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I hadn't heard anything about the style known as "steampunk" until I stumbled into this. We'd been looking at the websites of people who had converted buses into motorhomes, and spent some time looking at this one.

I noticed a link to some brass lanterns on one of those pages, and that led me to the Steampunk Keyboard. This is essentially a loose set of instructions for creating your own antique brass computer keyboard. You just have to see it.

If you go there, be sure you get all the way to the bottom of the page to see the photos of the finished keyboard. It's a nice piece of work.

You may also want to check out the Wikipedia article on steampunk to get an idea where "steampunk" came from.

Of course, that's a literary genre; there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia entry for "steampunk art" yet, but maybe there will be someday.

While you're exploring this, don't miss the copper-plated, etched Altoids tins.

I was surprised to find that the chosen subject for one of the tins was Lady Ada Lovelace. That's a good, techno-geek choice. (The U.S. Department of Defense approved the manual for the Ada programming language on Ada Lovelace's birthday in 1980.)

This ties in to my own history: The two most prominent languages at the university where I got my master's degree were Pascal and Ada. In the days before Borland released the object-oriented extensions to Pascal, Ada was thought of as an object-oriented Pascal.