Unboxing #7: Unboxing of FILCO Majestouch 2SS Edition 104-key and tenkeyless keyboards | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Sparky

Happy Halloween! Today: another unboxing video! This time we’re taking a look at my two new mechanical keyboards from FILCO (affiliate links):

As I mention in the video I usually like to purchase my mechanical keyboards from WASD Keyboards in California. They make excellent keyboards but just a bit too pricey for me at the moment. Instead of purchasing from WASD Keyboards I picked these keyboards up from Amazon Australia and I paid AU$202.55 (US$130) for the 104-key keyboard and AU$188.89 (US$120) for the 87-key keyboard which was roughly half of what I would have had to pay if I purchased from WASD Keyboards.

Both of these FILCO Majestouch 2SS Edition keyboards come with Cherry MX Speed Silver switches. If you’re into mechanical keyboards definitely give these switches a try; now that I’m used to them I will accept nothing less.

It was a bit disappointing that while doing the unboxing I discovered some of the keys had fallen loose during shipping. I have since plugged in and tested the keyboard (I’m using it now in fact) and everything seems to be working okay, so no harm no foul.

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Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Miniware DT71 Digital TweezersThis is an image of the product.notes

Let’s go shopping!

FILCO Majestouch 2SS Edition Keyboards

I ordered two new keyboards this morning. I got a 104-key one and an 87-key one. The gory details are documented on the keyboard page on my wiki.

Usually I like to buy V3 keyboards from WASD Keyboards in America. But the price for the two keyboards delivered would have been AU$841, which was just a bit too expensive for me.

So I had a bit of a hunt around and I found these Japanese FILCO Majestouch 2SS Edition keyboards on Amazon:

They both come with MX Speed Silver switches which are the ones I like.

While I was researching I found the following content mill articles which I enjoyed reading to learn more about mechanical keyboards:

Resetting a WASD Code keyboard

I have a CODE V3 104-Key Mechanical Keyboard with Cherry MX Green switches which I love. But unfortunately it has been my experience that they can be a bit finicky. I had to return one to WASD once because keys started producing “gibberish” if pressed the keys too hard. I know! Crazy!

Anyway I had a similar problem today. My Pause key, when pressed, would simultaneous ‘mute’ my audio *and* turn it either ‘up’ or ‘down’ (with a preference for ‘up’). Friggin weird. Anyway I was able to fix the issue by doing a keyboard reset.

To do a keyboard reset: unplug the keyboard, set SW4 to the “on” position, plug it back in. Wait until the solid green lights emit and then unplug, set SW4 back to the “off” position and then plug the keyboard back in and test. Easy peasy. :)

Disabling F6 ‘Run Main Project’ hot key in NetBeans because of G15 keyboard

I have a G15 keyboard, and I love it (but not as much as the old model!), but it occasionally causes a problem for me when I’m programming in NetBeans on Debian GNU/Linux.

The issue is that on a newer G15 the G6 key is right near the Ctrl key, and from time to time my pinky hits the G6 key which seems to be by default programmed to be the F6 key.

By default in NetBeans the F6 key is the ‘Run Main Project’ hot key, so when I accidentally press it, it fires up a Firefox window and tries to run my web app! I never configure my web apps in NetBeans, but even if I did, I don’t want to accidentally run anything due to an accidental key press.

So my solution was to disable F6 in NetBeans, and for that:

Tools -> Options -> Keymap -> Click ‘Search in Shortcuts’ -> Press F6 -> Click on the ‘…’ in the Shortcut cell for ‘Run Main Project’ (should be F6) -> Clear -> Apply -> And you’re done!

Everything is easy when you know how!

Input keyboard for decimal input on iPhone

So I needed to adjust a value (the odds of a horse winning a race) that has a fractional part and an integer part (i.e. a ‘double’, or ‘float’). The standard numeric input on an iPhone doesn’t include a decimal point, so I needed to trigger a different input device.

I ended up with this:

<input type="number" pattern="[\d\.]*" step="0.01" inputmode="numeric">