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IPv6 Buddy

ipv6buddy.com

273 pointsvermilingua81 comments

Don't know if this is a real thing or a gag, but if the latter, I give you a 10/10 for humor and sarcasm. If the former, my complaint is that on the sysinfo page, I can't see pertinent info (i.e. the product dimensions) from my text-based browser, lynx.

Update: I am able to reproduce the issue on w3m as well. Please fix your web site to be more command-line friendly.

The FAQ specifically addresses this and states that it's a real thing that you can buy and have delivered. It is likely a great gag gift.

That being said, the cringe-worthy use of female model photos on every single page certainly help make this page kinda hilarious.

It's definitely cringe-worthy that all the graphics are not replicated in ASCII art to support command-line only browsers. How insensitive! With lower-resolution ASCII-art, the models can be made to look more gender neutral, IMHO.

I feel like I've seen more gender-obvious ascii art than other kinds of ascii art

Upon further thought, I propose a new HTTP header sent from browsers to the web servers:

1) the gender the end-user identifies with, or lack thereof

2) the end-user's sexual partner preference, or lack thereof

With this HTTP header info, the web server can then display the most politically correct ASCII image, plus the most optimal sales conversion rate for this product #win-win

Time to make a IETF RFC

Headers? Protocols? Today we create JavaScript DOM APIs for this kind of stuff. A general all-purpose API to collect, persist and negotiate user preferences... WebPreferences sounds about right. /s

> A general all-purpose API to collect, persist and negotiate user preferences

I thought that one was called Facebook.

Prefix all these headers with swj_ or sjw- :)

I hate this website so much.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about all these comments on HN thinking they're hilarious by making fun of "political correctness" or "SJWs" or whatever the vogue thing for self-styled obnoxious individuals to make fun of is.

The keypad website is amusing.

Life gets better when you realize that on any polar issue, both side will have vocal extremist idiots and it can be amusing to poke fun at the whole lot of them, regardless of one's personal position.

I don't think "politically correct" means what you think it means. Your use in this context doesn't make sense (e.g. a person's preferred sexual partner is not a matter of "political correctness," nor is their gender identity).

Would you please not post flamebait to HN? We have enough trouble without it, and like most attempts to be funny, this is not as funny as it thinks it is.

sorry about that; honestly not flame-baiting. I do generally think that better ad targeting means, well, an advertising copy that is more relevant to the actual end-user. As opposed to sending a totally irrelevant and wrongly targeted and offensive message to the wrong person. But I also do think the issue is around the balancing of privacy needs--and that's a tricky balancing act. TLDR: not trying to flame-bait, but I can see how it might have come across as such

It would have been funny if they were the designers. Their Twitter page does the same thing for some reason.

Edit: of the product, not the web page.

There's a school of thought that the best design is when you don't notice it. Maybe a professional designer did this, intentionally. It's generating word of mouth, alright.

Given that there's exactly two individuals in said photos, in multiple poses, holding the object in question, they probably aren't stock photos at least. I also kinda doubt models were specifically hired to market this product.

I don't know if I believe a "designer" touched this page. Most designers would cringe at this page. (I like it, for what it's worth, it is excellent at communicating the product and the intent with which you should understand the product.)

I suspect they are either the people who developed the product, employees of people who developed the product, or friends of the people who developed the product.

And you'll remember it and talk about it.

Screw design, the mission was accomplished!

> I also kinda doubt models were specifically hired to market this product.

Wait how much do you think it costs to hire some models for a half-day shoot? They could easily be friends, yes, but it's not inconceivable that someone forked over a little dough to do an amusing photo shoot.

...or they're stock photos of a person holding a generic small object which has been replaced with the product via image-editing software.

Ya, these things have been around for a couple years now and the website sucks but I could see some IT people buying them.

It is real, I have one!

Do you know if it has Cherry stems?

I don't have one, but on the FAQ page it states it's rated for 8 million keypresses, and Cherry MX switches are rated for far more - typically 20-50 million. 8 million is a typical number for conventional rubber dome keypads, and would be low for mechanicals.

That doesn't exclude the possibility that the stems are compatible with Cherry keycaps, but I would be surprised and impressed if they were.

Obviously we can't take 8 million seriously with all those IPv6 addresses out there.

Here is a teardown of the IPv6 Buddy if you're interested... https://www.flickr.com/photos/70359193@N05/sets/721576293696...

Perfect, thanks! Not Cherry stems. Too bad.

"Please fix your web site to be more command-line friendly."

I can't tell if this is a real thing or a gag.

I love weird input devices. This is ridiculous, of course. I mean, who regularly types IPv6 addresses by hand, even if you work with them? They're too long to get right if you're hand-typing them. They're too long to memorize (except localhost, but that can be shortened to ::1). IPv6 addresses just don't make sense as a thing one would type.

A hex number pad, on the other hand, has some utility! I sometimes write music in a tracker...hex is the standard way to specify numbers (historically because it made more efficient use of the display area and because trackers used to be a relatively thin layer over generated data for an assembly player routine), so having a keypad just for hex would be really neat. I dunno if I can justify having an otherwise useless dongle, but I really do find weird input devices and keyboards charming, so I'm tempted.

