Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 24 August 2003

# 6:50 AM

Biked all over town today getting groceries (at the Berkeley Farmers' Market) and various bits of kit which I needed in order to repair Shweta's keyboard, which got a couple of traces burnt out in a beverage spill. Split keyboards cost $60 and up, so it's worth a fair amount of trouble trying to track down things like conductive acrylic.

The repair process is mostly tedious. It takes about fifteen minutes to disassemble the keyboard to the point where I can get at the damaged traces, thanks to the ridiculous number of screws holding it together. Having done that, I then find the breaks and patch them over with the acrylic, wait for it to dry, then test them with a multimeter. The paint does not conduct well when wet. Unfortunately, "quick drying" seems to mean "half an hour." Then I put it all back together again (another fifteen minutes) and plug it into a computer and see if all the keys work. Of course, they didn't, so I get to do it all over again tomorrow morning.