300Hz buzzing and health / sleep

I came across this comment while searching for something else.
The IBM golf ball typewriter is the greatest keyboard ever. Users of Modern day pc keyboards (or worse, laptops) have no idea how good a keyboard should feel.

You’ve got me. Now looking for the qwerkywriter …
Still won’t be an ibm. Not that I miss having to use the tipex correction paper all the time

Actually that just blocks one of the forks. It's still drawing current.

The Accutron II watches with the Precisionist movement, pulling the crown actually does stop most of the electronics.

By the way this is the growth chart for https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/



So a lot of people actually re-discovered Mechanical Keyboards and it's a big movement now, there are many collectors too, back when I started in January 2015 - it was a very niche hobby, felt a lot like collecting vintage watches now

Many people still used branded keyboards unaware of what was lost, and a mechanical keyboard cost upwards of $1000 - Lately with the explosion of the hobby it can still cost upwards of $500, however there are also many budget options, switches and pcbs are very affordable and easy to find now, keycaps also halved in price, but a decent German set still costs $150~ ish

What's relevant is the collection aspect of it, there are a lot of collectors that drive old Korean custom keyboards prices to around $3000's

I stopped collecting myself, seems more sane to spend thousands on watches instead, but I always find it weird that there are so many people with similar collecting afflictions, people even collect sneakers, yet proportionally there aren't many watch collectors yet

This is the graph for https://reddit.com/r/watches

And this is the graph for https://reddit.com/r/sneakers


You can observe Reddit's growth in these graphs too, so it's a bit hard to make sense of the graphs

My conclusion is that Reddit fuels the growth of hobbies, as I first hand observed with mechanical keyboards, yet it doesn't happen for vintage watches this is probably because we all enjoy staying incognito and either consciously or subconsciously don't share juicy stuff to drive interest, at least this has been the case for me, and another reason could be the lack of momentum for vintage watches, and more interest on expensive/new watches

For example similarly https://reddit.com/r/subaru doesn't grow


My family has been Subaru enthusiasts for 30 years, and there's a certain Subaru culture, instead this subreddit is filled with mostly American kids sharing their new WRX's, and kind of a subreddit where someone can boast a roadkill and not called out

In this sense for example this didn't get called out on https://reddit/com/r/OmegaWatches either


However the Omega subreddit is still very new, and just at 30K users, this is really nothing, and the growth seems rapid


So maybe Reddit is yet to drive interest for vintage Omega's, but if I'm forced to make a small conclusion, I'd say it will need nurturing or it won't really drive much, in this sense Mechanical Keyboards was an awesome hobby to be a part of while it was growing, and that positivity was what drived a lot more people to become interested when posts hit the Reddit mainpage

Had no idea mechanical keyboards were a thing, although I now recall my son talking about this, but I wasn’t paying attention.

So the qwerkywriter being $6-700 on Amazon is normal?

has anyone done a Selectric conversion? I’d consider one of those.

I remember qwerkywriter being frowned upon, the final frontier in mechanical keyboards is stabiliser tuning, in the end I had come up with a method to perfect coster stabilisers, they are more lightweight and external wire based, regular stabilisers called cherry stabilisers and they are pretty mushy on average, if you're obsessed with sound and expect a perfect keystroke on large/stabilised keys too, they are pretty lackluster

But there were MANY selectric homage runs

This is mine:


This is from Reddit, it's a different profile:

This is what I used when I worked in an office.

Great videos. When I get the time I’ll get into that Selectric vid.

you’re right about the ‘feel’ of the machine at work. There was that solid clunk of the golf ball rotating and striking the paper. I’m sure someone can write software that duplicates the sound. But reproducing the reciprocal movement….

@kaplan sounds like he’s all over this. Will await his response.
And thx for the links. The usb typewriter conversion could be a thing.

I think some put a solenoid inside their keyboards now, to mimick that feeling, while I'd love to try one out too, I just got out in time while I was ahead, I haven't built a keyboard in years

I'd suggest starting with something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003536693141.html

The blue switch here is the best modern innovation: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001984632232.html

Back in the day Cherry MX was the leader and their clicky switches were super annoying and mushy, these switches just produce the clean and strong thick, it's a dream typing on, before them I wasn't able to use clicky switches as I'm just too obsessive

And you'll need a keycap set to match your tastes

Here's an old review for the switches: