(Not) fixing my Apple Pro keyboard

I have been using an old M7803 Pro keyboard on my iMacs for quite some time—it has ©2000 on the label. I liked it much better than the newer keyboards.

Unfortunately during the table read for As You Like It on 2024 March 13, as I was reading for First Lord, I spilled some port into the keyboard. I rinsed out the keyboard as soon as possible afterwards, but even after it was dry, there were still some non-functional keys. I substituted a Windows keyboard the next day, and I got a used Macally keyboard for about $5 at the Grey Bears thrift store within a week to replace it, and that seems to be working ok.

I had heard that it is sometimes possible to clean a keyboard by disassembling it, and I thought I would try that. I even got myself some new Allen wrenches, because I did not have a set of tiny ones and the Pro keyboard requires a 0.05″ (1.27mm) Allen wrench.

I found instructions on doing the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly at https://web.archive.org/web/20160307171517/https://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/bgracey/prokeyboardrepair.html and started following the instructions.

I got the case off, took off all the keycaps (removing a dustpan full of cat fur and human hair), and removed the PC board. At that point, I looked at the next step, which involved removing the decorative glued-on cardboard panel and taking out 39 screws, and decided that I had had enough—there wasn’t any guarantee that I’d be able to rescue the keyboard, and that many teeny-tiny screws to lose was just too daunting.

So I started putting the keyboard back together. Needless to say, I dropped one of the screws (the grounding screw) in doing the assembly, and I couldn’t find it on the floor. I ended up spending 20 minutes or more sweeping about half the breakfast room, a third of the dining room, and half the kitchen, running a magnet through the dustpan looking for the screw. I finally found it about 10′ (3m) from where I had been working.

The keyboard is back together again, with all the keypads back in place and looking a little cleaner, but still only about half the keys actually work.

A wasted evening, but I suspect that if I had tried to do the full cleaning, it would have been even more time wasted.

Broke bike seat again

Long-time readers may remember that I had to fix my bike seat due to metal fatigue at the clamp that holds it back in 2016 (see Bike seat fixed, Broken bike seat and Flexible adhesives).

I wrote then “I was going to sand the rust spots, prime with metal primer, and repaint the spots, but my metal primer was no longer any good, so I just did some light sanding and coated all the rusty spots with oil. I will have to buy some more metal primer and repaint in a couple of weeks when I next have time to work on the bike.”  Of course, I never did get the primer and do the repainting.

I also wrote, “I’m hopeful that this fix, which cost under $50, will let the bike seat be usable for the next 15 years.”  Well it lasted less than 8 years. Yesterday, just as I arrived at Dominican Oaks for a NextStage Readers’ Theater performance, my bike seat failed again.  The bike had been creaking when I pedaled hard for the past several months, and I was worried about there being a crack somewhere, but I could never see one (hidden by the powdercoat paint, no doubt).

The failure was on the side of the seat, near a bend in the tubing. I would not have expected this to be a high-stress location.

The previous epoxy join did fail on short joint, though the tubing stayed on the rod—it just rotated freely on the rod.

Here is the seat off of the bicycle, showing the two parts that need to be glued back together.

I’m getting a slightly larger aluminum rod to put in the slightly larger tubing on the side. I won’t be able to put the aluminum rod very far into the tubing on one side, as it will be stopped by the bend in the tubing. I think I really want 17mm or 17.5mm diameter rod, but that seems to be an extremely expensive specialty product, so I’m going with a 16mm (5/8″) high-strength 2024 aluminum rod instead. The high-strength part probably makes no difference, given that there will be a lot of epoxy filling the gap and the epoxy is what will fail, but the difference in cost between the 2024 aluminum and cheaper aluminum was trivial.

If the seat fails again (as it probably will), I’ll have to get a new seat, which will probably be several hundred dollars (if available at all).

