The application’s interface offers all the controls necessary to set the sounds for the computer keyboard. A slider is available that can change the volume of the sounds. Pressing buttons from a to z will change the sound that will be generated whenever a key on the computer keyboard is used.

Available sounds are the classic typewriter sound and some very annoying ones that could come straight out of a video game (think Space Invaders when shooting the gun). The program will display the selected volume and sound scheme. A click on the Set button will activate the sound scheme for the computer and every key pressed from then on will also play the selected sound.

The remove button will remove the sound scheme again so that no sound is being played while typing on the computer keyboard. ClicKey can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows.

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Killkeys is a portable software program that can be configured by filling out the ini file of the same name. The ini file contains two important lines that define which computer keyboard keys are disabled. The first line is called Keys and will disable the key all the time while the name of the second is Keys_Fullscreen which will only disable keys when the computer is running a fullscreen application.

The hex values of the keys have to be entered in the ini file. These hex values can be extracted from a Microsoft MSDN page easily.

Killkeys will use about five Megabytes of computer memory while running in the background. It will automatically place its icon in the Windows system tray with the possibility to hide that icon from there. The only way to kill the process then would be to kill it in the task manager or a similar computer program capable of displaying and killing processes.

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The light was that bright that I had to turn the N73 before going to sleep because of the distraction by that light. My next purchase was the Razer Arctosa gaming keyboard which uses one ultra bright white LED in the top left corner of the computer keyboard. And guess what; It is not possible to turn off that light either.

Now I’m no expert when it comes to usability and quality control but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m overly sensitive to LED lights or if the manufacturer’s quality control fails big time.

The only working way of dimming down those bright LED lights was to use – preferably black – tape placed directly over the light. Do you know of other devices that have annoying blinking LED lights that cannot be turned off?

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In this article I am going to list some of the handier shortcuts for the GNOME desktop. So get your fingers stretched and ready…

Windows

The following short cuts will focus primarily on open windows.

Alt-tab: This combination cycles through the currently open windows. This is handy when you have a lot of windows open and you constantly are moving from one to another.

Ctrl-alt-d: This combination minimizes all open windows to the far corners of the screen. To get them back just hit the combination again.

Shift-alt-up arrow: (requires Compiz) This combination takes all open windows, shrinks them, and organizes them on the screen so you can see all open applications. You can then use the arrow keys to highlight the window you want. Release the keys and the highlighted window will have focus.

Alt-F9: Minimizes the focused window.

Ctrl-Alt-s: Shade window. To unshade window hit the same combination.

Desktop

The following combinations effect the desktop.

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace: This combination will restart X Windows (this logs you out).

Ctrl-Alt-l: This combination will lock the screen. You will need your user password to unlock the screen.

Alt-F2: This combination opens the “run” dialog. From here you can enter a command to run (similar to the “cmd” Windows command).

Alt-F1: This combination opens the main menu.

Print Screen: This key will take a screenshot of the whole desktop.

Alt-Print Screen: This combination will take a screenshot of a single window.

Ctrl-Alt-left arrow: This combination will move one desktop to the left.

Ctrl-Alt-right arrow: This combination will move one desktop to the right.

Ctrl-Alt-down arrow: Show all desktops on one screen. Because there are more desktops than will fit across your screen (even in this small size), you use the left and right arrow keys to move one way or the other.

There you have it. Some of the handiest GNOME keyboard shortcuts. But don’t think you’re limited to the default. Creating your own keyboard shortcuts is simple. Go to the System menu and click on the Preferences entry. From within this new sub menu click on the Personal menu where you will find the Keyboard Shortcuts entry. Click on that to open up the Keyboard Shortcuts window. From this window you can edit the existing keyboard short cuts, but you can not create new ones.

Final Thoughts

If you have never been a big user of keyboard short cuts you should give it a try. Once you realize how efficient you computing can become you will never look back. I will say that I miss the older style gconf-editor where you could create a multitude of keyboard shortcuts in GNOME. With GNOME 2.24 it seems you are limited to the keyboard shortcuts listed in the keyboard-shortcuts tool.

Tags: GNOME, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, Linux

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One of the biggest strengths of the application is the wide variety of possible actions that can be defined. It ranges from running applications, entering text, manipulating windows, changing system settings like the volume of the system. Hoekey supports multimedia keyboard keys and can control media playback on the computer system as well.

