Keyboards

Among HP's landslide of Windows 7 PCs announced today are two biz-centric laptops that are a dream for clumsy typists. The HP ProBook 6445 and 6545 have all the unremarkable specs you'd expect in an affordable IT-department-friendly notebook, with one exception: a spill-resistant keyboard.

Microsoft will debut a new keyboard prototype in October that adds a new layer of functionality: pressure sensitivity. By including sensors underneath the entire keyboard, each key is capable of detecting pressure, which it captures at 8-bit resolution. By striking a key with varying degrees of force, you can carry out higher-level actions like deleting entire words instead of letters, or having a video game character run and jump at different speeds and heights.

Hackers may be one step ahead of you once again. Sure, you can follow all the steps to protect your private data, like creating a password that's hard to guess or clearing your memory cache after browsing, but that may not be enough. It's very possible that hackers can sniff out your data with every keystroke—at least that's what Swiss researchers proved in a video demonstration, which showed four different ways to pick up sensitive information from people's keyboards as they typed.

We've all heard of the five-second rule when having dropped food on the floor—if you pick it up before five seconds have passed, it's safe to eat. In recent years, scientists have put that folk wisdom to the test and the results fell somewhere in the middle. If bacteria are present on the floor, researchers found that five seconds is plenty of time for it to attach to your food. However, most floors harbor very little bacteria, so unless you're unlucky enough to drop your toast on a tiny patch of e. coli, you'll probably be fine to eat it. If you were to drop that bread on your keyboard, though, that's another story. You'd maybe want to back away slowly and reach for the nearest tongs.

Marvin Birnbom started selling WWII surplus in 1947. That business has grown into surplustraders.net, which offers more than 900 pages of deeply discounted electronic overstock. The site lists both bulk deals—1,000 AA batteries for eight cents each, 10 keyboards at $4.50 per—and a few individual items (12.1-inch LCD screens for $89 apiece). But Birnbom, a hobbyist himself, will sell you any quantity of anything as long as you meet the $30 minimum order. Just give him a call: 514-739-9328.

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