Dead pixels.

But not just one. Or two. Rather, I developed a cluster below the screen centre. In my darker moments I wondered if, like the black hole it resembled, it would slowly eat up my monitor, before sucking in my phone, tea, desk, living room…

Needless to say it had to be fixed. Before it was too late.

In reality, ‘too late’ means ‘before the warranty expires’. Which is next week. And given I use my laptop for home, work and as a hot water bottle, I don’t like being separated from it. Further, I’ve heard horror stories before – Ivan in particular told me how his dead pixels had been scorned by Apple.

In any case, I bit the bullet last week and managed to get a Genius Bar appointment. Although it took some time, they agreed it required fixing and ordered the bits. I then dropped my laptop in Friday evening, which the promise it would be fixed in 3 to 4 days.

At 1500 the next day my phone rang. The laptop was ready.

So, for the price of two tube tickets and 24 hours of Windows-only living I have a brand new LCD. Thanks Apple!

Apple, however, don’t believe in locales outside the US. And so the UK keyboard layout on my MBP is designed around the hacked-together monstrosity Apple consider a UK keyboard layout. Those who have used MacBooks will know this is essentially a slightly hacked US layout, and so it doesn’t help with the NEK4000. Luckily, unlike the rubbish that Logitech put out, Intellitype has been stable and useful for me, and sorted the problem.

Until recently…

At work we’re currently doing Swing development on Java 6. Java 6 for the Mac is 64bit only. And, unlike the 32bit Java 5, the Microsoft Keyboard driver refuses to offer keystrokes to the 64bit JVM. Hence i had to swap keyboard layouts if I wanted to do crazy things such as entering text into our application.

Luckily, Ukulele has saved me. It is a keyboard layout editor for the Mac, and I was quickly able to knock up an appropriate layout. And so I can now happily type sans-Intellitype.

I’ve also dumped LCC and will be trying ControllerMate for my mapping needs. Stay tuned!