The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard A Thinkpad Yoga, modded with a mechanical keyboard, may serve as a wake-up call to both Lenovo and Framework. If you break your laptop's keyboard for the second time in a row, most of us would be inclined to just get a different laptop. Unless, say, you're a student on a tight budget. Marcin Plaza is a student, but he's an …
[Author here]
> No, friend, this saying occurs in WE Johns, one of the Biggles books about World War I.
Really? I *did* check.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/418466-once-is-happenstance-twice-is-coincidence-three-times-is-enemy
https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/sp2p8w/once_is_happenstance_twice_is_coincidence_three/
https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/fine-books-and-manuscripts-including-americana-part-2/fleming-ian-once-is-happenstance-twice-is
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-agree-with-the-principle-put-forward-by-Ian-Fleming-in-Goldfingerthat-once-is-happenstance-twice-is-coincidence-but-3-times-is-enemy-action
"PS. I think I first came across this saying (or something similar) when I read some of the Biggles WW1 stories."
There you go. I am also can quote from the wub.
If one were bothered one could grep the Biggles stories - The Faded Page have 95 Biggles titles listed.
The good captain was nothing if not prolific (second only to Enid Blyton apparently.)
Considering just those stories set during WW1 might narrow down the search.
Just the feel of the quote seems more in Fleming's or perhaps John Buchan's line.
Richard Hannay's Boer mate Peter Pienaar might have said something like this, or the American Blenkiron (Greenmantle.)
> If one were bothered one could grep the Biggles stories
If someone is offering a correction, then presumably they are "bothered." As such the minimum effort is to name which book, or give a quotation containing it.
I note that nobody so keen to contradict me has done so thus far.
I did at least make an effort to check, and I quoted three at random in the comment just above here. There are dozens of places and people that attribute this to Fleming.
I did, incidentally, read Biggles as a child. I am not saying it's impossible, but merely asserting it is not a refutation. Naming the book or the original verbatim quotation would enable us to check.
Many of the Biggles books are available on the Internet Archive, but "Once is happenstance" does not seem to appear prior to Goldfinger in the texts available there.
However, "Once is an accident, two a coincidence, and [...] the third time it’s a habit." appeared in the Washington Post in 1926 (https://archive.org/details/per_washington-post_1926-06-22_18268/mode/2up?q=%22Once+is+an+accident%22), so versions of the quotation have certainly existed long before Fleming used it, as indeed the context in Goldfinger alludes to, "Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago:...".
You could go for an old PPC with a colour TFT screen in full glorious CGA color!
(It does also support the CGA 16 colour 160x100 graphics mode too, or at least did back in the day on an external screen)
I'm remembering my 286 Zenith laptop (luggable) which I once ran all night off a motorcycle battery, during a mains electric failure. The Zenith had a lead-acid gell rechargable battery, so it was damned heavy, but you got a high-contrast, light-blue/dark-blue display which was great in direct sunlight or total darkness, a nice, long-travel mechanical keyboard, and ... its charger put out a STANDARD 12 volts DC (not 19, not 8.5, not 23 and two-thirds, or any of that proprietary crap). You could run it straight off a car's cigarette lighter plug-in.
Also kudos to my 1990s Toshiba Lifebook (P5?). It had a good keyboard, two bays, and bay-adaptors which let me swap a second battery, a floppy drive, a CD drive, and a Zip drive. I played Quake off the batteries for nearly 2.5 hours on a plane
The switch to USB-C Power Delivery is a huge leap forward for a house full of multiple different laptop makes. Most still have a proprietaty charger arangement, which gets installed alongside a permanent work location, proper keyboard, second screen etc. Elsewhere around the house, most rooms where a laptop might be used have a USB-C charger which anyone can hookup to when required. No good for my power hungry Thinkpad P15, but works with all my other laptops, and also USB-C phones as well.
Brought back memories from a long time ago. A colleague drove across the country to a place I'd never heard of "Bagshot" to buy a used Osborne portable. Probably found it in the Exchange & Mart - the Ebay of its day.
I remember us all crowding round it when it arrived back in the office. I hankered after a Toshiba T3100, which I could never afford and when they eventually came up available for free I wasn't interested.
In those days any Enterprise computing seemed to have full travel keyboards.