Costume design for The Bear

Our second costume-design assignment was to design costumes for the 3 characters in Chekhov’s The Bear (МЕДВЕДЬ). We were to do it as a historical-dress piece, to be compatible with the box set that we designed in a previous assignment (see Maquette for theater-design class for pictures of that design). Our designs were to be presented as the three renderings plus a slide show of the research we had done, the costume plot, and pictures of the renderings.  My slid show is available at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GWnBhgX1u5SL7oUrGtxZgJnBU1-9gPKdUK4i3Hxmb4c

In the slide show, you can see not only the watercolors I drew, but also what Freepik’s Sketch-to-Image tool did with them.  The quality of Freepik’s redrawings was certainly much higher than what I can draw, but it was not able to capture some aspects of the costume design that I wanted.  I’ll put the images here also, but leave the historical research and explanation to the slide show.

Luka, the servant, is imagined as a footman in livery, despite his comment that the mice ate the livery—I’m assuming that is the other servants’ livery, not his own meticulously maintained livery.

Elena Popova is in full Victorian mourning, with a lace mourning veil down her back. I envision her taking off the veil when she fetches the pistols, so this conflates the two looks.

Grigoriy Smirnov is angry for most of the play, so should be a bit red-faced. The stripes on the trousers should probably be narrower, but I can’t draw that well.

Luka’s costume is roughly right, but the AI added an unwanted tie and undid the fastening of the tailcoat. It also reduced the number of buttons.

Smirnov was aged excessively (he should around 40, not 60) and the vest is a bit too plain—it should have a more tweedy texture. Also the collar should be a simple band collar, but otherwise this is a pretty good rendition of my intent. (Again the stripes should be narrower, but the AI had no way to know that.)

Elena is beautified nicely and the mourning veil is well done. The embroidery on the skirt is suitable, but the bugle beads and black buttons were lost, and the jacket was unsuitably transformed into a see-through black lace blouse!

Fantasy costume renderings +AI

In Fantasy costume renderings, I showed my first assignment in costume design.  I tried this week (during our Spring break) improving the renditions by running them through an AI program—specifically Freepik Sketch.  The AI drawing program mangled the annotation, so I removed the “writing” and did a little cleanup and resizing in Photoshop Elements. Here are the before and after images:

The pregnant soprano is the lead here.

The AI did a pretty good job of capturing the essence of the costume, while making the drawing much more realistic than I could manage. The silver came out looking more like lace, but was otherwise reasonable.

The tenor has a tight-fitting satin outfit—superhero style.

The tenor also came out fairly well.

The baritone has a formal, almost military cut, but in the same satin as the the tenor, though with darker satin for the lapels and a sash of the silver grey, rather than just trim.

The baritone is ok, but not as much of an improvement. I had a hard time getting the look right—the AI wanted to make too many changes, so I had to turn “imagination” way down, making it look closer to my sketch. I don’t like that the spats have a zipper rather than buttons.

The bass has a pleated jacket and spirally pieced trousers of satin. The intent is to be flamboyant, and maybe a bit clownish.

The pleated jacket was too weird for the AI, so I had to turn “imagination” way down, which again resulted in something too close to my sketch.

Despite the limitations of the AI, I think I will use it for my homework assignment, turning in both my own sketches and the “improved” sketches.  In order to keep within the 20-per-day limit of the free server, I’ll be writing up the description of the drawing to cut and paste into the tool before uploading the scan of the sketch.

First pots from Spring 2023

I’m in the “intermediate” class this semester—because the beginning class conflicts with my theater-tech class at Cabrillo.  Unfortunately, even the Wednesday ceramics class conflicts with theater events (like the Undiscovered Shakespeare Zoom performance/lectures on Henry VIII and the As You Like It table reads with Santa Cruz Shakespeare), so I’m missing a lot of the classes.

