My switch from AZERTY to QWERTY

Just yesterday, I switched keyboards from AZERTY to QWERTY. This post is going to be a struggle to write as I'm not completely used to it yet, but I guess it's worth it as the QWERTY layout matches my needs most.

The first thing I did when I got into the QWERTY side of things was check out the differences in the layouts. The letters aren't that much of a struggle to get used to, apart from the letter M being in a completely different spot without any clear reason as to why.

Of course, there's some more advantages to this layout. You pretty much don't need the Alt Gr button, so you can use that one for keybinds in games (for example having to press both Alt Gr and a number to heal yourself in WoW).

I must say that my new keyboard feels extremely good compared to my old one. The button presses feel a lot smoother instead of constantly having that clicking noise. The space bar is pretty loud, but I guess every keyboard has its flaw and a loud spacebar isn't that much of a problem.

Also, a pretty big flaw (for people that live in Europe) is that it doesn't have the Euro sign on it so that could become a bit of a struggle in the future.

So far, I really like the experience of QWERTY compared to AZERTY. I'm probably going to run into some issues with the QWERTY layout pretty soon, so stay tuned for more keyboard layout madness.

The Way I Game

Well, everyone has their own style when it comes down to gaming, and I want to talk about mine.

The games I play

RuneScape

It's an MMORPG based around you developing your characters and training various skills. The reason I like it is because you can choose what direction you want to go with your character: will you mainly train the non-combat skills, or are you the type for exploring dungeons and killing every monster you see? It's up to you, really. I play RS3, the newest version of the game. It's a brower-based game, but I have a downloaded client for it just to be able to start gaming faster :-P. It's an awesome game in my opinion, but it might not be for those that are easily fooled by scammers etc. because those are, unfortunately, still playing the game and want to get your account emptied as fast as possible so that they can sell your stuff for real-life money.
Apart from the scammers, that are almost as bad as the Indian callcenter guys, the game is very good: it gets frequently updated so that there will always be content for you to discover, the developers are constantly working on getting cheaters out of the game as effectively as possible and they are good at that and last but not least: the community is awesome once you get to know the way their personalities generally work.
I personally play a skiller: I try to make my way through the game without fighting ANY monsters. This is pretty hard, as the game is combat-based.

MineCraft

I know, I know... loads of people think this game is extremely childish. For me, it's a way to get creative without necessarily getting comments about what I make. I build stuff in Creative mode, mostly on the Vadact Buildteam server (part of the Shotbow Network). Those guys really know how to take creativity to the next level, and that's exactly what I like so much about the Vadact server. They are skilled, know how to have a laugh and you never see any of the actual Vadact members get mad in chat or anything like that. Their world consists out of plots, small areas of land you can claim and build your stuff on. You start off with absolutely nothing: no landscape, no structure, just a flat surface. This is what we make of that flat surface:

We fill it up with montains, trees, bushes, rivers, cities, hot air balloons and much more. If you build very good on your plot, you'll get promoted to the next rank and you receive an additional (sometimes also bigger) plot for you to build your next project on.

Gaming behavior

Gaming communities are just like real life communities (sometimes a whole lot weirder, but that depends on the community just like in real life). That's why you need to behave yourself in order to really fit in with a certain community. If you come across some guys building up a meme community, you should stimulate them and give them advice on what you think would be awesome in a meme. If you come across some Call of Duty try-harders, you shouldn't start to talk about that one cat meme you saw on the internet yesterday (even though it may be awesome).
In the Vadact community, you have to remain a bit serious but there is plenty of room for jokes. Helping others is mandatory, so don't get too selfish around there! If you don't help others and give advice about what improvements could be made to a build whenever it's asked, you won't really get into the community and you'll just be sitting there on the side.

Setup

Oh, the ever-so-important setup. My setup is pretty much just a basic home PC (Acer) with two relatively small monitors (Samsung) and a pretty cheap keyboard (Acer, came with the PC), a wireless mouse (Logitech, obviously) and one of the cheapest microphones (Audio-Technica) that delivers relatively decent quality. I also have headphones (Philips, ordered online because my Turtle Beach was broken), but those were in my bedroom when I took the picture.

That's basically all I can say about the way I game, I hope you all liked it!

Cleaning my Keyboard

My keyboard got really messy, as I have the bad habit of watching movies on my PC and thinking: "Some chips would go well with this movie!" without concidering the effect it has on my keyboard and mouse. Also, it has been sitting here for a couple of years so loads of dust managed to get under the different keys. The only solution was to completely clean it, and the process took me about an hour or so.
To begin with, I took a picture of what my keyboard looked like in the beginning so that I wouldn't place any of the keys in the wrong order. I forget things like that very easily, so it wouldn't even surprise me anymore.

As you can see, I had already taken the space bar out when I thought of this hint I got from watching LinusTechTips' videos (very handy for picking up any techy ideas and watching reviews on what he thinks is "worthy" of his channel). He used this idea when he was repairing a soaked laptop so that he would remember where all of the parts he had taken out originally were.
Next, I started to pull all of the keys out and blow the dust off of them. This is what took me the majority of the time I spent cleaning the keyboard, and it was a very boring and repetitive process. I could've just put some music on, but I'm not that smart ;-)

As you can see, I didn't put the top row of buttons off because they just felt very different from the others and I didn't know if I would be able to put them back afterwards. Also, there wasn't any dust under there anyways.
After doing that, I used an air compressor to really blow away all of the dust (pun intended :P ). As not all of the dust was gone yet, I used a piece of cloth to get the dust out of nearly every corner.
Then it was time to put my keyboard back together. This went a lot faster than taking the keys out, as just pushing it in the right hole (No, that is NOT what she said!) obviously went a lot faster than getting my fingers under the corners of the key properly and trying to get that thing to let go of its keys (Am I a thief now?).
Now I can type with a keyboard without getting dust onto my fingers every 5 minutes, it consumed some of my valuable time (I needed it for preparing to go on a holiday to Switzerland) but it sure was worth it.
I hope you liked this post and have learned from my mistakes. Here's a quick checklist of what you should keep in mind when doing a full cleanup of your keyboard:

1. HAVE TIME! It'll take you a longer time than you would expect, trust me. I thought it'd be done in like 15 minutes but it turned out to be over four times that. If you rush through the process, you'll have to spend more time on it in the long run. Apparently it's not only women that are time consuming :-)
2. TAKE PICS! That camera on your smartphone is there for a reason, take pictures of any information you might need later. If your friends are mad at you for not having time to come on Facebook or Skype, simply show them the pictures. That, my friend, is how men multi-task ;-)
3. Apart from that, basically just make sure you don't spill anything into the insides of your keyboard and don't try anything crazy. You should be just fine.