Recently, I’ve been trying out compact computer keyboards to get things to fit better in my keyboard tray. I started off with a few cheap $50 keyboards from Amazon and they were all disappointing in some way. Then I came across an article talking about the Akko Gaming Keyboard MOD007B-HE Santorini.
Right off the bat, the design intrigued me. I’ve honestly never seen a set of key caps that is this gorgeous! I would never have suspected that I would be encouraging you to ogle key caps with serif letters, but here we are. Then you can’t help but be amazed at the seaside scenes on the space bar, shift keys, and enter key. The feel of the keys is excellent. The lights are pretty. Finally, $140 was a great deal if it worked for me and luckily it has.
But this isn’t a keyboard review. My geek friends would complain if I left out those things. Yet those fun details are a mere prelude to a toddler story. So let’s plug on!
Even more recently we had another delightful visit from our toddler grandson. He has been running around the house and giving us plenty of exercise chasing him around. Another area of toddler supremacy is getting into things we didn’t anticipate adequately. Who knew?
On this fateful visit our grandson made one of his pit stops on his tours around the house to tap on the keyboards in my office. The new Akko keyboard on my work computer is accompanied by one of my coveted USB Apple Magic Keyboards. Each one has a distinctly different feel of key cap and key press so I thought he’d like to feel both. Plus, this was the first time he got to see or touch the Akko. He loved it. And I wasn’t worried about any damage to the computers since the screens were locked and password protected. As an experienced computer professional, I was confident that this was a harmless, fun way for the toddler to enjoy his visit. Hahaha.
Once we got our house back to ourselves on Monday morning, I went to work on my work computer and boy, was I in for a surprise. The modifier keys had stopped working on the Akko keyboard. I could no longer cut and paste from the external Akko keyboard. I could get by with the built-in laptop keyboard, but it is uncomfortable to reach. So I tried another keyboard and all was well. I plugged the Akko back in and the problem was still there. [sigh] There’s lots of built-in options on this thing so I go through and toggled all of those that seem related. No progress.
It took a couple of days to work through all of that with no luck. Sadly I was almost ready to buy a new Akko keyboard. But I had one last option: doing a factory reset of the keyboard. Mercifully the designers had the foresight to include a reset option in the keyboard and the documentation. That fixed the problem. Glorious! I’m back off to the races.
I’ve often threatened to put children on-call (aka PagerDuty). I think I have another candidate for that list.
#keyboard #humor #family #art