Here are the pots I picked up in February:

This ruler, made out of Bravo Buff clay, was intended to measure shrinkage. The 1″ and 1cm markings were made in the wet slab. After bisquing, 10cm shrank to 9.3cm and 17 cm to 15.8cm (7% shrinkage). I put black beauty in the footprints and noxema blue in the ruler markings, wiped off the excess, and dipped the whole thing in shiny milky white. After glaze firing, the 10 cm shrank to 8.8cm, and 17cm to 15cm (an additional ~5% for 12% total shrinkage). The ruler weighs 81g.

This bowl is small, with a rim diameter of 8.2cm and a height of 4.5cm, but very heavy at 299g. The single dip of spearmint crawled badly.

The inside and rim of shiny milky white worked fine, though.

This bowl is 9.4cm in diameter and 6cm high. It is pretty hefty also at 370g. The inside and part of the outside was dipped in shiny milky white, then I dipped partway in tasty purple, noxema blue, and matte slate blue.

The matte slate blue was not visible on the inside, because it only came to the rim on the outside.

The tasty purple over shiny milky white crawled in one place on the rim.

The bottom shows the rough texture of the matte slate blue when it is on bare clay (in the triangular wedge). It really changes the color of the tasty purple (on the left).

Here are a few of the pots that I picked up on 6 March 2024:

This bowl has a 9cm diameter and is 5.9cm high and weighs 367g. It was hell to glaze—the shiny milky white inside kept cracking, and I eventually wiped it all off and tried again a week later. The bowl was dipped in shiny milky white, then in black beauty. But the glaze crawled badly and the spots shown near the bottom here are the only succesful part of the bowl.

Here you can see some of the voids where the shiny milky white glaze crawled.

This blue and white bowl has a diameter of about 9.9cm and a height of 5.8cm. It is thick-walled, but for once the base is trimmed to about the same thickness, so it does not feel as heavy as many of my earlier pots (only 282 g). The inside and rim are shiny milky white, and the base is noxema blue. Overall, I think this bowl is a success.

The top and inside of the bowl are pretty successful.

This bowl is about 10cm in diameter and 5.6cm high. Its base trimmed to a reasonable thickness, and it is lighter than the blue-and-white bowl (only 236g). The inside and rim are shiny milky white, and the outside is robin’s egg blue.

Unfortunately, the robin’s egg blue did not get good coverage, so there is one bare spot (possibly crawling, as I don’t remember any voids before the glaze firing). A second dip in the robin’s egg blue would have given better coverage, I think.

This bowl (10cm diam, 5cm high, 233g) was intended to be shiny milky white on the inside and rim, and black beauty on the outside, but some of the black beauty spilled to the inside, which actually made a pretty good effect (more dark blue than black).

The outside is a nice black, except for two spots where my fingers held the bowl for dipping—those spots have shiny milky white, so they look intentional, not like flaws.

This bowl is 11.6cm in diameter at the top, but the foot is only about 5.5cm in diameter. It is only about 4.6cm high, and the foot is not trimmed enough, so the bottom is very heavy. The bowl weighs 309g. The inside and rim are shiny milky white.

The side view of the bowl shows the taper to the foot. Because the foot is so heavy, the bowl is not tippy, despite the narrowness of the foot.

The bottom of the bowl was done with AC purple spot, which was mixed a little too thick, so one dip made a very thick layer. You can see one of the two spots on the rim where I held the dish for dipping in the purple.

The four tea-ball rests were each dipped halfway in shiny milky white, then the other half in (clockwise from top left) SC matte green, panama blue, yellow iron matte, and AC purple spot. The thickness of the AC purple spot glaze is apparent in the hiding of the ridges on the inside. None of these is particularly successful.

Here are the bottoms of the same 4 tea-ball rests. Each is about 7.5cm in diameter and they weigh (clockwise from top left) 69g, 73g, 67g, and 74g.

My pots are gradually getting a little less clunky, though they are still all pretty thick-walled. None of the glaze tests in either of these batches were particularly successful, except the noxema blue, which is a pretty robust glaze, even in the hands of beginners like me.