Modern Vespa

What is there to 'match' between front and rear tyres?

Profiles ?

Why? (I agree profiles may well be important - but should they 'match'?)

I don't know. I don't make tyres.

It's definitely not spill-proof. The keys have become progressively less clicky as the day wears on and the chicken soup dries into chicken paste.

This was an outrageously expensive keyboard, too. Replacing it is going to sting. But keyboards are the single most important tool for a programmer, and I'd be unhappy with any keyboard except this one.

So I'm going to have to bite the bullet.

Back in the day, video editors routinely spilled sweet coffee or soda of some sort into the keyboards. Easy fix - remove the covers, wash the innards thoroughly in plain tap water, blow the worst of the moisture off with a hair dryer (on fan only) then put in a warm place for 48 hours. Never lost one. And these were VERY expensive bespoke keyboards.

Yeah, no. This keyboard doesn't come apart.

Oh yeah - repair only by authorised dealer? What a nerve.

If it's fucked anyway, I'd be prising it open. Maybe even a Dremel - but if it's just glued it should split open fairly easily. Always worth mending something if at all possible!

I get it. My son-in-law is a programmer and he is very particular about his keyboards.

Yeah, but it's more nuanced than most people probably want to believe. Or, put another way, it is sometimes easier for the general public to believe that something is the result of malice, even when the truth is far more obvious.

Since more than half of my career at Apple was spent on input devices, I know a bit about this, and can say with some certainty that Apple is less interested in controlling who can repair their keyboards than they are with, well, all the other factors that go into manufacturing a keyboard at scale.

Product development at Apple is literally run by the Industrial Design group. They have more power than anyone in the company (even more than many of the execs) and they are single-minded in their desire to make everything smaller and thinner and lighter. They also do NOT practice Industrial Design as it is generally understood, and so they are willfully ignorant (emphasis on willfully) of the practicalities of manufacturing. If ID says it needs to be smaller or thinner or lighter, It Shall Be Done.

That means, for keyboards, that niceties like screws are off the table. It's just too thin for a screw to even make any sense. The keyboard I am typing on right now (that is becoming increasingly difficult to type on) is glued together. Not because Apple is protective of the inside of the keyboard, but because there are very few other ways to make a keyboard this thin, at scale.

Yes, I can probably pry it apart. And I might! But it will likely never be the same after that. Besides, I've already spent enough of my life working on half-assembled prototypes held together with kapton tape.

If I'm motivated, I'll return to this one and see if I can salvage it. But I'm not hopeful.

I've just switched to an older Apple keyboard without the Touch ID (fingerprint) reader on it. It's not too bad -- the key travel is a bit much, and the feel is entirely different, but these are factors that one can adapt to.

What's really going to bug me for the next couple of days (until a replacement keyboard arrives) will be typing in my master password over and over and over again. One of the reasons my preferred keyboard has a place on my desk is because I have to type passwords many dozens of times a day. The fingerprint sensor on the Apple Magic Keyboard is, well... magic! And once you've used it, there's no going back.

Well, not without some pain.

Since it seems a lost cause, I'd just give it a bath and hope for the best.
BEFORE the stuff dries into a concrete pancake in there.

I would seriously consider doing that, except for one thing: It's wireless, with an integrated rechargeable battery. Which would tend to suggest that I shouldn't submerse it in liquid.

Okay, my Covid-brain has accepted that the keyboard is a lost cause and I have nothing to lose except time. Which I have plenty of at the moment.

Here goes nothing.

This will be most interesting - I have the same keyboard.

Keeping it on-topic, this is definitely pissing me off.

You can do it! Spludgers rule.

I had to move out to the workshop.

Better tools out here.

Kidding! This is what I need.

In a battle of keyboard vs spudger, the keyboard is winning.

Well. That went even worse than I expected.

Good God, they filled it with epoxy!

No, not epoxy. Just plastic and lots of glue.

Progress (toward the e-waste bin):

Glad you're taking a swing at it. Too bad they didn't use adhesive like a smartphone. Those microwaveable warming pads work pretty well with picks and spudgers.