Probably the most amazing factor of this keyboard shortcuts program is its low resource usage. Once everything has been configured the application runs quietly in the background. It uses 200 Kilobytes of computer memory while running and 600 Kilobytes of virtual memory. That’s nothing compared to most other applications that allow the manipulation of keyboard shortcuts on the Windows operating system.

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KeyTweak displays a full keyword plus specialty buttons in its interface. A click on a button on that virtual keyboard will display the current keyboard mapping of the key and the option to remap the key using a pulldown menu. One interesting and very helpful feature of the software program is that it is showing the default keys of the selected keys.

This means that it is possible to remap keys and undo the changes easily by either remapping the key to the default one again or by clicking on the restore Default button in the lower half of the interface.

Another option provided by the keyboard remapper is to disable a key completely. Could be used to disable the Windows keys or the Caps Lock key. The specialty buttons section contains buttons for many multimedia and specialty buttons that are available on several keyboards. It is possible to remap those keys as well.

Keytweak comes with a teaching mode that can be used to remap keys as well. It works by simply pressing two keys on the keyboard with the option to remap key 1 to key 2. The main benefit of Keytweak is the visual representation of the keyboard and that it is easy to restore the keyboard defaults. All remapped keys are underlined in the program interface.

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Typing software is also great for kids who are making their first experiences with a computer system. Rapidtyping Typing Tutor is one of those typing software programs that can be used by adults and kids alike. It comes with a colorful interface that is showing an underwater environment that rewards the student with scenery changes and additional animals that are shown on the screen.

Adults can look behind this and concentrate on the typing software. Before it starts the user has to pick a fitting keyboard, the Typing Tutor is supporting several types of keyboard layouts like QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY.

The typing software is using lessons to tutor the user. They begin with combinations of four characters (letters, syllables, numbers, special chars) that have to be typed repeatedly in alternating order before it is showing complete texts.

An extensive set of statistics is recording the progress of each lesson over time showing valuable information like time needed and characters per second for the lesson which should hopefully improve over time.

The typing software uses profiles to distinguish users which makes it excellent for families with several kids.

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I did feel a little bit overwhelmed by the plethora of options and settings of the application. It too almost 15 minutes before I thought that I had seen all of the functions of the program.

Zen Key is an application manager that can launch, manage and manipulate applications. Most of its features can be executed with a few keystrokes. Alt Space opens the Zen Key menu by default which puts everything at your fingertips.

zen key

Zen Key, among other things offers the following features:

• Work and play on an Infinite desktop (almost)
• Launch a program or a file
• Control program windows
• Automatically make windows transparent
• Iconify windows
• Open folders
• Control Media Applications
• Open Websites, perform an Internet search
• Issue a Windows System command
• Simulate a series of keystrokes

Zen Key uses only 6 Megabytes of memory when running which is really astonishing. Two windows had been iconified and the virtual desktop was displayed when I checked the memory usage.

The major problem that users might have with Zen Key is that it is quite complex and takes a while to get just to. It does add a few nice features that seem pretty unique to me though and that alone makes it a program that is worth that time.

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Navigating through your folders and files in Explorer using keyboard instead of mouse is rather a matter of personal preferences and comfort (as long as we ignore the “I wanna look more pro” part). Simple and widely recognized navigation hotkeys like arrow keys, PgUp/Dn and Backspace aren’t worth mentioning. However, in complex folder structure with many objects in it, this kind of navigation becomes a bit clumsy since it often takes longer to hop to the object of interest than it would take with mouse. The solution to this can’t be easier than it is.

When looking for something specific within the folder structure, you usually do have an idea of what the name of the container or file is and it’s therefore easy to quickly identify such an object, which is moreover in most cases alphabetically sorted. Still, even using the ABCs for easier navigation can become a bit obsolete in stuffed folders. Fortunately, Explorer ain’t as stupid as it might appear and if you simply type the beginning of the object’s name, it immediately tries to find a suitable match and points to it by selecting it. That’s it, just use a small part of the object’s label to quickly get to it as though you were using Launchy or similar app launcher with the difference that Explorer takes care of this by default too.

To provide a simple example and clear out any confusion, imagine we want to quickly navigate to the Windows’ wallpapers folder to tinker with some of them. Say your system partition is labelled Primary, go ahead and type “pri…” within the MyComputer window, then hit Enter as soon as it gets selected. Our final destination (C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper) can be easily reached in a similar way, perhaps by typing something like “wi”, “we”, “wa” while always hitting enter in between, of course. The number of chars required to select the desired object is naturally dependent on the amount of objects in a folder as well as the variety of their labels. But it does work pretty fast in most cases.

