Presumably the resistance of a typical laptop keyboard is set to get the correct feel, not like a minimum mechanical resistance to get it to work at all, so there must be energy that is currently dissipated as heat that could be harvested for free, in principle without changing the feel.

A hand crank would be really cool on such a device. Rather than scramble for a charger and outlet you could just take a break and crank away.

> I remember manual typewriters - they were a hideous, miserable experience.

They were just the thing to write rants on, you could truly put some feeling into your writing. Rant loud enough and you'd type holes instead of o's. Overdo that underline and it'd end up splitting the page for real.

Having grown up with a non-Selectric typewriter, I'd be okay with a charging crank that mimicked the action of a manual carriage return that I had to shove to the left at the end of each line of code when the editor goes "ding!". But I'm not sure where it could be mounted on a laptop.

I've considered adding a few small geared stepper motors as a combination input device (scroll wheel, or two for etch-a-sketch cursor control) and energy harvester.

Pedal power, like an old-timey sewing machine.