Along with the hundreds of thousands of aging finger prints atop the keys, I’ve let a bit of dust accumulate on my keyboard lately. 

It was not for lack of writing. Mostly.

See. Late last year I found myself in need of a new computer. It was a mostly obvious choice. I’ve largely ditched Windows and was flipping between the family MacBook Air and an Ubuntu Linux install on my desktop for when I needed to do real work. It is a testament to the bloat in Microsoft products these days that Windows 11 barely runs on my desktop, chugging along and jittering and freezing despite my efforts in maintenance, while Ubuntu sings and dances on the exact same machine. I have it dual boot, still, because the Kid has games on the Windows boot side and… well, yeah.

Long story short, I found myself buying a new MacBook Pro in late 2025 for use as work machine: doing contract coding, graphic design, and any writing that I needed to do. It’s a little more than four months old now, and it has settled in as my primary computer which I use for all my serious stuff.

…but man, am I struggling to write on that thing.

Part of me blames the fact that on a full computer I have a hundred distractions. Notifications are forever popping up. The web and youtube are barely a click away. It’s too easy to flip and flop between apps and tasks and distraction after distraction after distraction.

Another part of me blames the keyboard. It’s far from a bad keyboard, but it is just a typical chiclet keyboard with no real character. It’s good, good enough and kinda boring. 

Until the laptop my primary writing setup for over two years has been an aging iPad with Scrivener and a keyboard. And a little over a year ago, readers might recall, I got a really good keyboard: a Nuphy Halo mechanical keyboard with backlit keys. It weighs three times as much as the iPad, is alive with color and character, and is tactile as heck. It is my baby, dusty as beats all right now, but the tool of my inspiration and more. 

It connects to the laptop, yeah, but it then the laptop is an extra thirty centimetres further from me and there is not always enough space at a cafe where I often write to accommodate. (I’m writing this on the Nuphy and the iPad in such a cafe and it just fits on the window ledge table.) Also, carrying around everything just in case defeats the purpose.

In short, I’ve been trying to write on the laptop and being met with middling success.

So in the last day or so I’ve come to a couple conclusions.

First, I need to use my pared down, simple iPad setup to do my creative writing more. I need to ditch the pretension of a fancy laptop and embrace the writing machine as The Way.

Second, I realize that all this might be leading into a bigger evaluation of my writing self, and a shake up of my daily routine, and generally auditioning a couple new places and times to get work done.

And third, I should probably clean my keyboard.