What an unfortunate side effect of switching to IP6. It's not that big of a deal but I'll miss being able to remember and type IP4 addresses or ask someone to tell me their current IP.

How are others handling this migration? What's the process for getting someone's IP6 over a phone call?

I avoid phone calls for anything technical because even without IPv6 it results in stupid misunderstandings at a rate of several per minute. I don't even want to think about the number of times I've had to explain the difference between a backslash and a forward slash multiple times in one phone call.

But, I would imagine you'd want a set of auto-generated names in your DNS zone for your organization. That's how I'd handle it anyway. e.g. if I had a few thousand IPv6 addresses, I'd generate a few thousand word-based subdomains in my second level domain. If you wanted to get fancy, you could make them pronounce-able (e.g. two words could easily represent thousands of IP addresses). I dunno if people do this, but it's technically easy enough, requiring only a few lines of code to generate a zone file, and solves the problem of sharing it over the phone. I've noticed most hosting and cloud providers provide names for all of their IPs; so even if your own DNS isn't working yet you can usually contact your IP addresses using the name the provider has assigned (it's usually somewhat clunky, like "sw-48he839.pool.domain.tld", but more humanly usable than an IPv6 address).

Of course, if you were trying to get it from someone outside of your org where those names don't exist, it'd be ugly. But, maybe it'll finally make people stop thinking you can solve any technical problem with a phone call. That'd be a win for my happiness, anyway.

But, really, we should just accept that we shouldn't deal with addresses directly. Once we got a naming system we didn't need to remember a string of numbers, anymore, even though it was possible with IPv4 (and I'm guilty, too; I used to have several of the servers I managed IPs memorized...a dozen or more of them). And, with cloud-based infrastructure, the IP of your host might change all the time. I don't know or care what the IP of any services I have running in AWS or GC might be (except the frontend EC2 of GCE instance).

You made some great points and laughs :) Thanks for the insight!

One of the dependencies of the page, syndication.twitter.com, is IPv4-only. Outrageous.

We don't need no IPv6. We just need more NATs. When we run out of space, we just add more NATs. It's NATs all the way down.

Opens a NATty Ice one-handed

Working in embedded, frequently typing hex numbers... this isn't quite as stupid as I initially thought...

Immediately reminded of http://www.vintage-computer.com/heathkit3400.shtml

Hey, it's missing the "%eth0", "%enp3s0", "%eno0", "%br0" etc etc keys!

Makes it useless for link-local.

I mean, it's not really that useful in the first place, by the time I've typed in `set interface vlan unit 50 inet6 address` needing to move all the way to another keyboard to input the address isn't really saving me much time. It's a cute novelty, but not really that practical.

Jokes aside, a special "network calculator" mode when you type in e.g. a CIDR and it prints out an IP range or netmask, or when you type in a EUI-64 (MAC) and you get a link-local address would be awesome.

It's all almost a no-brainer but only "almost" - I always tend to forget the exact rules (e.g. where exactly that FF:FE goes in).

I have one of these on my desk (got it as conference swag, use it for occasional hex typing). One note is that the colon keys are represented as e.g.:

   left_shift flag shift
   semicolon keydown
   semicolon keyup
   left_shift flag off

Likely the reason for the Euro/US model split I imagine?

Ah yes - note that Brits need to get the "US" model ..

"As seen on Hacker News"

still couldnt get over the font layout for the product... seeing as we couldnt put "a shiftless colon key" on one line, my eyes stopped at "a shiftless colon" and I began to seriously reconsider what this product was offering to do to me.

It's a $20 gag gift, don't sweat it too much.

I want one of these so bad. I actually programmed a hex numpad mode, including ABCDEF, onto my Ergodox layout.

The best secret santa gift I ever got.

I actually fully intend to buy one of these for everyone in my company someday. As a Christmas present. Beats the heck out of just getting the company shirt and coffee mug.

This seems worse than using a standard keyboard. ABCDEF are on the left hand and 0-9 on the number pad.

but you need that double colon button

A tab key! After all these decades, someone is finally putting a tab key on the tenkey! (err "sixteenkey") Back when I used Excel heavily, I would have been amazed to have a keyboard with tab on the right side.

Thanks OP, just put a serious dent in this months budget for Christmas Presents.

I'm not sure if a specialized manual input device helps IPv6 adoption as much as it highlights a dearth of automation in the target market.

Keyboard companies need to ditch the "ten key" and adopt the ipv6buddy. The future is here!

Is this site using tables for layout? Is that part of the gag?

I do wish it had a shift key so I could tab backwards.

A shift on another keyboard wouldn't work with the buddy tab key, right?

Don't the modifier keys need to be on the same keyboard to function?

I've always wanted to map control/shift/alt/cmd to mouse buttons because I work a lot with a hand on the mouse, and some shortcuts are a bit hard one handed (ctrl+y) for example.

