I’ve used Apple’s aluminium wireless keyboard for almost a year now, and I’ve been pretty satisfied with it. It’s small, light, nice looking and great to type with. The only problem I’ve had with it is that it uses three batteries instead of four or two, so you’ll always end up with one battery you have no use for.

Apple Wireless Keyboard is pretty much the ideal keyboard, since the only problem I have with it can be countered by having a mouse that uses just one battery.

A few days ago my trusty old pal decided life’s been too peaceful, and chose to spice things up. The perfect way of doing this is by the most awkward error keyboards can have: dead keys. Two of my keys just stopped working outright. Now I was presented with a dilemma: an almost perfectly working keyboard that just happens to have two faulty keys. Now, had the entire keyboard failed, it would’ve been easy to get a new one, but since it’s just two keys, well… I ended up with choosing the route of a cheap bastard.

I decided to switch the keyboard layout, so that the broken keys could be switched elsewhere on the keyboard. My software search ended with Ukulele. Ukulele is a free software for Mac OS X that allows you to edit and change keyboard layouts. After I found the tools, it was simply a case of opening a suitable keyboard layout file and mapping the broken keys elsewhere on the keyboard. On the next login the layout file became active, and I could switch to the new layout I just created.

So, thanks to Ukulele, my keyboard is still pretty usable. I mapped two letters I’m not likely to be needing very often to the broken keys. In case I happen to need them, I can still enter them through the OSX Special Characters-menu, for example. Not very convenient, but gets the job done. Here’s hoping that the rest of the keyboard keeps on rocking, behaves and doesn’t have any more great ideas like exploding.