Not many many people know this, but over the next 20 years Caps Lock will become extinct.

Poor caps lock is being abused. From Kanye West, to Oprah, to your Mum. It seems no-one is immune.

Join the cause and help stop this abuse. First, a little background. Did you know that on the Commodore 64 (still the best selling single model of computer of all time) capslock was called shift lock?

It was called shift lock because on typewriters it would lock the shift mechanism in place. The normal shift key would shift all the hammers in one direction, using the uppercase letters instead. Pressing shift took a lot of mechanical effort, so shift lock made a lot of sense.

"Make sense no longer, caps lock does, hmm?" - Yoda

How can you help?

Fortunately people have already started. And because of the efforts of people like Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child, capslock not included) and campaigns like CapsOff, the hardware manufacturers are beginning to listen. People unite! You are not alone.

So what about QWERTY? More archeological baggage. Colemak may not overtake QWERTY in the near future, but the revolution has started.

One thing we can ALL do now is to take a leaf out of Colemak's book. To not remove the Caps Lock key, instead replace its function with something more useful!

What's more useful than CapsLock I hear you ask? Almost anything! Escape, Control, Alt, Command, Option, or that even more frequently used key, 'BackSpace'.

Colemak replaces Caps Lock with Backspace, one of the most used keys on most keyboards, placing on home row, and for people with hands the size of mine (octave and a third on most pianos) it places backspace directly under my left pinkie. Very productive. Very efficient.

So join the revolution. Rebind your Caps Lock to Back Space.

• Windows users download this registry entry (src), rename it to '.reg' and right click->merge. 
• OS X users install PCKeyboardHack, go into the pref panel, and enable the capslock checkbox.
• Linux users can work it out; is that not what you do? ;)