Knowledge Brings Fear

Keyboards in the rain

The current weather in Berlin simply sucks. It does not help that its even worse in Hamburg or Amsterdam (where I will go again end of week). I live in perpetual fear that the climate catastrophe will leave Berlin with a scifi-dystopy default weather: 3 to 10 degrees celsius, grey sky and light rain. You know, the classic weather from end-of-world movies.

Upgrading my Mac OS X brought a number of interesting pleasures. Faster overall feeling, Exposé and some other niceties. One thing really hurts: uControl does not work. I use uControl to remap the keys on the external IBM buckling spring keyboard (those mighty classic keyboards that make a serious noise and have the right typing resistance). Since the IBM has a PS/2 connector I needed an adaptor. Previously I used the extraordinary well designed Y-Mouse from P.I. Engineering. Since I somehow misplaced the thing a while ago, I am currently using some its-cheap-and-from-china-copycat adapter that does the basic job, but misses all the quality of the Y-Mouse. The most serious problem: it has no internal key-remapping. As a Mac-user your most frequently used key is Command (also called Apple). Since the IBM keyboard has no such key and also no Windows key (its from way before that time), the only choice is to remap Alt to Command and use the Alt key on the Powerbook keyboard. Not an optimal solution, but a workable one. And to use the cheap adaptor I needed uControl to do this remapping. Anyway, it will be weeks until uControl works again, so I need to find that Y-Mouse tonight.