That’s it!

Last week I got an itch to dig more into mechanical keyboards. For those that don’t know what a “mechanical keyboard” is, they’re essentially the loud “clicky” keyboards you’ve seen in the past, and they’re amazingly popular. People are often able to type more quickly and accurately on them, which can add up to big savings across our millions of keystrokes every year.

As I dug in to learn more, I discovered that there are a lot of different options out there — and not just in terms of manufacturers. While all mechanical keyboards sound a bit “clicky”, those clicks come from a variety of different switch types. The most popular switches are the “Cherry MX” flavors, which come in black, red, brown, blue, green, and clear. Each color uses a different type of switch, so they each behave and sound a bit different. This Lifehacker article does a nice job of breaking them down.

After digging around for a while, I decided I wanted to try out the Das Keyboard 4 Professional. Das Keyboards are among the highest quality and most popular keyboards, so they seemed like a good place to start. That particular keyboard comes with either brown or blue Cherry MX switches in them. The blues are very clicky and quite popular, but the browns are a bit quieter — a smart move in an office environment.

Before I ordered, I decided to take it a step further and get the Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate instead. The Ultimate is essentially the same as the Professional model, but with one minor difference. Check it out:

Yep, the keycaps are totally blank!

I’ll be honest; I went back and forth a while before I decided to go with the Ultimate instead of the Professional, but so far it’s been great. I knew that letters and numbers would be easy enough, but I was a bit worried about the other characters like ()*$#@. I’ve been surprised by how many of those I can hit by touch; I can’t tell you where they are, but when I need them my fingers go right to them. In fact, I just used this new keyboard to write this entire post.

I wouldn’t recommend the Ultimate to most people, but the Das brand of keyboards are great, and mechanical keyboards, in general, are quite awesome.

I encourage you to check out that Lifehacker article that I mentioned earlier to learn more.

Do you use a mechanical keyboard in your daily life?

You’ve heard the phrase “you can never be too safe”, but it’s not true in every situation. A good example is driving; there are more than 30,000 driving-related deaths in the United States each year, but there is a very simple solution. Flood the streets with police, and lower the speed limit to 20 mph on every road, strictly enforced. The number of deaths would drop to nearly zero, but it’ll never happen. Why? People would never give up the convenience of getting places in a reasonable amount of time.

The same can apply to securing your technology — you want to keep things secure, but too much security can create headaches.

Anti-virus

A great example is anti-virus software. While things have changed in the past few years, traditional anti-virus software can be a huge resource hog on computers. It can make your computer run noticeably slower, costing you hours of productivity over the course of a year.

If you keep your computer updated, use a secure browser, get your email scanned for viruses (which most providers do) and don’t download any shady files, your odds of catching a virus are virtually zero. Further, some of the biggest security issues with computers in the past few years have been security holes in the anti-virus software itself (such as this issue with Norton). I’ve not used a true anti-virus program in many years and haven’t had any issues. However, it still may be wise to install it for your less tech-savvy friends and family members who might need the help or are more apt to click on misleading popups.

In either case, Microsoft’s “Windows Defender” is now baked into Windows 10 and does a nice job and Chromebooks are essentially virus-proof by design, so things are getting easier for everyone.

Backups

Whatever your use of anti-virus software is, you want to make sure that all of your stuff is reliably backed up. There are two main ways to do this:

1. Keep it backed up using an Apple Time Capsule, an external hard drive, or a remote solution such as Carbonite.
2. Keep all of your items in online accounts, so you can access them from anywhere and they’re essentially always backed up.

I work with option 2, which I’ll explain below, but option 1 is perfectly fine depending on how your life is structured.

Secure your accounts

With item number two above, the big issue these days is controlling access to your various accounts. In my case, I typically use at least six different devices in any given week; a desktop at home, a desktop at work, a Windows laptop, a Chromebook, phone and tablet. Having access to all of my tools everywhere I go is great, but if a hacker were to gain access of one of my accounts it would be killer.

Like many people, my most important account is with Google. This has my email, calendar, contacts and all of the stuff I save in Google Drive and Google Keep (as discussed here).

Google, like most major online services (Dropbox, Facebook, etc), allows you to set up two-factor authentication. They explain it here, but it essentially requires that you provide your password and prove that you have your phone with you (by entering a code) before you can log in. The logic is that even if someone gets your password, they’re unlikely to also have your phone (and vice-versa).

Going back to the beginning of this post, you have to weigh the “security vs convenience” of two-factor authentication. I’ll be honest, it can be a pain sometimes. You just want to log in, but now you need to dig out your phone and get a code. However, on this one I’ll push you to set it up anyhow. While the threat of desktop viruses is waning a bit, online hacking is only getting worse. Losing your Google/Facebook account would be killer for many of us, and this is worth taking the time to do.

A great example is the case of the Democratic National Committee hackings near the 2016 US Presidential elections; a major factor was that chief Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta didn’t have two-factor authentication set up on his email. That alone would have helped prevent that entire mess. Just do it.

Securing your phone

The biggest problem I see lately in the “security vs convenience” debate is PIN locks on cell phones. Do you have one on yours? Studies show that 30-50% of cell phones have no lock on them at all. If they’re stolen, the thief has full access to everything on the phone. It seems like an easy to decision to put a password/PIN on your phone, but with the average person checking their phone 85 times/day, entering that PIN becomes a pain very quickly which is why many people don’t want to mess with them.

So what’s the solution there? Part of the solution might come from your smart watch. While Android and Apple handle things a bit differently, both allow you to keep your phone unlocked if it’s in range of the watch, but have the password show up if no watch is around. This means that you don’t need to deal with a PIN in your day-to-day life, but if your phone is stolen or lost in a taxi, no one else will be able to access it.

In the case of Android, you can add other “trusted devices” and “trusted places” to keep your phone unlocked.

Trusted devices are things such as your watch or the bluetooth connection in your car.

Trusted places are GPS-based locations, such as your home or office.

If your device is in a “trusted” situation, it’ll unlock with no PIN. If not, then the PIN shows up.

With 2.1 million phones stolen last year in the US, it’s crucial that you make sure your phone is protected — even if it’s less convenient to use.

How do you make sure your stuff is secure without causing unnecessary headaches?

Not long ago, I told you that I made the switch from Gmail to Google Inbox. I may or may not switch back to Gmail at some point, but whatever I decide to do I’ll probably do inside of Shift.

Shift is a desktop application (for Windows, Mac and Linux) that puts your Gmail or Google Inbox (or Outlook) inside of their container. This frees up some tabs on your desktop, and also adds a few other nice features that I’ll share below.

Here is a quick animation showing some of what it does:

Google Inbox is great because of the “snooze” feature, but also has a few shortcomings. One them is the lack of badges to let you know how many unread emails you have. Gmail has a cool feature that shows your unread count in the favicon in your browser, like this:

Google Inbox has no such feature, but Shift does. In fact, Shift gives you a few different badges — the icon running at the bottom of your screen shows your total unread count:

Then each individual tab inside of Shift shows the unread count for that specific email account:

Keep it simple

What I like most about Shift is that it doesn’t try to do too much. I can still use the normal Inbox/Gmail app on my phone, and still use the normal web interfaces when I’m on a Chromebook. This gives me a slightly improved experience on desktop, and I love it.

The basic version is free, and the Pro version (which I use) is just $19.99/year. Give it a shot for yourself at TryShift.com. It’s based on the open-source software Wmail, which is a bit less powerful but is totally free. I’ve been playing with that a bit as well, but either one should work well for you.