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I think this is probably the very first thing anyone does when they get a new camera and sit in front of their PC, right?
As usual, I was behind the wheel of my PowerBook shortly after waking. And as usual for the past couple of days, the "R" key simply wasn't pulling with the team.
I got out my little drawer of dental tools, chose an implement designed in 1968 specifically for the extraction of PowerBook keycaps, popped the "R"...
And...
Er...
It looked pretty freaking gross under there.
I popped some adjacent keys just to see how far the mess went. And before I knew it, I'd performed a complete QWERTY resection.
Friends, it looked like a crime scene. Bad actors and actresses armed with green lasers soon set up shop and shot a few stilted scenes from an upcoming episode of CSI. The keybed was full of forensic evidence: arm hairs, eyebrow hairs, beard clippings, sideburn hairs...suffice to say that the whole menagerie from the neck up and the elbows down was duly represented. I even found a lonnnnnng hair from my head, which by some ungodly process had insinuated itself inside and wrapped around several keys, like a tapeworm or something,
I was also reminded of all of the meals and snacks I've eaten in front of this keyboard, and the fact that Lilith 7 is nearly three years old.
"Aha," I thought. "Perhaps this is why I've been having regular keyboard problems for the past few months."
Yes, I took a picture of the complete horror show. I have seen it on my screen at full resolution. After some thought and consultation with an interdenominal panel of area clergymen, I've concluded that the most ethical choice is to not post it.
But here's the "After" picture. I popped the keycaps, I used dental tools and tweezers to remove all the visible hairs and crumbs and cruft, then I swabbed the decks with Q-Tips and a magical cleaning solution that cuts through the grime and gunk and yet is perfectly safe for use on electronics. I can't divulge the secret recipe, but if you have lots of hydrogen and oxygen around the house, you're well on your way.
Then I used the middle tool to carefully pop each of those white scissor-hinges. And one by one, I'd scrape, tease, tweeze, and swab underneath.
I was at this for hours. Ultimately, I extracted enough material to make either a large cat toy or a small cat.
After putting everything back together again, the keyboard sure felt better but the "R" was still a little weird and the "I" -- which gave me plenty of guff last month -- had joined it on the Being A Great Big Jerk And Not Helping Andy Even A Little Tiny Bit list.
Damn, damn, damn. Maybe there's something underneath the keybed layer. Maybe it's just a nipple problem. About a half-dozen of them were loose and they're damned-near impossible to reinstall properly.
Lilith 7 is indeed nearing its retirement age -- the DVD burner gave up the ghost last year and after Microsoft Office is released as a universal binary, PowerPC Macs will find it harder and harder to keep up -- but I'm hoping to keep it on the payroll until the next Macworld Expo.
But it's not easy to keep Lilith going. The Powerbook is a terrific design; it's just that it was never designed for easy repairs. Even just replacing the hard drive was a freaking nightmare. Swapping out the keyboard looks to be damned-near impossible. Even if I can find someone More Clever Than I to do it for me, $300 or so for the new part plus reasonable labor is probably way too much to spend on an employee who (very rightly) spends most of its time telling fellow staffmembers about the cabin cruiser it's going to buy and how it's going to spend its first four months away from the day-to-day grind.
Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy...
I'm not sure how this European keyboard (I'm guessing it's European) ended up in one of our edit bays, but there you go. It's a little strange to use.
This picture has nothing to do with what I did on the day I took it (I had a bussy week!), but it is something pretty cool that happened recently -- I got a new laptop!
On this night, I went out with my brother Michael to support V-Day at W&J. We had a good time!
February 18, 2010
49/365
Just crossed this item off my to do list, and felt that the moment needed a bigger acknowledgement. One source I used to work out how: How to Geek: How to clean your keyboard without breaking anything.
An instrument used to write the saga of life. dust has crept into the crevices, but still it shows no signs of deterioration, but keeps going, getting beaten by the fingers of its master.
I was bored whilst working at one of my companies alternate locations... waiting for win2k3 to boot.
Finding the right house number in Japan is certainly less complicated than this early Japanese keyboard by IBM.
Cool macro I got of my laptop keyboard. This is actually in color but the difference is so minute if I switched it to B&W that there wasnt much point. It's much better viewed full.