Stuff that fries your potatoes with olive oil of HAPPY.

[Spectere]

That's all well and good, but I personally have no use for those. I've used the calculator button a few times when it's been available (though I typically just do "Win+R, calc, ENTER" since those keys are far from commonplace nowadays), but I generally just use Win+1 for the browser and personal email, Win+2 for Explorer, and Win+3 for my work e-mail (on my SP3 and my work laptop). Those buttons are also generally useless outside of Windows, so I don't really feel all that motivated to get used to them if they do exist.

I use the media keys all the time on my G710+, so it's kind of a pain in the ass when I end up with a keyboard that doesn't have them. It definitely doesn't help that every keyboard has their own idea of which buttons should be media keys. On my WASD keyboard it's Fn+Ins/Home/PgUp/Del/End/PgDn. On my laptop it's Fn with the arrow keys (the volume controls are F10/F11/F12). My Apple keyboard has all of them on F7-F12. Three different keyboards, three drastically different layouts.

You still have to contend with muscle memory with dedicated media keys, especially if you switch between keyboards often enough, but at least they stand out like a sore thumb, especially if they're backlit. With chorded media keys I always have to look around and be like, "Okay, where's the Fn key? Okay, cool. Now where are the media buttons?" during which time I could have already manually changed the song.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. Those three keyboards also have the Fn key in a different place. It's between left Ctrl and Super on my laptop, between right Super and Ctrl on my WASD, and where the Insert key normally is on my wired Apple keyboard with numeric keypad. To add in some more fun and excitement on my other systems, it's to the left of left Ctrl on my MacBook and wireless Apple keyboard, where right Ctrl would normally be on my Surface Pro 3 Type Cover.

I think you can see why I'm annoyed.

Oh, right! The icing on the cake. My work laptop is a Precision M4600--a professional mobile workstation. You'd expect a modern $2500 high-end business laptop to put productivity first and skip some of the niceties that the home models have. I mean, media keys belong on Inspirons, not Precisions, right? Wrong. The Precision M4600 has dedicated media keys. Inspirons do not. What the actual fuck.

Ahem. Yeah.

And yeah, the backlit keyboards that I do have all have plain white lighting. I don't really need the backlighting to find my place, but I wouldn't mind having one with RGB lights just for the bling factor.

[Bobbias]

"Features!"

Yeah that's pretty dumb. Still not as dumb as my laptop requiring you to use Fn to access the regular F keys, with no way to toggle it though. I don't need a key that defaults to fucking toggling airplane mode.

[Spectere]

Really? Not even in the firmware setup or anything? That's pretty shitty. Even that horrible Inspiron 17R that I had for a while let you change that. Even Apple recognizes that people might actually have to use the regular F keys once in a while (though it's fairly rare to have to do so in OS X apps, they're almost mandatory if you do a lot of Windows work).

[Bobbias]

Well honestly the biggest use I have for the F keys is when I play o!m (f8 is chat, f9 is friendslist, and I never felt like remapping them. those map to alt+tab for f8 and turn the screen off for f9. f7 is also switch frame limiter in osu, and that maps to airplane mode, and nothing is more annoying than messing up and hitting airplane mode and watching your computer choke for a second while it realizes the network just disappeared), so it's not a HUGE deal for me, but it is pretty annoying. I looked all over and there was absolutely no way to swap it :/

[Spectere]

See, I use the F keys quite a bit in Windows. I've gotten rather used to, say, hitting F2 to rename files in Explorer. If I couldn't disable that on my laptop it would be pretty awful (Fn+F2 is the airplane mode toggle on mine). I also typically close applications with ALT-F4. It's a lot faster to do that than to use the mouse, after all, and it's an easy one-handed chord.

If you want some really stupid Fn keys, you should see the Surface Type Covers. Here's what the layout looks like:

F1: dim keyboard backlighting
F2: brighten keyboard backlighting
F3: mute
F4: play/pause
F5: search
F6: share
F7: devices
F8: settings
F9: home
F10: end
F11: pgup
F12: pgdn

Okay, so I totally get F9-F12 being what they are, seeing as the system has a full-sized keyboard and is 10/12". Only having a mute option is fine, because there's a volume rocker on the tablet itself. Search can definitely be handy.

