Trying a keyboard at Blue Bottle Cafe

While going to Google I/O 2013, I met a friend working at Twitter who recommended me to drink coffee at Blue Bottle Café. The cafe was not too crowded and the line was short enough for me to wait for. Watching a beautiful siphon, I enjoyed the tasty drip coffee, and then...



I noticed a guy next to me using a keyboard that I thought I saw at keyboard.io connected to a MacBook. Excited I am! He is Mr. Jesse Vincent himself who I happened to know from Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's Podcast just listened to before leaving for this travel.

Naturally, I said hi and asked for a trial of the keyboard. "Hello World" It was so easy to type even using the keyboard for the first time. As Jesse said, I felt the buttons for the thumb need a little bit of tweak. He said this will be addressed in the next prototype. The blue parts being made with a 3D printer, electric connections made with wires, it seems that quick prototyping is the important point of the quick improvements. I am looking forward to purchasing one when it is on sale, hopefully this summer.

The details of the keyboard can be found in the presentation "Building a keyboard from scratch". You can even have a look of the old Tron keyboard. Photographs of higher resolution are posted as a Picasa album (Licensed under CC-by - photograph by zunda). You can find a Japanese translation of this entry.

Happy 1234567890 day!

Well, I thought I would try translating my journal in Japanese into English. Let's see what happens. Here is my first try from this post.

I happened to know that today is the day that the UNIX time becomes 1234567890 seconds. Hurray! I was sitting alone in my office celebrating it with those celebrating far away from me while typing date command and watching twitter. However, I heard some applause from the end of the corridore. It is good to know I am not the only geek here celebrating something on Friday the 13th :)