|
|
|
tiny keyboard bones
Thursday, August 30 2007
One evening about a week ago one of my old computer repair clients was drinking a vodka and seltzer when an accident resulted in some fraction of the beverage ending up in the keyboard of her ThinkPad T42. With that particular model of ThinkPad, the power switch is integrated into the keyboard, and with keyboard functionality shorted out the laptop wouldn't boot. So I'd ordered a replacement keyboard on Ebay, and it arrived today. The replacement keyboard fit the ThinkPad electrically and seemed to work, but when I went to physically install it I found that it didn't really fit. It was only then that I did a comparison with the old keyboard and found that the two were identical except for the location of several brass mounting posts. These posts pass through voids in the guts of the laptop to hold the keyboard in place from the bottom side. The different location of these posts rendered the new keyboard impossible to install, and since the posts were riveted on, I couldn't easily move them to any other location. Luckily, though, I'd made a low-energy stab at fixing the old keyboard, popping off many of its keycaps and putting it in the sun to possibly dry out. Amazingly, when I attached it, it worked just fine. It would have been ruined had there been any sugar in that beverage that had spilled into it, but both vodka and seltzer have the potential to evaporate away completely without leaving any residue. The only problem was that I'd broken one of the tiny plastic rods (or "bones") used in making the "scissor jacks" that position the keycaps above the little rubber nipples they are supposed to compress. It's amazing that these tiny polystyrene rods (which are less than a millimeter in diameter) can survive all the pounding that goes with supporting a key on a keyboard, but I've seen enough ThinkPads to be convinced that (overall) IBM/Lenovo knows how to design these things. Fixing the scissor jack with model cement proved fruitless, but it wasn't terribly hard to scavenge one of the scissor jacks off of the new keyboard that I wouldn't be using.
This evening a vicious thunderstorm passed through. There were lots of close lightning strikes and Sally the dog was terrified (as usual), but very little rain fell. Its clouds were temporarily thick enough to block our DirecTV satellite signal, knocking out two things Gretchen was trying to watch: Ugly Betty and a women's basketball game. It's rare that such a service interruption lasts more than ten minutes. Based on this observed reality, I'd estimate that the amount of cloud necessary to block a 12 GHz signal is between five and ten miles.
Looking north past the sunflowers in the garden.
Looking past the sunflowers, towards the north end of the house and its hydronic solar panels (which operated maintenance-free all through our Scotland trip).
Looking south past the sunflowers. The one to the right is almost exactly ten feet tall.
The tangled tomato thicket of the garden.
We have more cherry tomatoes than we can possibly eat.
Our morning glory vines.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070830 feedback
previous | next |
