UltraX
I was getting pretty sick of my bulky old keyboard, so, earlier today, I got a slimline Logitech UltraX™ Premium Keyboard.
- Logitech UltraX™ Premium Keyboard
Sure, the keys will wear just as badly as on all the other keyboards I’ve gone through. But, if nothing else, it’s reasonably aesthetic, and goes with my Logitech RX1000 and ViewSonic VX2025wm pretty well.
Frankly, I was somewhat reluctant to get a keyboard with multimedia keys. On Windows XP, there is no (native) way to configure them, and a zero-configuration approach generally does the exact opposite of what I want. However, I quickly got all the keys working:
The home key fires up my default browser’s default home page. No surprises there. I have no idea why it doesn’t have an e-mail key, but I wouldn’t use that anyway.
The volume keys as well as the play/pause key didn’t do anything by default, probably because of my Audiophile 2496. That turned out to be convenient, as the keys are properly recognized by foobar2000 and can be configured as global hotkeys. Nice.
Finally, the media player key, or whatever it’s called, would launch Windows Media Player by default—definitely not my intent. After some digging, I quickly found out that all I had to do was associate foobar2000 with
.cdafiles.
So, there you have it, I have a new keyboard. And my Computational Geometry exam could have gone worse.