Hmmm...so when the battery goes bad, the keyboard is junk - unless the charging port will run the keyboard. Bummer!

What I can see now -- hindsight is always 20/20 -- is that there are two layers of plastic, and I inserted the spudger into the wrong layer. The result is that the main reinforcement of the keyboard is now broken.

It'll never be the same.

However, there is this:

The charging port will almost certainly run the keyboard when the battery is kaput.

But don't quote me on that.

That's good. Hope I never have to find out.

Now, about the mouse battery...

The mouse is a bit of a worst-case scenario. The outer dimensions are dictated by ID, so it can't get any bigger. The laser tracking on the underside sucks a bit of juice. The Bluetooth radio sucks a bit of juice. If the mouse is moving at all on the surface, it is sucking juice. And the touch surface on the top sucks a lot of juice.

On an entirely different subject, Apache (as in the web server software) is pissing me off today. My god, it is full of layer upon layer of bad decisions, questionable design choices, and (to their credit) fully-documented shortcomings.

When evaluating the usefulness of a piece of software, the canonical preference in descending order is:
1. Code that is fully, 100% functional, without errors
2. Code that is 99% functional, but fails at predictable edges
3. Code that does not work whatsoever
4. Code that works 50% of the time

The Apache server software seems to be okay with #4, at least about some of their features.

The thing that I wasted an entire day on today is the SetEnv command. Environment variables set with the SetEnv command cannot (somewhat unexpectedly) be used with the RewriteCond directive. Environment variables set in other ways can, though, which is why it's so puzzling. SetEnv's only purpose is to set environment variables, so it certainly would seem like such an environment variable would be a first-class citizen as far as RewriteCond is concerned. But no.

But the worst part is that in some cases, SetEnv environment variables do actually work with RewriteCond.. Which lulls people (read: me) into the false sense that it works, except... then it fails inexplicably for no reason and you spend an entire day trying to figure out why.

Which is much, much worse than not working at all.

This is the most entertaining thing that I've seen in years.

I hasten to add not in a vindictive way, says the man with a dying Chrome Book.

You back in California?

Hope it wasn't that cold-hearted, COVID-carrying, floor fucking cocksucker Larry David that infected you!

Hey, oddly enough just yesterday I wiped down my tray load Bondi iMac in the garage. It was nice to see 9.2 fire up and use Claris Works and Photoshop 4.0.

It still has the original keyboard and hockey puck mouse. I have a few of them laying around. Just say the word and one of them is yours.

The keyboard was not so bad but that mouse is shit. It's also from just before I started working on input devices, so I can't claim any of the blame for it, either.

I did write all the driver software for the Magic Mouse, though. I also cobbled together all of the software pieces (multitouch, etc) to make the early prototypes work.

Fun fact: the first Magic Mouse prototypes were USB.

The hockey puck is the mouse I love to hate. But I'm still partial to the ADB square button mouse. I'm old.

I had a collection of various Apple mice in glass jars -- sort of like specimens -- lined up above my desk at Apple Park. The hockey puck mouse was among them. So was the first Magic Mouse prototype.

I liquidated my collection in my final week. The Magic Mouse prototype couldn't leave the premises, so I handed if off to one of my colleagues in Industrial Design. I'm not sure where the puck mouse went -- I think I offered it up on the internal Slack channel.

It really is a pretty thing. Feels good in the hand, too.

Too bad it sucked.

It sucked mainly for two reasons:

- Like the Magic Mouse, it is too small for adult hands.

- Unlike the Magic Mouse, it does not orient itself automatically in the hand. The round shape of the hockey puck mouse guarantees that 99% of the time that you grab it, it will not be oriented to your hand, and your brain will have to re-calibrate the relationship between hand movements and mouse cursor movements. This is a major cognitive hurdle, and it makes using the puck mouse an unpleasant experience.

Oh, but that 1% of the time it DID ... what a feeling! It made it all worthwhile. *



*No, it really didn't.