Before smarphoines appeared, phones were getting smaller and less useable all the time. Now they get thinner instead and the first thing I do when I get a new one is to order a wallet/case for it.
I do have an unusually small laptop - a Lenovo Duet Chromebook but the battery standby is well over a week and usage is almost 8 hours.
Oh boy - yes, both keyswitches and keycaps are complete rabbitholes, and there are so many potential combinations that someone selling a product can't possibly hope to cover them all.
Do you want your switches to click when you press them? Do you want smooth linear travel or a tactile bump? How heavy? Do you want heavier springs on the keys that fall under your index fingers?
What colourway do you want for the keycaps? Do you want them made of ABS plastic (cheaper, higher-pitched sound, less durable) or PBT (more expensive, more durable, usually "better" sounding.) Do you want cutesy multicoloured keycaps with Japanese characters or vintage Wyse terminal keycaps (yes, they'll likely fit just fine.)
And that's before you've entered the realms of stabilisers and lubrication.
But with all these options, the one that's hardest to find is the one that actually matters to me: keycaps in ISO / UK layout ("£" on shift-3, backslash cut out of left shift, '#" cut out of an L-shaped enter key - ANSI (with thin horizontal enter key) seems to be all that's served by 98% of the market.
Chyrosran22's videos on YouTube are endlessly entertaining (but NSFW) if you want to see reviews of some modern but mostly vintage keyboards, and a viscious (but well-deserved) skewering of certain fashion trends.
(Typing this on an early 90's IBM Model M.)
Similar; I think my late gf's laptop is an IBM R40 which soon became too slow for Windows' increasing bloat and ended up with Linux on it instead. Part of me is surprised she took to it so readily but for some reason I forget she was also a programmer.
We still have it somewhere, though I forget which flavour of Linux offhand; probably not MX, and not MX key-switches either, I think they're possibly MY. Some of the keycaps are almost worn right through because she used it so much.
As much as the R40 isn't really lightweight, it's also not that heavy. I suppose the obsession with thinness is at least partly understandable for portable stuff (though IMHO portable stuff also needs to be quite rugged) but what really gets to me is the fad for the same style of desktop keyboards: the shiny case doesn't make the horrible "chiclet" keys any better than they were when they were a standard for the budget end of the home computer era 40-odd years back; and from what I've heard, in some cases they're even worse.
Same here. My Wife's Yoga 720 is on its 3rd keyboard, and my daughter had to return her newer model Yoga due to a failed keyboard.
Let's not even start on the stupid, custom 90 degree push button switches they use for the power. They break at the drop of a hat. We've now got to turn the laptop on using a pin into the emergency restart button inside the microphone hole. Once that button fails, the thing is scrap.
Reminds me of my first experience of computers via an ASR-33 teletype
The problem with the ASR33 was finding a tub of oil big enough to dunk them in as part of the routine maintenace procedure. I still remember the oil stains on the backpacks of students carrying around rolls of paper tape with their programs on them.
Kids these days — spoilt rotten with those fancy new 7-bit ASCII teletype machines. Back in the day, real programmers used 5-bit Baudot.
I remember one lab assignment was to write a 6502 assembly language program for a Rockwell KIM-1 that when fed a 5-bit baudot tape via reader on one serial port would output 7-bit ASCII to a teletype on a second serial port. I think it also displayed the text (as best you could with 7-segment LEDs) as it sent the output to the teletype.
I've just upgraded from a decade-old Latitude 6420 (cannot run Win11, but will take Chromium) to a Latitude 5420 rugged (£550 second-hand, in-maintenance). Two slots for hot swappable batteries, all designed for easy user tinkering, with a weight and built-in handle which would definitely lend credibility to use as a bludgeon, should the need arise... A strong recommendation!
My lovely mechanical keyboard on my lovely Packard Bell Force 4900 MM (Pentium 60MHz machine) was a fantastic IBM AT type keyboard, and it lasted from 1994 till 2014.
The keyboard in my lovely Acer Swift 1 lasted from May 2020 till it got nixed by crap (food? dust? hair?) in December 2022......so I got the keyboard panel replaced with a new Acer piece.
Bottom line........who in the world is bothered BY THE KEYBOARD?????
