Category Archives: Thoughts on the World

My MacBook Pro is, ironically, the best portable PC I’ve owned. The Big Old Alien is slightly faster and more powerful, but you’d never use the word "portable" about it without gritted teeth, and since the PC world went to silly wide (=short) screens as standard, nothing else with a 15" screen can match the Apple’s bright, colour-accurate and relatively tall display. The form factor and elegant, strong body suit me very well.

The initial teething problems with accessing external displays resolved themselves when I bought some slightly higher quality display adapters. Ironically the best one for VGA has "Dell" written on it. The multi-touch trackpad works well with Windows as soon as you set the bottom right corner to provide a right mouse click, and the spacing and action of the keypad allows me to type quickly and fairly accurately in a way which isn’t possible on many of the other laptops I’ve owned.

The keyboard layout, however, is a different matter. I’m sure that Apple’s position is that you should just use Apple keyboards all day every day and get used to it, and that the more common layout is a Microsoft/IBM standard anyway. The latter point might be true, but that doesn’t help those of us who operate in a more heterogeneous world. I have to work on PCs as well. About half the time, I use my Mac via Remote Desktop, from a PC with a standard Microsoft Keyboard. Even when I’m working on it directly, and even though I’m not a true touch typist, my muscle memory is sufficiently good that I default to the UK PC positioning of the ", @, \ and # symbols, all of which I use quite frequently. And occasionally Frances gets to use it, and she is a touch typist who uses PCs all the rest of the time.

I therefore decided that something had to change, and that was the Mac! Unfortunately turning it into a "standard" PC layout is non-trivial, but I’m getting there.

The first step was to implement a proper "Delete" key, without which the Mac is unusable in many Windows programs. The solution to that one’s fairly well documented: you use SharpKeys to adjust the registry, and remap a suitable key to send the Del scancode, which is an easily reversible but permanent fix. I chose F12, which is easy to map and in pretty much the same relative position to Backspace as most Windows laptops. I believe it may be possible to use the CD Eject button instead, which would be even better, but I haven’t got that working yet.

The next layer is the Windows keyboard definition. Microsoft provide a free utility called the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Utility, which allows you to define the mapping for the main text keys. The advantage of this is that you can define multiple layouts and switch between them on the fly, if, for example, you work in several languages. I initially tried having the Apple layout, plus one based on a standard UK keyboard. This works tolerably well, but you can get tripped up if you haven’t switched the layout correctly, as you have to switch the keyboard separately for each application used in a login session. It also doesn’t resolve the problem of muscle memory on the Mac. Something more enduring was required…

I decided it was time to try and sort out the MacBook keyboard more directly. It’s relatively easy to pop the keycaps off and swap the standard text ones around. First change is to swap the \| key with the ~ key, which puts them into their correct positions for PC users, and remap their output in a copy of the Apple keyboard layout. While I was at it I remapped the non-shifted character on the ~ key from a grave accent to a # – consistent with PC keyboards and about 1 million times more useful in this hash-tagging world!

Apple’s approach to the quote keys appears to be wilfully obstructive. All European keyboards since the age of typewriters, including British ones, put the double quote above the 2. So do older American keyboards. However the US IBM Selectric typewriters put the @ above the 2 and the double quote above the single quote, and that became the standard for US PC keyboards. For reasons which I can only assume are due to an arrogant American company trying to impose American standardisation on others the UK MacBook keyboard follows US rather than standard UK practice. Fortunately they don’t impose the same change on the rest of Europe, so a partial solution presents itself by purchasing a replacement 2/" key for a German machine (from the excellent http://www.thebookyard.com), and swapping the outputs of the two shifted keys in the keyboard mapping file.

At this stage I have a single keyboard map which works with both the native keyboard or a PC one, and outputs all the symbols I regularly use on PC rules. The majority of keys on the MacBook keyboard also follow their labels. There are two exceptions: the @ key is generated by shift+quote as expected, but not shown on the key, and the same goes for the #, as the base symbol on the ~ key. Unfortunately as far as I can see there are no variants of the MacBook keyboard for any country which have these key combinations, so getting replacement keycaps is not an option. However I can probably live with this limitation.

