Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

If you read my earlier post, Seven Mac (OS X 10.5) annoyances, you know that one of my top annoyances was this:

….. This is the one that really bugs me. On a Mac mini, you can plug in any USB keyboard, or just about any keyboard if you get a cheap PS2 to USB adapter (these are easy to find on eBay), so you can still use all those free-after-rebate keyboards you stocked up on several years ago. A minor annoyance, at least for me, is that if I simply reboot the computer without powering it down completely for a few seconds, it doesn’t recognize the keyboard at all. But, that I could live with. What’s really annoying is that the geniuses at Apple decided that the numeric keypad should only be a numeric keypad – the NumLock key is disabled, and there’s no way to get the directional keys or Ins/Del keys to work (please note I’m talking about the keys on the numeric keypad, NOT the keys between the alpha keypad and the numeric keypad, which for the most part work fine though not always exactly as on a PC). The reason this is a HUGE annoyance for me is that I learned to type on a manual typewriter and when I want a number, I use the numbers in the row above the QWERTY line of keys. And for that reason, ever since there have been numeric keypads on keyboards I’ve always released NumLock and used the numeric keypad for navigation only. Do you have any idea how hard it is to unlearn a quarter century of habit? And there is simply no good reason that Apple could not have allowed PC keyboards to work as expected – their OS is built on Unix, after all, and I’m sure that most Unix-based operating systems don’t disable the NumLock (no version of Linux does that to my knowledge). I hope that when whoever made the decision to eliminate the NumLock switch gets old, they are forced to change some longstanding habits just to accommodate some idiot designer’s idea of how things ought to work. Can you tell I’m REALLY PISSED about this one? You would be too, if you hit the wrong key about 300 times a day (in my case it’s the Delete key on the numeric pad), then had to backspace and find the right one. …..

Forgive the quoted rant, but this really annoyed me, and it’s part of a pattern I’ve started to detect with Apple, which annoys me even more (more on that in a minute). But the purpose of this post is to let any of you who may be similarly annoyed about this issue know that there is finally a solution that works great, and is free!  Just head on over to the home of KeyRemap4MacBook and download the latest version.  Before you install it, make sure you completely uninstall any similar keyboard utilities such as DoubleCommand – if you’ve been using DoubleCommand only to get PC-style home and end keys you won’t need it anymore, because KeyRemap4MacBook can handle that also.

Once you get it installed, go to the System Preferences and click on the KeyRemap4MacBook preference icon (an “alt” key). Once you get to the preference pane, these are the entries you probably want to check:

Of course, you are free to select the options you like, and there are many others available. If you have a weird keyboard, are an Emacs lover, or are fluent in Japanese, there are probably other options here that would be of interest to you.  The one that fixes my particular gripe is “Use KeyPad as Arrow”, and the one that eliminates the need for DoubleCommand (for me, anyway) is “Use PC Style Home/End.”

This has totally eliminated my frustration with the Mac keyboard, now let’s hope that Apple doesn’t try to deliberately sabotage this program in a misguided attempt to force people to buy their overpriced keyboards.  Why would I even think that they might do such a thing? Well, you see, in the Leopard operating system, Apple introduced a great new feature called Time Machine – great, that is, if you have an external drive that you want to dedicate to Time Machine backups.  In Leopard 10.5.1, there were a couple of different ways (freely posted on Mac-related blogs) to let Time Machine use an existing networked external drive for your backups.  They involved either running a small utility program called iTimeMachine, or making a one-line tweak from the command line.  After that, backups to a share on an external drive somewhere out on your local network worked just great – that is, until Apple pushed out the most recent upgrade to Leopard (version 10.5.2), which for many people (including me) made their old backups inaccessible and prevented the creation of new backups (the backup attempt would fail with the error message, “The backup disk image could not be mounted”).

Strangely, this happened right after Apple announced their own (in my opinion) overpriced backup device called “Time Capsule”, leading at least a few folks to wonder if Apple may be deliberately trying to force users to buy a new backup device (and hoping some will choose Apple’s device because, you know, it’s an “official” Apple product with the Apple logo on it) rather than backing up to their perfectly good existing network storage devices. Of course, you can use Time machine with any external USB drive, you don’t have to buy Time Capsule.  And, there is other backup software out there that would let you use an existing networked drive, but Time Machine is really great when it works, and has on more than one occasion let me rescue a file that I had deleted thinking I no longer needed it, only to realize a day or two later that I still did. Now I can no longer do that, until I either shell out for another external hard drive dedicated exclusively to Time Machine backups, or figure out how to trick Time Machine into using my external share again.  Apparently, not every Time Machine user had this problem after the Leopard upgrade, but so far every Leopard upgrade has gone badly for me – after the most recent one I got a “blue screen of death” on bootup (just a sky blue screen with no information whatsoever) and had to do what is called an “Archive and Install” to get the system working again.

So if anyone tries to tell you that Mac users don’t ever have the kind of problems that Windows users have, I call bullshit – sure, maybe if you are using Windows Vista or Windows ME you will find Leopard a welcome change, but so far I’ve not been terribly impressed with Leopard.  The latest upgrade does seem to have made the system a bit more stable (no more nightly reboots required to clean up memory leaks, or whatever was causing weirdness), but at the cost of the Time Machine problem.  So, I’m still rather annoyed with my Mac Mini, but at least I am much less annoyed after finding KeyRemap4MacBook. And admittedly, I’d still much rather have a Mac Mini (even running Leopard) than a Windows Vista machine any day of the week.  But that doesn’t mean I’ve joined the ranks of the Mac fanboys who think that Apple can do no wrong. To my way of thinking, on some small scale, Leopard is Apple’s “Vista” – in my limited (one week) experience with Tiger (Leopard’s predecessor), it was a great, stable operating system, and maybe Apple should have built on that instead of releasing Leopard, which has caused so many problems for users.  But, all of this is just my opinion – as always, feel free to leave a comment if you disagree.