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Why You Should Clean Your Keyboard--Right This Minute
Posted by Gina Trapani at 1:39 AM on May 7, 2008
A new UK study shows that keyboards swabbed from an ordinary London office had more harmful bacteria than—you know what's coming—a toilet seat. Yeeks! The accompanying survey showed that most users clean their keyboard infrequently (if at all), and clean their mouse even less often. Here's what you do: shut down your PC, unplug your keyboard and mouse, shake out any dust, lint and other crap, and wipe 'em down with disinfectant alcohol wipes. Right this very minute. For a more thorough cleaning which involves disassembly and compressed air, see this step by step guide. Or if there's just one or two rogue crumbs you'd like to fish out from between the G and H keys, use a piece of sticky tape. Photo by basibanget.
Being on top of your grammar is a skill that takes years of practice to refine into unthinking craft, but even the most word-minded among us can trip up when it comes how keyboards transpose our thoughts. Blogger Christopher Phin releases his inner copy editor and points out 10 errors one sees everywhere in digital writing, mostly due to not knowing what characters go exactly where. As someone who over-uses the "m-dash" a bit, I was glad to get schooling in the finer points of horizontal lines:
Mac only: The new MacBook Pro models released Tuesday brought new processor power, more hard drive space, and a little-heralded but kinda nifty feature: The addition of a right Alt key (and dropping of the mini Enter key), giving keyboard enthusiasts access to "third-level" characters and a wider array of shortcuts. For those with MacBook models older than 48 hours, free remapping utility KeyRemap4MacBook can help you reassign that tiny Enter or other under-utilised keys for similar shortcut happiness. Definitely worth the effort for programmers and coders, but potentially helpful for anyone who wants to assign Mac environment shortcuts (like Spaces, for example) to non-default keys. KeyRemap4MacBook is a free download for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 only.
You've been dying to roll up your keyboard for on-the-go use ever since you saw the Mac guy plunking away next to John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard and you've got a spare keyboard laying around? DIY web site Instructables goes step-by-step through how to make a roll-up portable keyboard with a USB keyboard, screwdriver, and a few stickers. The end result may not be the most durable keyboard on the market, but it's an undeniably cool undertaking.
If you run Windows on your Mac with Boot Camp with an Apple keyboard, you start to miss certain keys: like Print Screen, Del, the Windows key, and Insert. For a while I was just living without them, but turns out there are key combinations that map to all the Windows keys in Boot Camp, like:
