dirtystylus

Filco Keyboard Deep Clean

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Some maintenance work on the Filco Keyboard. So much grit had built up on the keycaps, and I had a feeling that it was even worse under the keys.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how much dirt was under there:

Crumbs, dust, hair, and who knows what else.

I pulled all the keys off (using a makeshift keycap puller). The longer keys (spacebar, shift, enter, etc.) had extra wire stabilizers that required some finessing. Then I dumped them in soapy hot water, scrubbed them, and laid them all out to dry. Then I took a bunch of q-tips dipped in diluted alcohold to the board, trying to get most of the dirt there.

Reassembly:

Next time I’ll have to find a can of compressed air before doing this; it would’ve made cleaning the board a lot easier.

Picking Pearls at Mitsukoshi

Back from a quick trip last weekend to Orlando. Celebrated my Dad’s birthday and sampled a ton of food at the Food & Wine Festival. There’s a bunch more photos to sift through.

Backpack

I’ve been searching for a decentralized to-do system for a while now – I previously used iCal for this purpose, but I no longer carry my laptop to work everyday so keeping everything in sync was getting difficult. I’d heard about Backpack before, but didn’t delve into it until recently. I thought it was a good idea – a centralized repository that you could send notes, to-dos, images, and reminders via website, email, or even your phone – but didn’t see much use for it.

Two things made me curious to try it out in this new year – the presence of a dashboard widget and a plugin for Quicksilver. The combination of the two means that I can add to-dos and notes to my Backpack pages from either Quicksilver or the widget, and I can check my Backpack pages without ever needing to fire up a browser.

This post on magpiebrain was a big help in getting it all set up.