This kind of quick navigation should be supported by virtually any file manager under Windows, including Frigate (advanced implementation of this feature), TotalCommander as well as registry editors and other applications listing folder structure or any other elements. Another way of quick navigation through your folder structure is by engaging an application launcher like formerly mentioned Launchy. Though, the disadvantage resulting from this is a much larger database that has to absorb much more data if you set it to index your whole drive and its contents.

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A waterproof keyboard on the other hand can be useful for most users. Did you ever drop some coke, coffee or other liquids on your keyboard before ? Chance is that the keyboard stopped functioning from that moment on or that some keys got sticky or stuck completely.

Waterproof Keyboards from Man Machine can be cleaned from liquids in no time. Most of their keyboards can even be drowned in water to clean them up. Their medical keyboards on the other hand top even this because it’s also contaminant proof. There are probably other manufacturers of waterproof keyboards out there.

I always thought of getting a waterproof keyboard to make the cleaning process easier.Taking the keyboard with you under the shower or in the tube to clean it up once every while. That sounds like fun, does not it ?

The downside is the hefty price tag in my opinion. If someone would produce a solid waterproof keyboard for $30-40 I would buy it but it is not worth $100 or even more in my opinion unless you need it in a special work environment.

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The reason for using Sharp Keys instead of the Registry is simple. It’s faster, it offers a better overview and can be undone faster as well. With Sharp Key i was able to map the ESC key to the Caps Lock key which means that ESC is pressed when I press the Caps Lock key or ESC.

You can map other keys as well or disable them completely if you prefer that. Usage is pretty straightforward. Select a key that you want to map (From key) to another key from a list of possible keys (To key). In my case it was From Caps Lock to Escape. You can also map applications, functions (mute volume) or folders like the My Computer folder to keys.

Once you made all changes click on Write to Registry to make the changes in the Registry. The new settings will be available after a reboot or logout.

via How to Geek

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Lesson one for instance uses only half the letters of the alphabet while lesson three uses all of them. Another difference between the lessons is that you have to type more in lesson three than in lesson one and two. Keybr displays the letters on top and a keyboard below.

Whenever you hit a key on the keyboard it is shown on the keyboard displayed on screen and it is checked if the key that you did press was the correct one. If it was the next key is asked for, if it was not you have to try again until you hit the right one.

I like that you can use different keyboard layouts and languages including English, German, French and Russian. A counter displays the typing speed (per minute I guess) and the errors that you made in this part of the lesson. Once you finished typing all the letters new letters will appear that you have to type again.

You can look at a chart that is displaying your progress over time. It displays the errors and speed of your typing.

I do have some criticism though. I don’t like it that most of the time fake words are displayed. This is of course harder than typing known words and reduces the typing speed. There is also no distinction between upper and lower case and all the special chars are not used as well except for the space key.

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I would never use keyloggers to spy on someone but I have no problems using them on a computer that I use alone. It is up to you and your conscience if you want to use a keylogger like the perfect keylogger lite. If you do you should make sure to deactivate the anti-virus software and other security related programs that would detect the keylogger. I had troubles installing it on my system because Antivir popped up about 20 times warning me to continue.

If you use the keylogger you should make sure that it is really hidden from the task manager and the system tray. It should also be invisible in the start menu and the uninstallation dialog. The right tools will still detect the keylogger and disable it pretty quickly.

I had to link to the tucows download because the download of the lite keylogger was not working at the developers homepage.

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It actually does not look that bad in motion, take a look at this presentation video to get an idea how combimouse works. It still seems to be kinda awkward to move the right unit as a mouse especially when you consider that some keys on the right unit function as mouse buttons when in mouse mode. Would you consider buying this ?

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He suggests that everyone cleans his workspace on a daily basis with disinfecting wipes which decreases bacteria level tremendously (99,9%). People who did not use wipes caused an bacteria increase on other devices as well. An interesting study if you ask me, I will buy some disinfection wipe at once.

[tags]health, keyboard, workplace, dirty, bacteria[/tags]

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Look no further, I found a alternative keyboard gallery that has lots of graphics and links to keyboards that are mostly way different from the default one.

Take a look at the site and tell me if you find one that you would like to try and think could work ;)

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