Not me.............I'm bothered BY WHAT I'M DOING WITH THE COMPUTER!!!!
Glad you have what you need and can focus.
Many here type a fair amount of text one way or another. Hence interest in keyboards.
Plus a bit of fun project. Not so sure the clacktop will be too welcome in the University library though.
Icon: I thought we'd all be using stylus based direct input with handwriting recognition by the 21s century when I was at University (mechanical 80 column card punches build strength).
[Author here]
> who in the world is bothered BY THE KEYBOARD?????
Me. Very much.
On a desktop I can bring my own, and I do. I am typing on a gorgeous retina iMac with a super-sharp 27" screen and the whole computer is a slight bulge in the back of the lovely screen.
I bought it used, because I'm not a mug, and I told the original owner to keep the horrible flat short-travel "Magic" keyboard it came with. No thank you. Mine has a clicky-as-hell Das Keyboard and a big phat symmetrical mouse that I can use in either hand.
But on laptops it matters a lot. I have a small herd of 64-bit classic Thinkpads that are my preferred laptops because they have great keyboards and are easily repairable and upgradable.
I have two work machines which are modern things with flat chiclet keyboards and they're really unpleasant to write on. I normally use them with external keyboards if I can.
For me, the quality of the keyboard is THE *number 1* attribute of a laptop.
I drive no more than half an hour in a single day, and often don't touch the car for a week at a time.
I have a little "runabout" and I'm not that fussed what the seats are like.
If I spent most of my working day on the road I'd want to be damn sure those seats were comfortable.
I've rarely use laptops as true portables or need the built in keyboards or monitors.
I just like the small footprint of a laptop in combination with external keyboard/mouse and dual monitors.
Easy to do work on and.. move as needed.
So... I'd rather have lots of USB ports instead to mix and match on the fly.
Intel's NUC Mini, and various similar things from other vendors, might be an option. They actually have a smaller 'footprint' (depth x width) than a laptop, but they are invariably thicker - starting at around 4 cm. The total volume might be bigger than a laptop sans monitor, to improve the cooling.
What I am finding annoying is the lack of legacy USB ports & have mostly been replaced by a lack of USB-C ports on the various Dell laptops that I am currently deploying & users coming up to me asking if I have any adaptors.
I am also finding I have to use USB network adaptors just to re-image some of them as they no longer come with network ports.
Our NUC was great... until it started overheating, which didn't take that long to start being a problem, invariably heralded by the tiny fan making a loud and shrill scream that was rather unpleasant. I tried to dismantle it to remove the build-up of dust and found it was not maintenance-friendly at all; in fact it was exceedingly difficult to get to the fan as it needed it to be completely dismantled, which was evidently not something that it was ever designed for.
It took me much longer than it should've done to realise replacement cases are available. The new one has a similar footprint though it's 5 or 6 times as tall; but on the plus side, the passive cooling all that tallness facilitates means it's actually less obtrusive because it's completely silent. Wish I'd thought of it a couple of years sooner...
I installed my RPi5 and USB SSD drive into a AUD5.00 clear plastic sandwich box*. The SSD is attached to the lid and the RPi is held off by 4 cut down plastic masonary plugs screwed to bottom of the box.
The box being plastic, creating cutouts for the cables and ports is pretty simple.
Nearly worthy of Heath Robinson (L.P. ~Rube Goldberg.)
* manufactured in NZ for a change. :)
I nabbed a couple of refurbished Acer Veriton minis N4640G (I think) which were very small, light and are basically a notebook without battery, keyboard and screen but use a Acer notebook power supply.
When travelling, if you know there are a decent keyboard and screen at the destination, just the unit fits in the glove box.
I was considering a (battery powered) portable monitor and a 20V battery pack for the verition when the need vanished.
With a spare mechanical keyboard or two I habitually plug one into any notebook I am messing with (and mouse, and 60cm (24") monitor.) Likewise with RPi. Used far too many crappy keyboards. :(
Looks aside, I don't think this chap is the type who would miss.
I imagine his bullet would be a micro autonomous target seeking projectile that could "linger" until a bee line to the target was available.
But why would he, or any sane person, bother as there is a conga line of comparably obscene arseholes ready to take up Trump's dismal mantle.
"I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet. I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer. P.S. I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death."
