If you have a Macbook or Macbook Pro, you may or may not have experienced freaky keyboard issues with it after upgrading to Leopard, or perhaps even before then. Apple just released an update specifically to address this problem.
Meanwhile, back in an Ars Technica forum thread specifically created to house complaints about this problem:
To work around the sleepy keyboard (until I could reboot), I would just hold the capslock key down until the LED illuminated, which typically took around five seconds. That seemed better than hammering on keys or doing some of the crazy things that people seem to have suggested (like flexing the battery!!), which are probably just superstitious behavior that make no difference either way. (Mac users seem especially prone to this, I’m always seeing people say things like “My dog wasn’t hungry, and then I zapped the PRAM and repaired permissions on my Mac and his appetite came back, so now I do that every time I feed him, just to be sure.”)
—from this post in the “Official MacBook Pro keyboard/trackpad disappearance bug thread” at the Ars Technica forums, emphasis mine.
*Looks at paragraph again* *LOLs*
Personally, when this bug showed up for me (keyboard just stopped working on its own) nothing helped except rebooting and, in a quasi-superstitious panic, setting my Macbook never to sleep again. Superstition concerning computers— especially among smart people like yours truly *cough*— cannot really be because we are stupid. Superstition arises because you don’t know how exactly something works, and the little you know doesn’t seem connected to how it actually works. That Ars Technica thread is actually what made me finally decide not to reset the PRAM or repair permissions, because on the first page there are some detailed posts where people talk about how neither of those things has anything to do with the bug, and how the common thread that runs through the “it was fixed” stories of the bug all had to do with rebooting.
I can just see, centuries from now, people scoffing at our ignorance (“all they had to do was reboot! Couldn’t they see that??”) and turning right round to kick their nano-assembled gear in the hopes that all those stupid nanobots would wake up and get it working again. |
bouncy