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keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

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Gillian Densmore

keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:

Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.

Thanks!

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Gary Schiltz-4

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:
Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.
Thanks!

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Gillian Densmore

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

Thank you Gary!

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 6:31 PM Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:
Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.
Thanks!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Barry MacKichan

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4

Late to the conversation, but here’s my 2 cents:

The best keyboard I’ve used is the Das keyboard for the Mac. Mine has cherry brown switches; the cherry blue are a bit noisier. The aural feedback helps my typing. It has all the Mac keys I need, and also the Windows keys, a necessity since I use both OSes via virtual machines.

They are expensive, but I spend a good bit of my life tapping at it.

Again, solid state drives are more expensive, but few things come as close to making your computer seem brand new and twice as fast. The switch to SSD reminded me of the ’80s when every new processor generation doubled your speed.

--Barry

On 9 Apr 2019, at 20:30, Gary Schiltz wrote:

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:
Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.
Thanks!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

I have a Das keyboard too, one of those with no key labels. ☺

Btw, the new Cascade Lake machines are out now and offer Optane memory modules. I think this could be transformative in computational science -- open-ended persistent memory that is byte-addressable.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Friday, April 12, 2019 at 7:46 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

Late to the conversation, but here’s my 2 cents:

They are expensive, but I spend a good bit of my life tapping at it.

--Barry

On 9 Apr 2019, at 20:30, Gary Schiltz wrote:

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:

Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.

Thanks!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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Gary Schiltz-4

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

In reply to this post by Barry MacKichan

In my experience upgrading laptops, double is an understatement. 5-10x often.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 9:46 AM Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Late to the conversation, but here’s my 2 cents:

The best keyboard I’ve used is the Das keyboard for the Mac. Mine has cherry brown switches; the cherry blue are a bit noisier. The aural feedback helps my typing. It has all the Mac keys I need, and also the Windows keys, a necessity since I use both OSes via virtual machines.

They are expensive, but I spend a good bit of my life tapping at it.

Again, solid state drives are more expensive, but few things come as close to making your computer seem brand new and twice as fast. The switch to SSD reminded me of the ’80s when every new processor generation doubled your speed.

--Barry

On 9 Apr 2019, at 20:30, Gary Schiltz wrote:

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:
Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.
Thanks!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Gillian Densmore

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

In reply to this post by Barry MacKichan

Thanks! After I tanked out harder than I thought I might yesterday, and needing to wind down some was browsing reddit to see how do-able it is to fix either one: turns out not all that do able. Short of the long is that Das Keyboard, Apple Keyboards, and a new to me company called red dragon for mechanicals get really good praise, partially for just being a darn good keyboard, and partially because of being much more sensable for budgeting than others.

I'll see if Amazon has Das Keyboards used.

Re: SSD-Hard drives, and speed. I can see that! any sugestions for brands to look at? and what's your experience been with reliabliy?

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 8:45 AM Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Late to the conversation, but here’s my 2 cents:

The best keyboard I’ve used is the Das keyboard for the Mac. Mine has cherry brown switches; the cherry blue are a bit noisier. The aural feedback helps my typing. It has all the Mac keys I need, and also the Windows keys, a necessity since I use both OSes via virtual machines.

They are expensive, but I spend a good bit of my life tapping at it.

Again, solid state drives are more expensive, but few things come as close to making your computer seem brand new and twice as fast. The switch to SSD reminded me of the ’80s when every new processor generation doubled your speed.

--Barry

On 9 Apr 2019, at 20:30, Gary Schiltz wrote:

I had a "Happy Hacking" keyboard when I last worked for a living, and loved it. The "light" version that I had doesn't have the Cherry switches, but it was still good for the price. As for hard drives, they are cheap as heck these days, and I have no real preference among the major brands (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 7:08 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Alas my super nice keyboard from at least 2 years ago is showing age and having been used pretty well. Mechanical Cherry Mx Green (blackwidow if that makes a difference) feels fantastic to type on. The key cap for space is wearing, and I feels like the swich to it and vowles are loosing a bit of spring.

Any recomendations for a solid replacement? Loved a logitech I got as a gift years ago, other than faulty "e" key it was also fantastic and served me very well. Leentwards mechanicle because they feel fantastic. Not ,must. full sized required.

Hard drive:
Looking for hard-drive recomendations as well. I Ask because I ran FSCK and the graphicle disk checker tool that came with ubuntu 19 (forget thename) FSCK only said " have 50 bad sectors" while disks(?) cautioned spin up and spin down are a little on the week side. Not surprising as it's a 4 year old hard drive that's been used pretty hard. Also it's for a desktop PC, regular internal hard-drive. Nothing fancy.
Thanks!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Russell Standish-2

Re: keyboard and hard drive recommendations wanted.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 11:32:15AM -0600, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Thanks! After I tanked out harder than I thought I might yesterday, and needing
> to wind down some was browsing reddit to see how do-able it is to fix either
> one: turns out not all that do able. Short of the long is that Das Keyboard,
> Apple Keyboards, and a new to me company called red dragon for mechanicals get
> really good praise, partially for just being a darn good keyboard, and
> partially because of being much more sensable for budgeting than others.
> I'll see if Amazon has Das Keyboards used.
> Re: SSD-Hard drives, and speed. I can see that! any sugestions for brands to
> look at? and what's your experience been with reliabliy?

Hah - half way through writing this email, my finger accidently hit
the power button, which is helpfully positioned right next to the
delete key. One of the few design faults of my new laptop!

Anyway, after a bit of googling, I have found the configuration setting
to disable the power button (I only ever use it to hard power cycle
via the 10 second press any way, which still works).

So much more abbreviated response here: basically SATA interfaced SSDs
are not that much faster than hard drives, no more than 2x when
benchmarked, and making little practical difference to the performance
of the computer. M2 SSDs OTOH seem more worth it. I had a Patreon
Ignite 490GB job, which died just days before its 3 year warranty
period expired. Patreon did honour the warranty, and did replace it,
although it did involve sending the old SSD to Taiwan, so around a
month all up for the replacement to arrive. In the meantime, I bought
a Samsung 970 EVO, which is a faster technology called NVMe. So far so
good, although I only have about 4 months on the clock. My replacement
laptop which is only weeks old has a Western Digital Black NVMe SSD -
and so far so good.

Speaking of which, I swapped out the hard drive on my old laptop for a
second hand SSD about 6 months ago. It was a SATA based drive, which
had had a varied life under my care since mid-2014, but not a hard
life. About 2 months ago, the SSD started dropping offline after about
15-30 minutes of use. Since the latop was nearly 9 years old it was
time to upgrade. Not entirely sure if the SSD or the SATA subsystem of
the laptop is at fault. No data got harmed...

One final comment - avoid Btrfs like the plague. On the couple of
occasions I forgot and accepted the default option of Btrfs on a
machine with an SSD, the computer will work for a few hours (maybe
even days), then suddenly the load average goes up to 20, and the
computer becomes unresponsive. Some btrfs process is running, and it
never stops - the only way of recovering is via a hard power cycle.

Cheer

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow [hidden email]
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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