I've tried to do this with programmable Logitech mice without success.

I checked and using the shift key on another keyboard with the IPv6 Buddy does work, the field selection goes backwards.

The page is awkwardly sexist.. but that would be a pretty close to an awesome integrated numpad design for programmers.

What's sexist? The photos?

2017, the year stock photography became sexist.

"became"?

Yep. Like the FAQ page.

Can you please elaborate what is discriminating about the photos/FAQ contents?

The pictures are clearly sexualized. You'd never see pictures like that with men doing those poses.

It's the same as the issue with booth babes.

Of course you would, the stock photography style is used extensively in the "Head First" book series: http://www.headfirstlabs.com/index.php

Edit: I'd also dispute that the photos depict anything remotely sexual.

While I tend to think this is leaning towards taking it too seriously, I’ll bite.

The ‘booth babe’ problem. A ‘booth babe’ used in a marketting shot is standing beside the car. If a man was used, he’d be driving the car (or at least pretending to).

These shots have the same problem. The “sitting in the car” equivalent would be a desk, with the keypad setup beside their regular keyboard, with someone pretending to actually use it. Yaknow, like a person uses a keyboard. Instead we get the booth babe effect of waving it around like a novelty-sized cheque. These models aren’t driving the car.

The front page portrays professional women, dressed as professionals, promoting a product that they personally use. Normally, that would be cool. I know more professional women sysadmin then male sysadmins, yet the marketing is usually male-oriented.

However, with all the baggage of sexist advertising in the tech industry, it's awkward. And then there's the images on the FAQ page, for guaranteed table flipping cringe.

Those are not standard ‘business’ poses on the home page.

I'd say they look more like stock photo poses. They wouldn't look out of place among https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=isch&q=stock+photo+woman...

Stock photos are often pretty ridiculously sexist. My favourite are "mansplaining stock photos".

For alternatives, I like https://www.stocksy.com/ -- they're a platform co-op, and have good quality stuff (I'm not affiliated, although I do like co-ops).

Wrong in all counts :) Not even a good keyboard for anything. It is a joke from head to toe, from the women in the ad as if it were a sports car ("buy one of these and increase your hit rate with women" - haha), but I am quite tempted to buy one because I collect keyboards.

I'm pretty sure the awkward photos are part of the gag.

I find the women as models trope annoying and creepy. I would have loved to find one page without them.

http://www.ipv6buddy.com/sysinfo/kblayout/models.png ???

http://www.ipv6buddy.com/faq/model1.png great.

edit The legal page doesn't have models.

I am impressed by their use of a PNG with a transparent background.

EDIT: I mean. I can't see any graphics from my command-line only browser.

Wow. I was weirded at on the home page. I didn’t realize how much worse it got.

It's a gag. The models are part of it.

Yeah, I agree 100%. The last thing we want is women getting paid for jobs they choose to apply for. Then they'll be independent and we can't have that.

To me the obviously over-the-top use of models to sustain the gag and turn the thing on its head serves as useful satyre.

You want real creepy? Look at this shitty RAD tool[0]. This piece of crap is terrible: there are highly suggestive ladies everywhere on their ads and documents. Even the installer and the wizard screens right in the IDE have them plastered all over! They even have a FAQ[1] trying to legitimise the whole thing. Seriously, scroll down that page and tell me how this[2] is even remotely acceptable (and it's not even the worst offender, by far!).

Translating[1] (trying to keep the completely awkward phrasing because they can't even write proper french):

> Plea for freedom and optimism!

> Our company's marketing is bold and innovative.

> Our marketing is emotional, happy, joyful, optimistic!

> In a world where not every day is a happy one, we persist in our unabated optimism and our confidence in human nature!

> Our ads are warm, smiling and create happiness.

> We categorically refuse a world of darkness, of established conventions, stereotypes, bland ads, sadly descriptive, joyless, actionless, emotionless, smile-less, humourless, without off-beat humour.

> At first it can be surprising, yet ads for technological software, do not have to look like sad and mournful technical sheets! Neither do they have to reproduce bland photos of people working (everyone gets to see these daily!). An ad has to make you dream, and has to keep being an ad! We say yes to smiles, yes to the sea, yes to the sky, yes to dynamism, yes to action, yes to emotion....

> <exhibit A>

> [stock photo of busy but sexually diverse people, badged with a red no-no cross]

> VS

> [stock photo of a girl squarely aimed at cisgender males to provoke arousal instincts through body language, badged with a green hell-yes checkmark]

> </exhibit A>

> We are sorry for people who could be put off when faced with so much boldness and emotion!

> Just as our software is innovative, our marketing is too.

> Long live freedom, long live women, long live men, long live equality, long live boldness, long live passion, long live optimism!

> The marketing team

[0]: https://www.pcsoft.fr

[1]: https://www.pcsoft.fr/pcsoft/plaidoyer-pour-la-liberte-et-l-...

[2]: https://www.pcsoft.fr/img/2016/pub-1.jpg

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