Nearly twenty years ago, the great mechanical keyboards of early computing were largely forgotten, spoken of in reverent tones by the faithful few who clung to them in a sea of mushy, but cheap successors. Das Keyboard stood out as a counterpoint, an attempt to offer a modern, mainstream-friendly board with mechanical switches years before the current resurgence took hold. Do its boards still hold up in a more competitive landscape? And, given that it is Christmastime, would a Das Keyboard make a nice gift?
Live streaming continues to grow in influence while remaining complicated to do well. Mevo pioneered an easier path to quality live streaming a half decade ago with its original live streaming camera and the Mevo Start is the company’s latest entry into that line.
A year ago — pandemic induced video conferencing mania at the center of it — even a bad web cam was hard to come by and often approached the century mark. Now you can get a webcam for eleven bucks. Will it make you look like a million bucks? No, but it’ll get you on that video conference you have to be on without spending a fortune.
Since its introduction, no one has ever mistaken the Macintosh as the cheap option for computers. Nor would anyone who watched Apple’s launch of its insanely fast M1 Pro and Max chips on Monday argue that the new MacBook Pros are cheap. However, when the dust settles, the previous reigning top Apple Chip — the M1 — will still be the one that created a year when the cheapest Mac was the best Mac and one of the best computers, period.
I shared last week the start of my quest for the perfect keyboard, stopping by the well designed, aesthetically pleasing Keychron’s K2. While less visible than Keychron, Epomaker has emerged as another major purveyor of keyboards suitable for more than just gamers, including the GK68XS — an intriguing board that ticks off a lot of quality boxes.
When the pandemic hit last year, it threw me into a world where I was doing vastly more video editing than I did previously. Anyone who has spent time splicing and dicing video files knows those files can fill up storage devices really quickly and they are a pain to transfer between computers. Enter the new class of tiny, pocketable, external SSDs like the RavPower Mini External SSD Pro.
I nervously hit the buy button and wondered what in the world I was doing. I was ordering a portable air compressor and I was excited about it. I’ll confess I never thought I would get excited about an air compressor, but after a bad afternoon hoping from gas station to gas station only to find their air pumps broken and finally forking out $2 for not-enough-air-to-fill four tires, I wanted to try something different.