The $100 soda

I mentioned it in passing before, this weekend I emptied a glas of soda over my G15 keyboard. Bad, bad idea! Of course similar things happened to me before with previous keyboards, but previous keyboards were a lot simpler. A cheaper keyboard you can just rinse with lukewarm water under the shower, put on a radiator to dry for a day or two, and it will be fine. With the G15 that method didn't work at all. When I connected it again after drying, the backlit keys were playing a flickering lightshow, the LCD panel went crazy, and some keys occasionally hit themselves. Not good!

That G15 keyboard was very hard to get. I live in Belgium, where people are using French AZERTY keyboard layout, which is significantly different than QWERTY. You can't just swap a few keys and you're fine, because for example the number keys are all different from US/UK keyboard layout. On a French keyboard you need to hit shift to get a number from the number row above the letters, the non-shift version gives you special French characters with accents on top. So I imported my G15 from the UK, which was hellishly expensive and cost an additional bundle in shipping cost.

So how to replace a broken G15, having gotten so used to it? Easy! I bought a new G15 in Belgium, with a French keyboard layout, then ripped out the keys from the new keyboard and put the keys from the old keyboard in. Tada! The keyboard itself doesn't know it is French, so as I still have the UK keyboard driver the layout works just fine now. Only problem of course is the $100 price tag, making that the most expensive soda of my life.

I bought the new G15 at Media Markt, a German chain that invaded Belgium a few years ago, because they have huge stores where you can find everything, and usually at the best available price. So as I was already in the shop, I looked for a DVI cable. No luck at the computer cable section, but fortunately (and unusually for a European shop in the christmas season) there were lots of sales clerks around. One of them directed me to the audio cable section, where I found 2 different DVI to DVI cables. One gold-plated 2m cable, and one not plated 3m cable, same price, 20 Euro. Now I know that gold-plated shouldn't make any difference for a digital cable, but I certainly didn't need 3 meters of it, so I went for the shorter, shinier version anyway. After a small adjustment of the driver (which comes in analog or digital version) of the Syncmaster, I now got a perfect video signal. A happy conclusion to my hardware adventures of the weekend.