Hello everyone. I'm kalrand and I made the mistake of buying a mechanical keyboard on July 13th.
I needed a new one, one of my cheap, disposable rubber dome keyboards had something that was irking me. I forget exactly what, and it's not important. I wanted something *a little* bit nicer, so I did a bit of googling and liked the old ibm-style Unicomp keyboards. One happened to pop up on craigslist relatively close to where I lived for about half off, and I emailed the guy.
He was selling it because it was too loud and his wife was making him. Neat!
So then I ended up lurking here and on /r/mk and learned a bit about bucking springs, and started to read about the different cherry MX switches.
I'm not a light switch person. I don't even notice pressing the keys on my Unicomp. Massdrop had the clear poker ii go up, and I thought what the hell, they don't seem to make keyboards in tactile grey, and this seems nifty.
I was also in the market for a programmable keypad. I like Kerbal Space Program, and it would be really nifty to shunt a bunch of those commands over onto something that wasn't the main keyboard area. Also, the Unicomp keyboard had a bit of a NASA feel to it, so this all kind of had a theme still.
I did a bit of research, and started trolling about on ebay, putting in relatively lowball offers. I ended up getting two cheap genovation micropads, and a Cherry G80-3700 that supported mode 4, both at about the same time.
Then I found a thread that stated in the great finds section where someone was asking a question about one of they keypads I ordered, which later became this thread:
http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=61544.0 I answered the question, and suddenly I have 32 more programmable keypads in my apartment.
Somewhere along the way I ordered a GH-40 (because that's just an awesome idea) and a 122 key Unicomp for $35 (see: Kerbal Space Program).
So in about a month, I have 1 new keyboard, 2 more on the way, 35 fully programmable keypads, and there's some keycaps on order too (I like retro styles, so I got the DSA Dolch set). And now I see the Nuclear Data keycaps. Ugh.
So hello geekhack. I think I might just fit in here. Just don't anyone show me a Phantom with 7Bit's layout and tactile gray switches. That would be bad. Or a working 122 key Model F that has a soarers converter.
