New keyboard, who dis?

[Wayne]

I decided to treat myself to a new mechanical keyboard. I have one already, but as I use more than one computer I decided to get one for the other one too. I found a really nice one in a charity shop of all places, brand new and at a quarter of the price they sell on places like Amazon. It's called a Durgod Hades 68 white. The only problem was that it's a US keyboard. That means the @ and " keys are switched, plus there's no £ key on it. I also wanted the backlights to be a single colour (blue in this case as opposed to red on my other mechanical keyboard) rather than patterns. What I'm going to do is write up how I fixed these issues as it may come in useful for others in a similar situation.

First up the backlight. The keyboard can be programmed to have a single colour, but it means you need to do each individual key. I don't have the patience for that, so did something different. There's a setting that makes the keys change colour. Blue to red to green and so on. All I did was use that setting but make every colour option blue. That way it technically is switching colours, but as all the colours are the same it looks solid blue all the time. Now I have a keyboard that's lit the way I want it, and it took less than 30 seconds to do it.

Next up was the pound sign. This was tougher as it doesn't have a numpad on the side of it so I couldn't create a macro to do it. I installed the ENG-US keyboard layout and made that the default. Digging around my spare keyboards, I found one with a numpad and plugged it into the PC. Then I went to the macro creator and used the second keyboard to make the macro needed. For those that need it, this is how it's done. Turn on num lock, hold down the alt key and type in 0163, then let go of the alt key and press num lock again. Each of these are set up in the macro creator with a delay of 1ms. There are two Fn buttons, marked Fn1 and Fn2. I then told the software to run the macro if I pressed Fn2 and 3. This does mean that I need to do a slightly different combination of keys than usual to type the £ symbol, but it works. The other option I tried was to create a macro that presses the Win button and space, which changes the keyboard layout to UK, presses shift and 3, which types £ and then presses Win and space again to switch it back to the US layout. It worked, but I prefer this method.

With the " and @ keys swapped on the US layout, that was my next task. For that I used a program called AutoHotKey 1.1 and used a script that automatically types @ when you type " and vice versa. It's an incredibly easy script that looks like this:

"::send {text}@
@::send {text}"

Now the keys work just like a UK keyboard.

I also added some dental bands to the keys to act as O rings, making the keyboard quieter. Much as I like the clacky sounds it makes, my family would go nuts if they heard it all night long while I was working. Way back when I bought the original keyboard I bought a pack of I think 250 of them, then put the rest in one of my filing cabinets. They're really cheap, just a few pound for a pack. Now all this is done, I like this keyboard so much I've decided to use it on my main PC and use the older one on the other computer. I've also bought another one to put on the charity raffle table at BSides later on this month. Hopefully someone will get as much enjoyment out of it as I am with this one.