[sdiy] Very OT: Computer Keyboard--Lightly Irrigated

[Rainer Buchty]

> Something like 1 or 2 teaspoons/ 5 or 10 or more milliliters of water
> [strawberry-flavored, so with a dash of citric acid/sucralose etc.] got
> dribbled into an iMac's USB Pro Keyboard.

Reminds me of that AmEx commercial where the father feeds the VCR with a
cassette in front of his nipper with the words "He's veeeeery hungry."

Next time the li'l guy walks by the VCR -- this time with his baby cereal
-- he rembers daddy's words...

> I've been drying it out with fan-forced air and even a bit with a blow
> dryer. Nearly 48 hours later it's semi-functional but still has some
> dead keys (most if not all listed below).

You didn't clean the keyboard but just dried the stuff inside?

Personally, I give my computer keyboards the following treatment (and
since they still work, it can't be that harmful after all):

- soak the entire thingy with warm water and your favorite dish cleaning
  agent
- rinse it with cold, clear water afterwards
- put it in the oven for a couple of hours at 50°C/125F

In case your water is very hard, you might want to do the final rinse with
aqua dest.

> Just wanted a reality check.  Am I really waiting for water to dry, or was
> something possibly blown by a resulting short?

Might be... I don't know the keyboard matrix of the apple keyboard.
Judging from the number of keys it might be that an entire row is blown,
but it might as well be that just the contacts are contaminated with that
strawberry stuff.

You might want to give the soaking method a try (which I first time tried
as a last resort after a major orange juice accident). Might require more
than one cleaning procedure as you already spent much time on vulcanizing
the stuff with your hair dryer.

Rainer (who is always amazed how much gunk gathers inside an ordinary
	keyboard -- chips'n'cookies certainly don't do any good to it)