(OT) Replacing white numbers on a keyboard

[Stormin Mormon]

I've carried nail polish in my locksmith tool box, for about twenty years. Only been asked twice, in that time.

- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus

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[bob_villa]

If this was a higher quality keyboard with injection molded characters...they would not have worn out. Buy a new one or go to Goodwill and pay $5 or less...you may get lucky!

[songbird]

i flunked typing in Jr. High, (manual typewriters, ugh!) yet by the time i was through the second year of college i'd used four different keyboards.

the most important bits are those two little bumps on the keys which tell you where the f and j are at. all else after knowing those is via training. do it 80-100hrs a week and you'll learn.

for a tough typist on a kwerty keyboard the i is like giving the finger a little with the right hand. lift the middle finger a bit and it's right there. if that doesn't work your hands are out of position and that will slow you down a great deal.

songbird (yes, the first thing i do on any keyboard is break the F'n shift keys!!!

[rbowman]

When U was in high school, there were two paths, college entrance or business/shop. The business kids took typing and Spanish. College entrance kids took 2 years of Latin followed by 2 years of French for liberal arts types or Germans for the engineering/science types, no typing.

So 50 years later after spending a lot of my career programming I still can't type well, and the translations we do for our Puerto Rico site are Google fuels Spanglish they must find hilarious. I've retained enough German to sort of make sense of speigel.de. Latin, well, I'm reading Schopenhauer and he throws in snippets from classical Roman authors that I sometime can recognize a few words.

I never went to a high school reunion or I'd probably ask them why they didn't teach me something useful like typing and Spanish.

[bob_villa]

I remember typing class...all Remington manual typewriters...by 1 month most of the girls could type 30 w/m and most guys took 3 months! (1962)

[Jerry.Tan]

I remember those old typewriters, and they took a lot more finger power to work them keys. I took typing class, and never could get the hang of using all of my fingers as instructed. Worst of all was the lack of DELETE or BACKSPACE keys. Half my page was "whiteout" when I was done. That was in the early to mid 1960's for me too.

All the expectations of "proper" typing left me with a bad taste regarding typing. But in the 80's I kept needing to have things submitted in a typed format. That either meant typing it on a manual typewriter, using a lot of whiteout, and making a photo copy to actually submit, or paying someone else to type it. Eventually I bought an electronic typewriter (Word Processor). It would hold about four or five typed pages in memory, and errors could be fixed before printing. To me, that seemed like the greatest thing ever.

A few years later, I bought my first computer, which used the old 5 1/4 floppy disks, and had a black and amber monitor. Having the ability to save what I typed on a disk, and be able to print it again at a later date seemed to be a whole new world. Plus those early computers could do spreadsheets, which I never really needed, but I had to play around with them. Those early computers were not much more than glorified electronic typewriters, but still a huge improvement over the old manual typewriters.

The computers of today, are a whole different world. They can still do word processing and spreadsheets, but so much more. ANd even do so with full color screens, versus the old black and white (or amber) monitors, or later on the black, white, magenta, and cyan monitors. (3 color, and damn ugly).

I still remember the old BBS modem connections, when you could connect with someone else in your area, chat, share a few really ugly pictures, and download some Dos based shareware app. Then came the internet.. Websites, Usenet, Email, and a few other things which are no longer used.

In my opinion, the older internet was a lot more fun and useful than it is today. Most young people dont even know what a newsgroup is, but they are all addicted to that worthless mass of junk called "Facebook".

But that seems to be the way with all technology. We dreamed to have "COLOR TV". We finally got it, and then HDTV. Now we have the "perfect" picture, but the tv programming is trash. And we have computers that can do almost anything, but they are mostly used for trash and flooded with more trash advertising and malware.

The times they are a changing. But in some ways, I'd rather go back to better days. Just NOT a manual typewriter!

[Jerry.Tan]

Funny thing, the keyboard they show on this webpage is the exact same keyboard I have, and the same keys are worn as they mentioned, (plus a few more). It's an eMachines keyboard. Seems like they used quality electronics and cheap paint on the keys!!!

Someone in the comments at the bottom mentioned a Dymo label maker. Hmmmmm, I got one of those somewhere.... I used to label electronics inputs and outputs, etc. with it, and it worked well. I'll have to look for that thing. That's probably the easiest way to fix this.

[Tekkie®]

[e-mail] posted for all of us...

Sharpie has silver and gold markers. I don't believe they have white. You could try white typing correction fluid but I think it will chip off easily. I think you will spend more in fixes than a new one is worth.

[rbowman]

There was a guy in high school that was very strange. He always brought his lunch in a tin lunchbox that was painted like a barn and I'm pretty sure his mother dressed him funny every morning. Maybe Asperger's or something. But that son of a bitch could type. He was the fastest typist in the school and he put out clean copy. iirc he could do a consistent 120 wpm.