spiffy new Ko̱nyin keyboard

I've been beyond sick of trying to insert non-ASCII characters into documents, email messages, google searches, etc. for some time now.

And to address it, I've hunted for a Spanish keyboard, but never found anything that quite did it for me.

But now I have a new toy!

It's a Ko̱nyin K-2060UM-US, to be specific, one in a series of keyboards designed to take the pain out of using international characters in documents. The main feature that wooed me was a 2nd shift key designed for easy access to international characters and character modifiers.

For example, I can press the [e] key on the keyboard, then hold down the 2nd-shift key while pressing the key with the backtick to create the character "è".

Previously, this meant recalling and entering a special code, or sluggishly looking for the desired character in the Character Map utility in Windows. I never really came to appreciate either method.

My only meaningful concern was whether the keyboard would work with Vista, because an impressive lot of stuff doesn't. But it installed quickly & painlessly.