But where's the option to adjust the screen brightness? Why is there a bloody share button on the keyboard? A settings button? What? I don't know about you, but I don't reconfigure my computer on a daily basis. Considering how bad the devices screen on Windows 8/8.1/10 is, that button is pretty damn useless.

The reason I brought that up is because there's no obvious way to invert the Fn key on that system, and most of the "enhanced functionality" is actually quite useless. There apparently is an Fn lock (Fn+Caps), but I highly doubt that sticks around after a reboot, and there's nothing indicating that the feature is actually enabled (or even present). Urgh.

This is starting to get dangerously ranty for this thread, haha.

[Bobbias]

Yeah that's kinda.... ugh. I do use f2 for rename, and alt+f4 (one of the only good ideas they had was to make f4 map to alt+f4) and also occasionally stuff like f5 (which is mapped to... f5 actually) or f6 when in browsers and not using a mouse.

[Spectere]

I upgraded to an iPhone 6s Plus. That fucker is huge (I was using an iPhone 6 before).

I also love the fact that both of my parents now use iPhones. We have a nice hand-me-down system going that 1) ensures that all of us will get upgraded every year and 2) ensures that I, specifically, will always have the latest and greatest.

[Bobbias]

Haha, that's awesome. I need to get me a fucking phone sometime.

[Bobbias]

Doublepost because #1postwhore status never goes away. I mean, because my girlfriend just got hired full time at the place she's been working as a temp for a while now. She likes the job and applied for full time earlier, but they told her she 'lacked focus' as why she didn't get hired earlier, and she was pretty upset about that.

[NewF]

I've been lurking around here for the past year and haven't really given much of an update to anything.
Considering my previous problem, all that has ended. I once again, moved back to the Philippines in May, 2015, am now happily married (With a new proper girl), have full citizenship status, working fulltime and have my first baby on the way! Super happy and excited. Just thought I'd let you guys know. Hope all is well with everyone else.

[Bobbias]

Congrats man! That's awesome.

Also, my sd2snes arrived. Can't wait to play some snes games on real hardware without shelling out thousands of bucks for a huge collection of games.

[Spectere]

I've been lurking around here for the past year and haven't really given much of an update to anything.
Considering my previous problem, all that has ended. I once again, moved back to the Philippines in May, 2015, am now happily married (With a new proper girl), have full citizenship status, working fulltime and have my first baby on the way! Super happy and excited. Just thought I'd let you guys know. Hope all is well with everyone else.

Congrats!

[Spectere]

I updated the web server and nothing got fucked up! It's sad that the above is a reason to be happy, but with the combined powers of Arch and systemd, it truly is a reason to celebrate.

Edit: Just to clarify: I mentioned something about migrating to a different distro a while ago, but I canned that project due to how cumbersome using a source-based distro on a public web server would be. I do use Gentoo for the Minecraft server that my friends and I screw around with, but for that VPS I absolutely need to have as light of an init/log system as I can (rather than the accident-prone, resource-addicted systemd, which, all in all, is using more RAM as MariaDB right now...not even fucking joking). This one, fortunately, doesn't get hammered as hard, so I can afford to keep it as-is. If things get too stupid I'll probably swap to a different binary distro (probably something that uses apt, definitely not CentOS), but for now I'm keeping it as-is.

And yeah, I know there's plenty of Minecraft hosts out there, but a Linode VPS isn't much more expensive, the ping times are lower, I have far more control, and it's way less laggy. Admittedly, Minecraft Server Host did come pretty damn close, but I enjoyed writing my own init scripts and cron jobs for it. They seem to be quite robust, too!

[Spectere]

TWIPPLE POST.

So I got something today: 667131251908710400[/tweet]]

I'm only, what, 30 years late? pic.twitter.com/1V1q70nJ5c

— Ian Burgmyer (@Spectere) November 19, 2015

[/url] (apologies for the inconsistent lighting)

Also, I can't help but be amused that the minor video editing that I used to do for my ancient rhythm game videos can now all be done on a cell phone. Gaddang.

[Spectere]

In case people haven't seen it yet, Undertale won this year's GameFAQs Best. Game. Ever. contest.

I don't know whether to be more excited about the fact that it won or the sheer level of salt from people who think that Ocarina of Time deserves to automatically win every year. It is glorious.