December 28th, 2008, 15 Comments »
I bought my white mid-range MacBook in August, 2007. About ten months later, little cracks appeared on the keyboard’s faceplate. They were on the seam where the top faceplate meets the front of the laptop, and maybe half a centimeter wide.
Eventually little strips of plastic snapped off the top of my laptop. It was really only an aesthetic problem, but the thing was still under warranty, so I got it fixed. It’s a good thing, too, because I seem to recall the Apple technician telling me the faceplates were, like, $500 to replace.
Another six months later, my replacement keyboard faceplate is suffering from the same problem:
I’m quite a heavy-handed typist. Maybe that’s it? Or is it my incredibly muscular wrists? In truth, it seems like an ongoing defect with the plastic and design of the faceplate. It’s not thick or strong enough to bear the ongoing weight of lazy typists who don’t pick up their wrists when they’re working.
After a year and a half with this MacBook, that and the overly-hot base are my only complaints. Later in 2009 I might upgrade to a MacBook Air, or I might go with another MacBook. Apple has given me little reason to return to the wayward Windows ways of my youth.
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June 6th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Ami asked for a photo of my rockin’ Hungarian keyboard. Here it is (click for a larger version–can I stop saying that?):
As you can see, of the core keys, only the Z and Y are in different locations. Well, the zero is also in a different spot. Regardless, I’ve mapped it back to a North American keyboard, so it’s business as usual. Except for the zero key, which now gives me ± and § whenever I need it. Bonus. The tilde key is now just to the left of the Y (Z on the North American keyboard). I also like that the Enter key is two rows tall–I’m finding it easier to hit.
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June 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Julie and her Mom made a day trip to Comino, the third island in the archipelago of Maltese islands. Nestled between the two bigger islands and named for the cumin that once grew there, it has all of four full time residents, one resort, and one of the most picturesque lagoons in the world.
Because of the Blue Lagoon, the place gets inundated with hordes of day-tripping tourists. The trick is to stay at the resort, so that you can enjoy the lagoon in relative peace and quiet in the early morning and late afternoon. We plan to give that a try over the summer. Julie took a few photos of the extraordinarily aquamarine water around Comino (click for the complete set):
As I mentioned, we’re on a working holiday in Budapest and Vienna this week, balancing work with some sight seeing and shopping. Yes, I’ve acquired a new MacBook, and the Hungarian keyboard is frickin’ awesome. We’ve taken some photos, ad I think this is my (somewhat manipulated) favourite (again, click for the whole set):
On a related note, how’s this for a strange flavour of chocolate bar? Nonetheless, it was tasty.
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May 29th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Three unrelated facts send us to Budapest and Vienna for a working holiday next week.
- Julie’s Hungarian heritage.
- We’ve always wanted to see Vienna, but have never gotten around to it.
- My PowerBook is dying.
I must confess that I made a miscalculation when abstractly considering travel options from Malta. I figured if we’re close (from a North American perspective) to places like Morocco and Israel, then it must be easy to fly there.
There are direct flights, but inexplicably they fly at the most heinous times of day. For example, we could spend four nights in Morocco, but we’d have to take flights which leave more or less at midnight each way. The same goes for Israel. The alternative is to fly to London, which just seems ludicrous, particularly for a long weekend.
We’ll get to those places sooner or later, but for now we’ve picked Budapest as next week’s destination. Not only is it an engaging cosmopolitan city, but it also has several vendors of Apple MacBooks. I spoke to a couple of them today. Their English was Boratesque, but it was far better than my Hungarian.
My beloved PowerBook is almost exactly four years old, and has been ridden like a Pony Express stallion. I’d hoped it would last until our return to Vancouver, but alas, it’s on its last legs. The hard drive sounds like an angry bee hive, and I’m spending more time staring at the Gay Spinning Pizza of Death than working.
We could get it repaired, but the money is better spent on a new Hungarian MacBook.
So, next week we’ll be working in and wandering around Budpaest from Sunday to Wednesday. Then on to Vienna by train for Thursday and Friday nights, and back to Budapest for the flight out on Sunday.
We’ll read the guide books and surf around online a bit, but I’m always open to top tips from those who have gone before me. Any favourite spots in Vienna or Budapest?
How Screwed Up Will My Keyboard Be?
UPDATE: Derek raises a good point in the comments:
Are you going to end up with a wacky Hungarian keyboard of some sort?
Good question. There’s two levels of ‘wacky’ here–the aesthetic and the functional. I’m a touch-typer, so it doesn’t actually matter to me what’s written on the keys. In fact, I might like the exoticism of having some weird symbols on some keys. Resale value isn’t an isssue, as I tend to use computers until they die or get antiquated. This blog post makes a kind of cryptic reference to this:
Hungarian layout keyboard has too few signs on it.
Presumably there will be minor differences in how some of the secondary keys are mapped. For example, in Ireland, the ‘@’ sign lived somewhere around the question mark.
Assuming that I’ll need to, can I remap a MacBook’s keyboard? It looks like I probably can, thought it’s not immediately apparent how to do so.
Ah, hang on, I found it under System Preferences –> International –> Input Menu. That allows me to choose keyboard layouts for any number of countries, including both USA and Hungary. So presumably I’ll just chose my preferred layout there.
UPDATE #2: If all else fails, The Unofficial Apple Weblog indicates that I can use this keyboard layout editor to make my keyboard play nice.
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