:
>
> http://www.razerzone.com/Products/Gaming-Keyboards/Razer-Tarantula/
Looks nice. I've got no idea about the low-latency stuff they're
referring to and whether or not it would be useful. For me, the
important things were that the keys simply be quiet and not take a lot
of effort to mash down. I've become very spoiled by the feather-touch
and short distance on the Zippy EL-610 I was using.
> It isn't out yet, but I think the odds/cost make that a more likely
> purchase than ever seeing one of those Russian keyboards with the
> little OLED keys.
Those things are going to cost a bloody fortune, if they actually make
it to the market. They're asking $100 for the _three key_ version
they've got available now. Either there's a massive markup for
prestige costs or this doesn't bode well for the price of a 104-key
version.
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