This. I needed a laptop and looked at Dell Precision, as ten year's worth of memory told me they were good. Then WTF? The latest ones looked like identikit skinny blades, well not quite as skinny as everyone else's, but just as plasticky. Ick. Shame on my usual go-to computer brand :(
So I bought a 2014 one with 4th gen i7 and 32GB RAM, FHD 15in screen, put in a 1TB SSD and off I went. Only cost me £200 and despite its age, fast enough for all my essential daily work and a bit extra. Several USB 3 ports too, and yes, I probably could crack open a mugger's skull with it :) The base is plastic, sadly, but the rest is mostly metal.
It seem they literally don't make 'em like that any more :(
I like ultra-thin laptops, but I also prefer mechanical keyboards. So I've tended to get 2-in-1 convertibles, and use a mechanical keyboard with the computer in tent mode; currently that's a Dell Inspiron 7445 with a Keychron K1 Max keyboard. This is arguably less convenient than replacing the keyboard, but doesn't involve any hardware surgery. 2-in-1s have an accelerometer, so they automatically rotate the display when you put the computer into tent mode (at least that happens in Ubuntu Linux), so all I do to set up is open the computer in tent mode, turn on the keyboard (and my trackball), and I'm all set.
While the desire for a mechanical keyboard is appreciated (my own keyboard can be heard, even while wearing noise cancelling head phones, which is the way I like it), it would seem, if one is going to the effort of replacing a keyboard, why not go whole hog and include a full keyboard, with numeric keypad?
Of course, that would require a wider custom case, and probably the need to add extra bezel "padding" around the display (or, an opportunity to upgrade the display into something larger?) But, maybe there's a market for such cases / displays / keyboards?
Since the footprint would be somewhat larger (almost in the "luggable" [aka "portable"] class), why not increase the battery size, too? (Especially, if the mechanical keyboard has backlighting effects.)
Go nuts, and include a PCIe bay for a "real" Video Card (assuming built in video can be disabled and PCIe lanes are accessible). Plus fan(s). Plus custom Power Supply. Plus 10GE. Plus... err.. that's probably getting a bit too far.
Keyboard with numeric keypad. Yeah. Maybe stop there. For now. And the bezel "padding". If necessary.
Unless... maybe design the system around an external keyboard? (which defeats the purpose of a laptop)
Wait, what if one started out with a NUC or Mini-ITX mobo? (the possibilities are endless...)
"Unless... maybe design the system around an external keyboard? (which defeats the purpose of a laptop)"
If you look inside many modern laptops, especially the bottom end corporate or many of the consumer grade ones, there's actually very little in there. The main board is often barely 2x the size a Rasberry Pi with a daughter board at the other end of the case for the I/O ports. You could potentially fit it inside of a full size keyboard, especially if you decide you don't need the battery and are happy to use only external PSU. It just needs a more robust connector for the LVDS cable. Or use one of those USB-C external portable screens. Maybe add some bit's of plywood and hinges if you really want it to fold up :-)
I have a numeric keypad - it's a second (third?) keyboard for my machine.
It also connects to my phone, which was invaluable when I had to use a stupid code generator (still much better than the dinky physical one) for every single bank transfer, one which required me to type in a ten digit number to the device/phone, and then transcribe a ten digit number back to the bank.
"I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet.
I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer.
P.S. I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death."
I got a desktop 10 years ago like this.
A 30kg/60 lb. one. 1/16 inch steel all around, a BD player, and a DVD-RW. No freaking glass, this thing had a safety polycarbonate window instead. And a UPS with a 24-Volt system, feeding 2x 12V 60Ah car batteries that will last some 4 hours. Drop that thing on your pinkie and regret your life choices.
But yes, I want a laptop like that as well, the kind of system that will stop a bullet.
I mean, cool project, nice keyboard, excellent work and all that jazz... but why?
I'm now in my mid-50s and I *want* smaller and lighter. My laptop (now a 13" instead of a 15" monster) goes with me everywhere. I certainly wouldn't want to carry that giant thing. I keep a proper, clacky external keyboard on my both home and work desks (which, between them, is where I am most of the time) and for mobile emergencies the laptop's own keyboard will do as it's not regular. I'm not going to give myself another bl**dy hernia...
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