X61 - adding third language to the keyboard

[dr_st]

My girlfriend is studying Russian and wanted her Thinkpad to have a trilingual keyboard. Since Lenovo offers no such option, we took her X61 to a keyboard customization shop and engraved Russian on the English/Hebrew keyboard.

The end result looks rather nice. Much better than stickers. Now I just hope that the paint lasts.

[LegendaryKA8]

That's rather nice... I wish there were some services here that did that... at the very least I could refresh a keyboard with the letters worn off. I'm pretty picky about my TP keyboards and have replaced several older ones with brand new replacements... not cheap.

[t140568]

That does look very nice, indeed.

I can't help but wondering... is there really a shop dedicated to keyboard customization?

[dr_st]

I can't help but wondering... is there really a shop dedicated to keyboard customization?

Yes, and in fact much more than one.

Many Israelis like to take advantage of significantly lower laptop prices in the US (and some countries in the far east, like China/Thailand), buy laptops on their trips and bring them back. Many of these would like to get Hebrew on their keyboards, and engraving is usually far cheaper than replacing the keyboard with an official localized one. In fact, for certain models not sold in Israel, such a localized keyboard may not even exist.

Furthermore, the ethnicity here is much more heterogeneous than in the typical country. With about 20% arab population, and additional 20% of the population who are immigrants (mostly from Russia and ex-USSR countries), there is interest in adding additional languages to laptop/desktop keyboards.

Overall, the demand is sufficient for the businesses to thrive.

And they also do other keyboard customizations, for instance assigning special labels for the keys, for application-specific macros (i.e. music-editing, gaming, etc.). Although these are probably are only about 2% or less of the total customization jobs.

[t140568]

Wow. Very cool. I guess I didn't expect such diversity.

I'd love to get the Windows symbol removed from my desktop keyboard and have something more Linux-oriented.

Also, how much does a customization like you have cost?

[dr_st]

I paid $35. I've seen prices between $25 and $40.

[Utwig]

I learned to type in Russian by looking on keyboard layout on paper. So none of my keyboards (TP USB keyboard, T42p, X61T) have Russian letters but I type in Russian on all of them. It would be fun to have a Thinkpad with blank keyboard .

There are no engraving services here, you can buy stickers but those would spoil the feel and aesthetics of my Thinkpads.

[dr_st]

There are no engraving services here, you can buy stickers but those would spoil the feel and aesthetics of my Thinkpads.

Been there, done that.

Most of my keyboards, like yours, don't have any Russian letters on them (including all my Thinkpads), but I type Russian blindly pretty OK, but not nearly as fast as English, and not as fast as Hebrew. I still end up hitting the key next to the key I need fairly often, especially when it comes to the edge keys (the ones at the right ends of rows, which are non-letter symbols in the standard English layout).

What bothers me is that my brain seems to have been stuck for the past several years, and my Russian typing skills have hardly improved. I'm starting to doubt whether I will ever go to "the next level".

[fasteez]

awesomely beautiful, reminds me of a giant hp48, nice color scheme .. and quite cheap too.

[crashnburn]

Nice.

It would be nice if you could share the contact info of any of these who could / would offer their services by mail / parcel.

[Utwig]

I improved my Russian typing skills by adding lots of chat contacts who write in correct Cyrillic (most people from ex SU do, most people who moved out don't). There are also programs for improving typing: Windows: Typingmaster is not free and I'm not sure if it supports Russian. Linux: KDE has a learn to type game/utility and it supports different languages that KDE supports. It's free, if you have many Thinkpads you can install Linux with KDE one one of them and drill typing every day.