Green Keyboard

Intro: 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

STEP 2: The Keyboard

Cover the keyboard in about 5 layers of toilet paper. Roll some up and push into the cracks.
Make sure it's well covered
Wet the paper thoroughly

STEP 3: Sowing the Seed

Sprinkle a good layer of seed onto the paper. I'm using alfalfa here, though mustard or cress will be fine.

If your mate is off for a month or more, grass seed will give a lush greenness not obtained with other seeds.

STEP 4: Germination

This next step is important as it will provide the optimum environment for your green keyboard

Unpack the Catalyst switch and discard all the contents apart from the bag with the book and cables in.

Discard the the book and cables and split the bag down each of the long edges

You should end up with a rectangle of polythene, half a seal on each end, which just fits over the keyboard.

Water the seeds again, and place the polythene over the keyboard.

Note: this could work with other polythene - I didn't have any other polythene.

STEP 5: Growth

Water every day. After a couple of days, the seeds should have sprouted. Now is the time to add more seed and water again

STEP 6: What Next?

Continue watering, adding seed etc and after about a week, remove the polythene. You should now have a green keyboard

What Next?
You could surround the keyboard with gravel, place a small dish in the gravel and add Sea Monkeys to give that calming Japanese Garden with Koi Carp feel

For an English Cottage Garden feel, thimbles and fishing line can be used to make hanging baskets. Superglue them to the front of his/her monitor

Toy people and bears will recreate the fear of a wild forest on the keyboard. Use epoxy to glue them to the keys before adding the paper.

If your colleague is only off for a week, why not go for instant results with turf?

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

[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

[Bets2]

If you are a true typist - not a finger pecker - then moving the keys around will not slow you down & most won't even be notice the key changes at first.

[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...

[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.

[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]

I think everyone gets it now.