Green Keyboard

Our colleague has gone on leave and so we thought it was a good time to go all environmental on him and give him a green keyboard.
Note: the use of the term green here may not be in the same context as what you're thinking!

Step 1 Preparation

First, assemble your materials. we'll need the following

Keyboard (unplugged)

Toilet Paper

Water

Either
1x Cisco WS-C2950C-24 - 24 10/100 ports with 2 100BASE-FX uplinks, Enhanced Image
Or
Some polythene

Seeds of your choice

Absent colleague

Comments

[ewilhelm]

This project was featured in Popular Mechanics Top 5 April Fools' Day Pranks!

[xproplayer]

u might want to fix the robot hes vandalised the website at the top

[tigerboy]

funny!!!!LOL!!!!

[qwixel]

The keyboard can be destroyed doing this. Willful destruction of company property could get you seriously fired at just about any job.

If you want to try this I suggest you supply your own used keyboard (maybe tech has a pile of dead keyboards...) *AND* make sure your superiour knows and has a sense of humor...

Remember to take it to an electronics recycler later, because this thing will be toast when you are done: water and electronics - not a great mix esp. not the thin metal layers on the plastic membranes that make most keyboards work.

Oh, and don't plug the keyboard in if you do this. Most USB keyboards run on 5v with a surprising amount of amerage available. Might not be enough to hurt you, but water inthe wrong spot could cause a short that could destroy the computer.

[zack247]

i had a keyboard i picked up from the curb that sat in the rain for days. i let it dry out, and it worked like a charm

[computer_guy]

 the keyboard is unplugged. easily cleaned with the toilet paper layer. after the keyboard is dry, just use again normally.

[marc92]

Another fun keyboard prank: Pry off all of the keys and put them back in different locations on the keyboard Maybe this is how dvorak was invented :P

[jongscx]

you could also rearrange his keyboard AND upload a custom keyboard driver, so it'll look possessed... Better yet, try to find an enigma-like encoder that will change the character with each press...

[erikals]

cool. Can you program your own driver?

[Dr.Paj]

Or maybe rearrange the keys and then program the keyboard so that if you hit the 'y' key it will type 'y' even if its where the F1 key used to be. Just a thought. Another idea is to only switch the letters. Change them to alphabetical order on the keyboard and program it the same way as above.

[som3thing]

yeah dvorak was actually invented before qwerty, i assume you know the story of qwerty key layouts being invented to SLOW DOWN typing. Because in the old type writers people would type so fast that they would jam the type writer, so qwerty was invented to slow down peoples typing funnily enough. just a handy bit of trivia for you :] Som3thing

[dannix]

I was not to slow down typing but rater to have the common letters possitioned such that they were less likley to clash due to the mechanical mechanism used.

[Trogdor_The_Burninator]

Yeah, dannix is right, it wasn't to slow you down but rather to separate letters that commonly used together and to prevent jamming. Not to slow you down

[MadMechanicMike]

yeah, dannix and trogdor are right, it wasnt to slow you down it was to separate letters that were commonly used together to prevent jamming.

[jaysbob]

yeah, dannix and trogdor and Mike are right, it wasnt to slow you down it was to separate letters that were commonly used together to prevent jamming.

[bratnose]

uhhhh... yeah, what they said.

[Full Frontal Graphic]

Yep. Which inevitably has the effect of slowing down the operator's typing speed. Nicely, that means you are all correct.

[dannix]

Let me get this right, because it slows/slowed typing, that was the reason for the QWERTY layout?

[Full Frontal Graphic]

Not really. It was meant to keep the type arms from jamming against each other, if one key had not returned to its rest position before another one was actuated.

[Big Bwana]

Dam and I thought it was so the typewriter sales man didn't get it all jammed up, slowing him down, and his sales, while typing "typewriter" which is also the longest word you can spell using only one row on a qwerty keyboard...

