My read of the VGA port was not that it was particularly valued as an output; but that it was supposed to be there as an input option(mentioned in ‘Video subsystem’) so that, along with the ability to use the internal keyboard and pointing device as USB peripherals, you could connect the thing to a headless system.
That is a rather interesting feature, I don’t know of any laptops that do it. I modified the connectors on one of the old Motorola ‘lapdock’ things intended to laptop-ize certain cellphones to get the mouse/keyboard/screen in portable package with battery option; but it seems like something that could be even less obtrusive if it could just borrow those peripherals from an actual laptop on the occasions that they are needed.
Totally, it’s for connecting to rack servers and the like, which typically have bare-bones video on-board - on those rare but critical occasions when you need to reconfigure a borked network configuration or get into BIOS.
Not quite cellphone screen sized, but there are some battery powered standalone portable screens in the pipeline. Expect that we’ll be seeing more like this now that USB-C as a video transport exists for multiple device classes.
I get that he’s trying to cram as many ports on it as possible, but some of it seems to be ugly for ugliness sake. Why are the keys all weirdly color coded? Maybe it’s for some Russian input mode reason? It would be a lot more ascetically pleasing if you didn’t have the Cyrillic letters cluttering up the keys and made them a uniform color.
This is pretty much an all-in-one crash cart for a datacenter. It’s a bit of a shame it’s doomed to be absurdly expensive if it ever gets built.
I really love the idea that the VGA port is an input port. Hopefully it comes with a cable that you can plug into a USB port on your machine and the server to allow you to use your laptop as a console terminal.
Yes, I’ve thought about the left handed folks, and I guess there is a mirror-image solution for my keyboard shortcuts.
I do use a Logitech G502 mouse, something that would probably be even more useful for you: I have Return as one of the side buttons. I also have the scroll wheel assigned for: press left, Command S, Save, and press right, Delete.
I use a cheap symmetrical mouse, and use left handed mode in my desktop environment. On pure X environments I remap the mouse buttons with xmodmap.
The main thing for me is that I select objects or text with my gripping hand (the left) and operate on them with my right (enter or delete). I do this to share the load between both hands, to void focusing the work on the left.
Before that my right hand would get very sore, particularly when documenting. Coding wasn’t so bad.
Cons:
If you’re an SA, you REALLY REALLY want a full sized CTRL key on at least one side (I would happily sacrifice the CAPS LOCK key).
The ESC key is in an interesting place, don’t know if I like it
The tilde key is also in a weird place.
One thing I always hated moving from computer keyboard to computer keyboard on different systems is that touch typing became impossible, especially when editing files…
THIS is why I love BoingBoing so much. They appreciate beauty, elegance, functionality, coolness – good design – in every aspect of human technology. Even typography.
I mostly agree with everything you’ve said, but not this. I still manage a fair number of way older systems which do not have HDMI output; VGA (especially if it supports sync-on-green) is still super useful.
Requiring extra USB ports is easily resolved by grabbing an external hub. But HDMI to VGA converters don’t always work.
ETA:I do have a question, though. This thing has webcams. Do you guys use webcams a lot?
When did it become a “clit mouse”? First time I’ve seen that. Although IBM and the Thinkpad people officially called it a TrackPoint IIRC, it was less formally known as a nipple (or perhaps the bit of replaceable red rubber was that - or a nub)
I’m just fascinated that it has migrated from nipple to clit.
Well when I had a virtual office I worked for a place that didn’t like them so dunno. I did you voice chat on skype often though so video would just be an add on to that.
Should have replied to this as well. At least where I worked there were always carts with keyboard, mouse, monitor and various dongles to connect to the headless servers. Stupid blade servers had like 3 different connectors depending on make/year.
It is sort of incredible that with thousands of machines available the one with just the combo of things I want never seems to be available.
Using all the real estate for a keyboard just seems like a no brainer that nobody gets right.
