Exploring The Shift
The shift is not a thing. It is the action of discovering Self.

I just found an article named Death to Caps Lock on Wired which addresses a minor annoyance of mine.

Pieter Hinjens, CEO of a company named iMatrix who not only started a blog but a whole full fledged campaign to remove the caps-lock key from modern keyboards, which immediately drew the attention of major media (Wired, Slashdot, Der Spiegel).

I guess this somewhat indicates that he must right about his assessment that this key is mainly used by people who program FORTRAN or those who tend to think that SHOUTING in their emails and posts will give them the attention they deserve (in the great hierarchy of things both those groups range in one class together with finding a toenail in your cake and hearing the type of music you usually hear on voice mail systems).

However, my personal experience regarding this key is that everybody (except those aforementioned groups) only uses this key intentionally in order to turn caps-lock off after it had been pressed unintentedly.

"I've launched a campaign to rid the world of the caps lock key. Sure, there are more serious problems to solve but please, think of the children! How am I going to explain to my kids why some of the most valuable keyboard real estate is squatted by a large, useless key that above all you must not press! Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key. It's going to be a hard, long, and possibly very embarassing war on uppercase, but some things just need to be done." (from the Caps-Off blog)

Now, starting a whole campaign with forum, wiki and whatnot may seem to be stretching the issue a bit too far, but at least the guy is funny. But probably his company (which I've never heard of previously) never got that much attention before and there's no such thing as bad publicity. Starting a campaign about the death of caps-lock definitely is quite catchy and defintely more catchy than for example pointing out that under Windows XP you can rid yourself of that annoyance with a bit of hacking knowledge.

What follows here will probably not get me any calls from Wired or Slashdot and despite what you may expect on this site, I will also not tangent off to ramble about some Elias stuff like paying attention (to what keys you press) or how upper- or lowercase is merely a belief system.

Instead – and contrary to Pieter's campaign – I will lead people towards more freedom and help you to escape the terror of the dreaded caps-lock key by sending it to retirement (it can then serve as real useful purpose, e.g. as a place under wich to store breadcrumbs or something to rest your pinky thinger on).

There's an article on the www.microsoft.com about the Scan Code Mapper for Windows which describes the tech side of that, but I guess that's not for everybody. In fact it took me three attempts to get it right, and I'm a professional programmer who's usually not too squeamish about fiddling with the registry.

But once I figured it out, it's not so hard, so here is my personal contribution to the campaign for the death of the caps-lock key (in eight easy steps):

1) Start-Menu, Run, regedit
2) In the Regedit tree go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout
3) Right click Keyboard Layout (make sure you're not using Keyboard Layouts), New, Binary value
4) Enter Scancode Map as the name of the new entry
5) Double click Scancode Map
6) Enter 00 00 00 00   00 00 00 00   02 00 00 00   00 00 3A 00   00 00 00 00
7) Click OK
8) Reboot your computer

Before step 7 you should have something which looks remotely like this:

May caps-lock rest in peace …

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