BANG! and the dirt is gone
Following in the footsteps of many others I decided to clean my keyboard. It was looking decidedly grubby, and while I had dealt with the same problem in the past by pairing up my old dirty keyboard with a Mac Mini and sticking a new and clean keyboard on the PowerMac, I’m currently watching the pennies (however much I’d love a sexy new slimline model). I popped the keys off and opted for the dishwasher method which did an excellent job. It did take me some time to work out where all the keys went but I’m now left with a keyboard that looks brand new. An extra bonus is the keys that were getting a bit sticky are now silky smooth. I don’t know why as the grime was on top. Maybe more gets inside that I thought.
On the topic of all things Mac I’m having an October “spring” clean in anticipation for Leopard on Friday. I’ve tided up my desktop, cleared out some old applications and emptied the folder that I download to (I’ve never seen so much crap!). I’ve got a 320gb hanging off the back of the PowerMac on FW800 that is split 50/50 between a bootable image of my system and a backup partition where dotMac backup sticks all my incremental stuff. I could use that for the new Time Machine but I’ve also got an Airport Extreme Base Station that with the addition of a 320gb USB drive has given me a NAS drive. I know that Time Machine does a complete restorable system backup as well as incremental file backups (its one of the features I read about explaining how it dealt with deletion of files when low on space) but I’m yet to discover if I can pool across multiple backup devices. It would be nice if it could but if not I’ve seen a load for really cheap 1TB external drives. Wow, I think that’s one of those IT milestones, 1TB in a domestic capacity. Still I need somewhere to put the Internet 
If anyone else will be camped out on the doorstep of the Trafford Centre Apple Store on Friday at 6pm be sure to give me a wave.
