Goldilocks and the Three Keyboards

This is a quick followup to the blog post about having a dedicated li’l keyboard for doing translations. The problem is that this product category — small keyboards — is cursed. It’s not surprising, because it’s not something that the major producers are involved with much (they concentrate on actual, real keyboards), so you get a lot of semi-no-name producers pumping out junk. One of these was the smallest keyboard up there — the M4 — which is complete junk: It drops half the keystrokes. The biggest one up there uses a USB dongle, and works fine. But it’s just a bit too large, really — I just want to be able to have it on my table by my reading chair permanently in case I need some emergency French translation. Today I got this keyboard in the mail. It’s a Rii 518BT Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s very straightforward — it’s got all the normal keys and stuff, and not too many weird ones. And the layout is pretty standard, which is something you can’t always count on with these small…