Having the desire to upgrade my input devices at the home, I started looking around for a good keyboard and mouse combo. While the business-oriented lines were nice in their own ways, they lacked a certain flair and were woefully short of buttons and standard layouts. (What’s with everyone screwing with the standard keyboard layout? Stop it. I like my buttons.)

As a result, I started to look at the gaming series of devices. I’m not sure how I wound up looking at them, honestly, but once I started to look at the options it was clear to me that all the attention on making input devices better at a hardware level was going into that market instead: the keyboards were mostly mechanical, the mice were high-DPI and loaded with buttons, and the quality was far and away higher — as were the prices, of course.

Even though I knew that video modes were a nightmare mess that was made barely tolerable by standards, I had no idea the hell that awaited once one passed the 1200p edge.

A short history of video modes before we begin (this helps the pain later). Video is a three-dimensional concept that must yield to the laws of computer science and become a two-dimensional bitstream of arrays in order to go down the wire to the screen (and also in order to be stored in memory, but let’s not complicate things more). You may be wondering if I added an extra dimension in the previous sentence but I did not – that additional dimension is time.

For a mess of reasons too boring to get into, I wanted to get a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad Mini. After poking around for a bit I found some good candidates, but holy hell is the market for BT keyboards crap right now.

The Apple Wireless Keyboard is pretty much a desk keyboard. While I really hate wires, I hate replacing batteries for needlessly portable devices more, so I always go wired at desks when I can (my love for the Magic Touchpad is an exception to the rule). There are a dozen clones of that keyboard out there (whose manufacturers are both named and unnamed) but the design is very much for the desktop.

I have four Backup Plus Desktop drives. Two were bought two years ago and two last year.

All of them had an issue where they would drop off the USB bus sometimes and require a power cycle to return. I looked around and found a firmware update that promised a fix. However, it would only apply to two of them (the newer ones). The older ones (which looked identical, of course) didn’t show up in the tool.