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December 28, 2006

geekery

Dvorak’s new keyboard symphony

Posted Dec. 28, ’06, 8:44 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Geekery

MacBook KeysIf you have some time on your hands, and access to a friend or loved one’s MacBook, then it’s time to start planning that April Fool’s Day prank that would make Woz proud. Now, admittedly, this process was originally intended to help, not hurt people, but I think we all know in what direction it’s going.

Flickr user sjwalsh384 decided that he’d rather use the Dvorak keyboard layout (don’t worry—no relationship to Mac troll John of the same name). While in OS X, that’s as easy as popping open the “International” preference pane, clicking over to the Input Menu section and checking off “Dvorak,” it doesn’t fix the fact that your physical keyboard is still laid out in QWERTY format. But I suppose there’s nothing to be done about that short of repainting the keys, or popping each one off and putting it in the correct place. And come on, who’s going to spend their…time…doing…tha—okay, now that’s dedication.

Wow, think of the possibilities. My dream scenario is spelling out messages on a friend’s keyboard, though I’m unfortunately restricted to sentences that contain only one instance of each letter. Maybe I’ll hold myself back to a couple of words. “WATCH OUT!” for example.


5 Comments

Donn said:

Except "watch out" contains two Ts.

December 28, 2006 12:46 PM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

Crap. After all the money I spent on that English degree, I still messed that up. How about "WATCH OU—"

December 28, 2006 12:52 PM
Rodrigo H. said:

Freaky coincidence...
Today is "Dia de los inocentes" in Mexico (Our equivalent to april fools) and I actually changed the keyboard layout in my friend's MacBook (Only in software, I don't have enough time to change the keys...)

December 28, 2006 9:14 PM
weldon said:

I was going to comment only to point out the double-T in your example, only to find I was beaten to it. Try using 1337-speak to help find some double letters. You could spell out "w4tch ou7" for example. :)

December 29, 2006 7:38 AM
DarthMac said:

A few spare keys could be fun. For example you could replace the D key with a second S to spell ASS with the added bonus of possibly confusing the user as to which was the real S key.

And swapping the Z and X keys around would cause some confusion as they're used so infrequently.

December 29, 2006 9:01 AM

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