"Your Internets are broken."
"How's that?"
"The keys don't work on them."

Of course, then the librarians would either kill you or buy you a drink. Or, perhaps, kill you with drink.

I turn my left caps lock into another left control, and switching either the keyboard's layout or my brain's is so aggravating, I can't even imagine the suffering of remapping every single letter. (Of course, even once I find the control key one way or another, my troubles aren't over. I will not-uncommonly hit C-a C-k to delete the line I'm editing, only to find that I have selected all the text in the document and replaced it with the letter k. Which is usually not what I wanted.)

Via FedEx, yes. That seems to be the only option KeyGhost offer.

If I were them, I'd offer registered mail or even plain old untracked air mail, which for a thumb-drive-sized thing of course costs very little.

The problem with this for dealers who sell ordinary sorts of computer products is that scam artists will order a widget (or several...) via air mail, pay for it with a credit card, then say they never received it and reverse the charge, whereupon the seller is boned.

(Or they'll order lots of stuff with stolen credit-card details, which amounts to the same thing. This kind of scammer is easier to detect, though, because they're usually someone with very poor English from a third-world country, who's asking for 25 top-flight CPUs.)

But the QIDO seems to me to be enough of a niche product that it shouldn't attract fraudsters. No credit-card spammer is likely to want a QIDO, even if they can get it for free.

It's easy for me to say this, of course, because I'm not the one who has to implement it. KeyGhost might also be well-advised to stick with expensive tracked shipping for their keyloggers, because those have a certain obvious appeal for scam artists. Even if no consumer is very interested, scam artists could sell them on to all of their scam-artist friends :-).

Theo sent me a prototype of the QIDO to test and comment on. I totally love it and I'll need to keep one on hand all the time. I'll write up my impressions in a blog post, but the short version is that it works exactly as you think it should, and I couldn't tell a difference between the QIDO and a real hardware Dvorak keyboard, including that when you plug it into a Mac, the OS says it doesn't recognize the keyboard type and asks you to press the key to the right of left-shift (just cancel out of it).

One big advantage of the QIDO you didn't mention is that you can have Dvorak with you almost anywhere. Many times you don't want to mess with someone's settings, or maybe you're using a kiosk computer like at the library - now you can just plug in through the QIDO (if you can access the USB port where the keyboard is plugged in). As for having two people type at once, that's a programmer thing. It's a good practice to work in tandem with another programmer from time to time (pair programming) and there's no other way for Dvorak typists to do it than with a QIDO.

I'm glad to hear about the price drop, that's been the biggest negative complaint I've heard from the Dvorak users at work. What about the $29 shipping though? Is it really that much from New Zealand?? Is there an American distributor that could help?

As for the Dvorak vs Qwerty debate, I'm really glad I switched, but it was a long process so I don't recommend it to everybody. (And my wife gets very irritated about my rearranged keyboards!) The biggest advantage for me is in comfort. Most words just feel like they lie naturally under your fingers. I highly recommend the Das Keyboard for switchers, as the blank keyboard is the only way to force yourself to stop looking down at the keys.

Hi PhilH, we can only convert the keystrokes on an external USB keyboard, not laptop.

Hi tm and Dan, the KeyGhost USB/HUB version will record off multiple USB keyboards, but the data needs to pass throught the KeyGhost. E.G. 4 x USB Keyboards connect to -> Hub which connects to -> KeyGhost USB/HUB device connected to -> PC/Mac.

Kind regards
Theo

It's plausible that people with strain injuries caused by typing may find relief if they switch to a different keyboard shape or keymap, but this could apply in the Dvorak-to-Qwerty direction, as well as the other way. Repetitive-strain injuries can be alleviated by any change to the repetitive strain.

In the olden days, typists had to exert quite a bit of pressure to swing the arm for each key up into the paper, which meant that stuff like this was more important. Today, even heavy-push keyboards like the Optimus Maximus are not anywhere near as hard to type on than were most manual typewriters.

I'm not about to declare that Dvorak Users Are All Fooling Themselves; the Qwerty layout was not created by an ergonomicist, and it's quite likely that some other key layout is better. I type a lot, though, and Qwerty on a nice clicky IBM keyboard is fine by me.

If you're finding typing uncomfortable, and you're not currently using a fancy Qwerty keyboard, I strongly recommend you pick up a buckling-spring or Alps-keyswitch "clicky" keyboard on eBay for not more than the price of two movie tickets, and see what you think of it.

If that doesn't help, then off you should go to Dvorak layouts, bizarre-looking ergonomic keyboards, and so on.

I think it's very possible that a clicky keyboard with some oddball layout will be just as good as a $1000 ultra-ergo-board, though.