Wednesday 27 November 2024: Rubbish technology

So, Tuesday was all about poor communication and rubbish customer service. Wednesday was all about technology failing…

I reminded myself that Mercury was now in retrograde and wondered if that was what happened. 

It was my keyboard that suddenly stopped working properly. The command+Z stopped working for ‘undo’ and was just typing a row of Zs. Adding that to my “ and my @ being the wrong way around and my # being an extra keystroke (Alt+3 instead of just the hash key), not being able to undo with a single keystroke combination was a real nuisance.

I spent a lot of time looking for a new Apple keyboard, but Apple apparently stopped making wired keyboards back in 2018. Why? Wireless keyboards are rubbish. Wireless mouses are rubbish. There’s a slight delay between what I type or do and it appearing on screen, and the batteries run out way too quickly. 

My keyboard has been a wired gaming keyboard for a long time. When the letters started to wear out on one, I immediately bought another. The keys are mechanical, they make a satisfying clunk when I use them, and they last a helluva lot longer than the stupid so-called silent keyboards. I like a solid keyboard with solid keys that lasts a lot longer than the ones that generally come with computers now.

Or am I old-fashioned?

Anyway, I use my keyboard a lot and I know a lot of other people who also use them day in, day out, and all day long. 

I then wasted a lot more time looking for an Apple-compatible keyboard that has all the sturdiness I’m looking for. And the colourful backlight that means I can continue working when much of the natural daylight has gone. How often have I worked through the night? I wouldn’t be able to do that without my backlit keyboard, not when I’m half asleep as well.

While I was there, I started to look at colour printers too. But I had to step away from that one as I hadn’t given any thought to what I might be looking for, and we’re not supposed to buy large tech items during a Mercury retrograde…

When I couldn’t find a keyboard at a reasonable price (there were a couple that cost many hundreds of pounds that might have done the job, but they still wear out too quickly for me to justify spending as much on a keyboard as I do on a laptop), I started to hunt for reasons why my keyboard had suddenly stopped working.

There was an update at the weekend, so it could have been that. But as I’m not as au fait with Macs as I was with PCs, I didn’t know where to start if I wanted to revert to the previous update. 

As I perused the forums, I saw that others had the same issues as me with the “ and the @ being the wrong way around, but the solution for that was to choose British PC keyboard. I already had British keyboard, I didn’t even know there was British PC keyboard but apparently that was one of the suggested solutions. So then I had to find out where to find British PC keyboard.

I stumbled on it by mistake, but I installed it and tried it. That resolved the “ and the @ mix-up, but not the Command+Z thing. Then I saw in another forum that a simple restart might fix the undo issue.

Well, I scoffed at that, but tried it anyway. And it worked! It’s still not the same as it was before, because I could undo a character at a time before and now it was undoing entire sentences, and I couldn’t find the redo command. (It’s there, I know it’s there, I’ve seen it, but I couldn’t remember what it was.)

But I was happy. I had my “ and my @ in the right place, and even my #. My undo was working again. I’d found out how to turn the ‘breathing’ backlight on my keyboard into just one light at a time. And I’d also found a typewriter keyboard sound effect thing, which I love. (I used qwertick on the PC, but it doesn’t work on the Mac.) 

And then the poet called to say he was on his way home.

Surely it wasn’t home time already?

But it was. And I’d wasted the entire day down another rabbit hole.

Determined not to completely write-off the whole day, I opened up Scrivener and added another 1,000 words to The Secret of Whitehorse Farm. Then I rattled off today’s post and scheduled it to publish. 

As the day progressed, I noticed a creeping bit-of-a-throat. I didn’t have much of an appetite and my right eye was watering. I took some cold & flu tablets, crossed my fingers that I wasn’t getting anything too debilitating, and upped my liquid intake. 

I don’t have time to be ill this week. I have a novella to finish and submit and a very short story to write. Fortunately, the novella can be a first draft and so can the 300-word story. Unfortunately, the 350-word story needs to be competition-ready by Saturday at the latest…

Keep everything crossed for me today.