It took me a few days over all but it was certainly worth it.

I cleaned my keyboard.

Now this wasn't your 'run the vacuum cleaner (isn't vacuum an odd word?) over the keys and ignore the gunk on the sides and that's embedded into the texture of the keys' cleaning. This was the full bore, unscrew the case and pop off every single key and individually wash them by hand.

And now the keys just sparkle. It's so nice. :) This is the first keyboard I've owned, having bought it with my Mac in 1993. And I can't remember having ever cleaned the keyboard before. So 6 years of hair, dust, cat hair, gunk, sparkles, and more came tumbling out.

I haven't put the thing all the way back together, but it's close enough to touch type again. The feel is still pretty damn stiff. I'm a big believer (now) in light touch keyboards. It seems to me that it would be easier on the fingers and therefore the wrists, therefore reducing rsi. However when I first got my mac, I wanted two main things in the keyboard: a full 104 keys, plus a big delete and huge return key. The return key on this board covers half an acre. I love it.

On an as-needed basis I can hit that return key from across the room with a reasonably well placed koosh ball.

Speaking of keys, I've finally got real uses from the function keys. F1-F4 launch 4 different sets of web pages: Weekday, Macintosh, Journals, and Weekend. 1 touch and I can walk away from my machine while it logs on and downloads each of thosepages I've set up. It's very cool. Same goes from F9-F12: Jesse's Word of The Day (Random House), Scripting News, Slashdot.org, and my journal entry page. Finally F13-F15 are Eudora, Netscape, and Fetch.

Those last three (e-mail, web, ftp) I've started implementing on all the machines I use. At work, the first two launch Netscape since I use it for mail and web at work. But I'm to the point where I almost expect them to be there.

The hotkeys are setup using DragThing, and the web page sets are implemented with DragThing and JavaScript.

Ross : Link : Discussion Board