Wednesday, March 25, 2015

How Many Keystrokes Does it Take?

That's the second space bar I've worn a hole in
Whirring, clicking, freezing, and heating to the temperature of an Amish Fireplace, my computer signals its final days.  When the new one arrives, I shall be lost.  Gone will be the incessant sounds of a crippled fan bearing and a hard drive looking for somewhere to write.  My hand are also sure to freeze in winter.  What I'll miss most though is the perpetual gambling.  Will it work when I need it to or not?  Oh well, I can't say that it hasn't served me well.
Ginger and I bought two HP Minis almost 8 years ago.  Hers kicked off after two years. Thankfully though, we kept the carcass.  Five years later, when I had worn out my keyboard, we cannibalized that machine to give mine new life.  Add to that, two power cords, three batteries, and some internal work on the charging port and mine is now about to join the other.
Most people would have replaced the computer years ago.  But, it was so handy for traveling I could not bring myself to do it,  Keeping it also helped stretch the pennies.  The average person goes through multiple machines in that amount of time.  They also spend thousands.  If I remember correctly, I've spent around $500 total on everything to date.   Considering how much work I've completed with it, that's not bad.
Now to the question at hand; how many keystrokes does it take to kill a computer?  I know that benchmark isn't really relevant to the life of such a machine, but I do wonder how many there have been?  Cameras have had shutter counters on them for ages. This helps people determine the amount of life left in the components.  But, many photographers just use them as measuring poles.  "My D5 shows (insert hundred thousand something number here)".  I can hear it now and I also understand it.  It's fun to know how many photos you have triggered, how many steps you taken, and how many keystrokes you've made.  Well, that last one would be fun.
Maybe there is a such a thing and I don't know it.  There are keystroke loggers for NSA style tracking of messages and passwords.  But, I do not know of a single program which tracks the total number of keystrokes made on a keyboard.  In fact, if it were up to me, I'd have one that would also break it down into individual characters.  It would be totally worthless but it sure would be fun to be able to tell you I've made 3,879,385 total strokes with 427,002 of them being the letter "s", 501,553 being the space bar, and the character "#" rounding out the list with 7,098 total hits.  Yeah, that would be fun.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  I think we're about even.

2 comments:

Ken Bittner said...

Ha, ha Rich!
I'll bet if you ask the NSA...they could tell you how many keystrokes you made on that computer!

csyan said...

Jeg har vært oppmerksom på kopi klokker. salg kopi eksklusive klokker Etter å ha mottatt varene, ble jeg veldig overrasket, lærremmen er behagelig, klokken er lett, høy kvalitet og prisen er god. Hvis du er ute etter et klokke som passer til hverdagsbruk, er dette repliksklær definitivt det perfekte antrekket.copia orologi audemars piguet Jeg vil kjøpe igjen!