[Derin]

I need two rows to type typewriter I use TR Q layout

[jongscx]

Actually, I do remember a study where non-typists (this must've been in the 70's or something...) were given randomly generated keyboard patterns and a few months to get used to them and tested for typing speed. I think they were then given the QWERTY or the alphabetic layout and tested again. The results were that there was no perfect keyboard layout as everybody could type just as fast with any layout. So you could all potentially be wrong...

[Full Frontal Graphic]

The effect would be less pronounced with non-typists. The random keyboard experiment was with IBM selectrics, if I recall correctly, and on those machines, there is no jamming of type arms because they had none. I'm pretty sure that unless one is really really fast, that keyboard layout is irrelevant to typing speed... provided it is a standard type of typewriter and not a stenotype machine or some other exotic keyboard like the Maltron etc...

[dannix]

Why is that then? QWERTY was to stop mechanical clashing, regardless of typing speed. It may have slowed it down till they got used to it, point remains that it was for mechanical reasons not typing speed.

[Full Frontal Graphic]

Yep.

[dannix]

I think everyone gets it now.

[MadMechanicMike]

lol it was fun though

[CoolKoon]

You know it's pretty funny that QWERTY is quite beneficial in Hungarian, since the letters used in many of the most common phrases and words are pretty much close together, like "az" (means the), "egy" (means one or a, an), "és" (means and, but convenient only if you don't use diacritics), various digraphs: ty, gy, sz, zs, cs, dz, dzs and even some words: "azaz", "mert" (means because; only the letter m is in a more inconvenient place), "ki" (means out), "de" (means but or confirmation). Despite this fact some people in their infinite wisdom thought that it's more convenient if they mix up the letters z and y (creating the QWERTZ layout in the process of doing so). Well, it isn't, but some people still prefer the latter because they got used to it :P

[CoolKoon]

grrrrr Looks like the site doesn't handle the "nonstandard" characters correctly (despite the fact that it seems to be using Unicode). So "és" is in fact az e with an acute mark on it and an s....

[marc92]

Hahaha, I never knew that!

[bobulator]

so that means I should use a DVORAK keyboard since nowadays keyboards don't jam(not as much)!

[Full Frontal Graphic]

If you will always have access to DVORAK keyboards, then possibly yes.

[jcurme]

You don't need a Dvorak keyboard -- just a Dvorak driver, which is included on most OSs. You can rearrange (most of) the hard keys on a keyboard into the Dvorak layout, but after you've learned the layout, that's not really needed. Now if Palm, iPhone, Blackberry and other PDAs would just have a Dvorak driver that rearranged the soft keys, I'd be set! :)

[omnibot]

Better keyboard-prank : Clear Turtle-wax on all the keys .. apply .. pollish .. done. Watch someone try to type slippery keys :D

[adamvan2000]

I did dunk a keyboard in the sink after someone had spilled pop on it, hoping to clean it. I also took it completely apart and scrubbed the sticky parts. Had the pop not shorted out one of the traces in a few spots, it would have worked fine when put back together. BTW, if you're going to do this, take the keys off and use more tp, or other porous paper products, and give them seedlings something to grab a hold of. ~adamvan2000

[hammer9876]

I had a co-worker spill her yogurt on her keyboard (blueberry if I remember right.) She unplugged it right away and called my department. My boss called the computer company (HP) and they recommended rinsing the keyboard under warm running water for 15 minutes, dousing it with rubbing alcohol, then letting it dry for 24 hours. I was elected to rinse. I had a great time standing at the sink letting people ask me all kinds of stupid questions. ("No, really. I do this every week. You don't wash yours? Eew, yuck!") When I was uninstalled, that keyboard was still working....

[Big Bwana]

You can actually blend the toilet paper in the blender with some water and pour it right in the keyboard if you are mean ... and mix the seeds in with a spoon ... just lift a key, keep the spring and pour away banging it every so often so it levels out and fills in all the cracks ..... mmmm it's like a high fiber milkshake hold the milk ....

[MadMechanicMike]

you can clean keyboards in the dishwasher if you put them upside down and let it completely dry before using.

[Bardouv]

For a second, I totally thought that was marijuana... So cool!

[szechuan53]

wink wink nudge nudge snicker snick k A U G H splat