The one remaining annoyance is the fact that the Fn and Ctrl keys are the opposite way round on the Apple keyboards to most PCs. That’s a bit of a problem with muscle memory for Ctrl+key shortcuts. However I’m gradually training myself to hit the standard PC Ctrl key on its right edge, which is almost the right position for the Mac Ctrl key as well. The real fix is to develop a new keyboard driver which swaps those keys altogether, and then swap the key caps. That’s not for the faint hearted, and I’m not going there unless I have to (and have lots of spare time).

There’s one more layer! Some of my software (particularly XnView, which I use for image management) uses the numeric keypad, which doesn’t exist on the MacBook (one of the big advantages of the Alienware M17X being so enormous!). However that has a relatively quick fix, using AutoHotkey to temporarily map the equivalent keystrokes from the standard number keys. This has the advantage that I only need to have those changes in place on demand, and can tweak the mapping on the fly if needed.

It’s a complicated process, and definitely not standard end-user territory, but I’m nearly there!

Readers of longer standing may remember the agonising when I had to replace my 2009 Toshiba laptop, as there had been yet another shift in screen aspect ratio standards, and in order to preserve a decent vertical screen size, I ended up buying a massive Alienware M17X laptop for my main work machine. It’s still a great machine, but “portable” is not an appropriate adjective…

This means I need another laptop for travel. For a while I soldiered on with the old Toshiba Satellite Pro, sticking a large SSD in and upgrading to Windows 7. This works fine, but inevitably software tends to expand to match hardware capabilities, which means running the latest versions of compute-intensive software such as Capture One starts to feel challenging on older hardware. The major nail in the coffin came in Barbados this year, when we discovered that The Crane had upgraded most of the televisions to new models with only HDMI inputs, and the Tosh only has a VGA output. This put a significant crimp in our television watching.

Back home, and the search for a new travel laptop began. One of the interesting challenges is that while I need an HDMI output for plugging into newer televisions, I also definitely need a VGA output on what will be a business tool, for plugging into projectors. However in about the past year Intel in their “wisdom” have decided that newer PCs should not have VGA outputs, despite the vast number of VGA-only projectors still in daily business use. After some agonising I found a deal from Dell for an “outgoing stock” 2013 model Latitude E5530, which has a Core i7 processor (of which more later), and, importantly, both VGA and HDMI ports.

Setting it up was refreshingly easy, as I purchased a 750GB SSD and simply cloned the old travel laptop onto this disk, stuck it into the new machine, and updated a few drivers. I have a fairly complex file replication scheme set up on all my laptops using the excellent SyncBack SE, which allows my work to just flow smoothly backwards and forwards between them, so that I can work on the Alienware M17X if I’m driving somewhere, or switch to the Dell if I’m travelling by other means. As a business computing arrangement it works pretty well. Recently I’ve been splitting my time between home, the Midlands, central London, Cologne and Berlin, and it’s served its primary purpose.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations. Firstly, although the Dell has a Core i7 processor, it turned out to be a dual core version. I didn’t spot this when I bought the machine, as I didn’t realise such things even existed! While it’s not a limitation if I’m doing normal business computing, it does affect my ability to do some tests with virtualisation or performance simulations, which have been an element of my recent work. Coupled with the relatively slow integrated graphics, it’s significantly slower when I’m processing images for my photography.

However the main issue is the stupid slitty “widescreen” display, which is only 768 pixels deep. This makes it almost unusable for some programs, such as Capture One, and a bit of a challenge even for working on large spreadsheets, project plans, or documents where I want to see an overview of a page. Coupled with a disappointingly dim screen which is very sensitive to viewing angle, it’s effectively unusable for my photography.

The result is that I’ve started lusting after alternatives. There is, of course, one hardware supplier who “get” the need for a sensible screen aspect ratio, and also have display technology which produces bright, colour accurate images tolerant of quite a wide viewing angle range. I am talking about Apple. One of my colleagues has a three year old 15″ Macbook Pro, and while I’m no lover of OSX, the screen is exactly what I need.

So that got me thinking, maybe the answer is a hybrid solution: Mac hardware running Windows :)… Yesterday I bit the bullet and purchased a 2011-era 15″ Macbook Pro, with a four core i7 processor. I will do my usual trick of installing maximum RAM and a big SSD, and it should more or less match the Dell for performance and portability, plus deliver a bit more style to boot. The interesting challenge is whether I can pull off my trick of just installing a clone of my existing laptop set-up, or whether I will have to re-install everything with a more complex dual-boot solution managed by OSX. I’ll also have to get used to running Windows on an Apple keyboard, which may be interesting.

Let the experiment commence!