doit, doit now!

This post might be NSFW. YMMV. If you find it in fact NSFW then I apologize for offending your sensibilities beforehand, because this is actually pretty damn funny.

So my friend Sheila has several hundred dachsund puppies in her loft, or at least it seems like it when you go over there and hear them bark. Kevin and I had to dogsit for two of the little ladies about a year ago. A couple of days before the dogsitting was to occur our friend Pink told us that the dogs “69’d” on a regular basis. I was incredulous. “Pink,” I said, “dogs don’t 69.”

“No, no, they do! I swear!” he insisted.

“No way, Pink,” I said.

“Whatever, Nick,” he dismissed.

So later in the week the girls came over for their dogsitting trip. At one in the morning the fat one destroyed our comforter for no apparent reason. Feathers filled the air as we fired up the vacuum, much to the apparent chagrin of our landlords above. Meanwhile the brown one walked and peed at the same time, leaving odd, long trails of urine all over the house. Lovely. After they exhausted us with their horrible behavior adorable antics, we fell asleep in our comforterless bed.

As usual I got up the next morning an hour or two earlier than Kevin and traipsed into the office to check email and whatnot. The girls followed me in and collapsed behind me on the floor while our dog, Feynman, wisely remained sleeping in the bedroom. I was typically bleary-eyed and tired, so it took me a second to recognize the distinctive sound of tongue slapping flesh. My conversation with Pink immediately came flooding back to me. I peeked over my shoulder to find, lo and behold, the dogs doing this:

So if anyone ever tells you that there are not gay animals you can point them in this direction, pointing out that a gay animal himself posted a video of other gay animals doing the nasty.

So I’ve had a Logitech diNovo keyboard, mediapad, and mouse for a couple of years now. It’s a standard Windows-style keyboard and mouse that operates over Bluetooth. It’s really well-designed and has lots of features (such as extra buttons and a non-retarded shape) the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse lack. Unfortunately in OSX the extra buttons on the keyboard don’t work and the modifier keys are swapped (option swapped with command, etc). Logitech has explicitly stated that they have no intention of producing a driver for the Mac.

I have tried lots of different methods of getting all the keys to work and to swap out the modifier keys so they work properly. Apple allows you to change the modifier key behavior in Tiger but only on a global basis such that it modifies the Macbook Pro’s keyboard as well as the external keyboard. This is annoying since it requires me to change the settings back and forth whenever I take my MBP out of the house. However using Apple’s built-in software the mouse buttons can be assigned to various Exposé actions, which suits me just fine, though other people might want the forward and back buttons to work as they were intended.

There are also some hints of Mac OS X Hints that propose modifying keyboard layouts and such, but all of them are kind of kludgy and don’t really lend themselves to random playing or modification.

I noticed a great little Open Source app called HIDFiddler that accomplishes some of what I need, but it is very young and doesn’t have an obvious mechanism for the modifier-key-swap, just for the extra button thing.

Long story short: I have finally settled on using ControllerMate as the best way to acheive all of my aims. This great, super-cheap ($15!) program allows you to customize essentially every aspect of any controller you have — your mouse, your keyboard, pretty much anything. You can attach AppleScripts to certain keys or swap others out. If you find that you never use the Pause/Break key, for instance, or you want to disable caps lock, you can do that and more.

I spent an hour or so making a configuration for my diNovo Keyboard. I used some of the AppleScripts from HIDFiddler to attach to buttons presses (mainly for iTunes controls). I exported my diNovo ControllerMate files for others to use along with my modified HIDFiddler AppleScripts. Let me know if this is at all helpful to anyone.