Cleaned my keyboard

I finally cleaned my dear white keyboard! I popped out all the keys using a small screwdriver, as I read people doing that from various web pages. It was scary at first, but later it's quite fun. Then I took all the keys to clean, using my sister's paint brush. A lot of dust. They dried for a day. And the naked keyboard, I didn't know how to clean it. It was full of dust and greasy. Ugh. Took an old tooth brush and a piece of tissue. It's not really good, but I got quite impatient and stopped.

During the time that I didn't have a keyboard to use, (really, there's no other USB keyboard in the house. We're talking about a house with two computers, and the house has a computer for like 6 years.) I had to open the keyboard viewer in OS X, and click on the keys to type very slowly. Not suitable for IM or any other activity. No more keyboard shortcuts, I had to use menus for doing things. And I can't seem to work with any modifier key. That was all so stupid.

Now comes to last part: putting the keys back. This is a test of my nerdishness, and it was hard. I got most right, but I was pretty clueless about the symbols. I was wrong in the +-*/ in the number keys side. The punctuation were wrong, and haha I got some alphabets wrong! My sister keeps spoiling them for me, (she went to the other computer to look; you thought she's better than me or what?) so I wouldn't know if I could ever put them back myself. Interesting anyway. But then it was really scary to push them back in. Scarier then taking them out. The sound that it made was so loud. Had to use great force to do it. I don't want to do that again.

Talking about MacZOT!

MacZOT is for Mac users who likes to buy shareware since it gives out good deals of Mac shareware every day. The price can be less than half of the orginal.

The creatice bit of this website is about marketing. The BlogZOT I wrote about gave me a free AppZapper. Now they have a BlogZOT 1.1 for bloggers (like me) to talk about this website. This gave them a lot of publicity all over the web. (What's better than being Dugg?)

Than there's MysteryZOT. It's a secret bundle of shareware that is worth more than $60, but now sells for only $15. You don't know what's in it until you buy it, so you have to decide your trust MacZOT or not.

It's a very interesting website and their design is good too! :) Definitely visit it every day to get greaat deals.

I've got free AppZapper

I reported that macZOT wanted to give away AppZapper for free if bloggers write about it. I nearly didn't get it. Yesterday afternoon I used the school PC to check it. Fortunately it was still available. If I hadn't checked, I would have to check when I went back home. By that time the offer has ended! So lucky I remember to get it in the afternoon. Time difference is so bad. I never know what the time is in the US. And they have 4 times for diffecent areas. We arer +8 here in Hong Kong, and they are something like -10! Too big a difference for me to handle.

Today I've zapped many apps. Quite fun, that effect! lol Really funny. It's got a place in my dock. So now for apps that I want to remove, instead of dragging them to the trash, I drag them to the AppZapper icon. Satisfactory.

Rebooted for I don't know how many times yesterday

Yesterday Mac OS X 10.4.6 was released. So naturally I had to reboot. But it was more than that.

First I rebooted because I wanted to solve my issue of the computer not sleeping automatically. Well, it's not solved.

Second thing, I had the hacked Front Row long ago, but an OS update broke that. Yesterday I saw people mentioning that Apple didn't break FR with the new update. And I've been missing FR lately when I want to view a movie. So I decided to hunt for it again. After all, it's impossible for Apple to completely remove the hack. There are many mirrors for it and Apple can never remove their update of FR.

A correct install of a hacked FR requires two reboots, as far as I can tell. I think I incorrectly installed it before I updated to 10.4.4, so the icons of Spotlight and time and other system things disappeared. But this time I got it quite correct and I've rebooted so many times I don't think it will go wrong again.

After that I ran the new OS update. The Mac rebooted twice. I don't know why. But it's normal anyway.

Let's count it. Five reboots! I saw the bootup screen for the highest number of times in my life yesterday.

AppZapper might be free

macZOT is offering to make AppZapper free if 259 bloggers link to it. So this is what I'm doing. It's Dugg, BTW, so it's very slow now. Maybe it won't be free because the bloggers can't visit the site.

Apple, happy birthday!

30 years! Of course I have known Apple for just less than two years, but I know some history too. They're insanely great, right? No one needs me to repeat what Apple has done in these years.

What I'm waiting for is a celebration and new products from Apple. But there's no news yet. I'm quite worried, honestly. They can't just start a party tomorrow. They'll have to get the press ready, and get the fans ready. Next week?