New Year, electronics purge, clean keyboard!

We're on a thorough decluttering rampage this January, and making amazing progress already.  Last weekend the amazing spouse cleared out many bags of graphic novels and books which we'd now replaced in electronic format.  I took them along with a big supply of Meyer lemons (from my tree) over to a local center which provides housing for families transitioning out of homelessness.

This weekend, I tackled some stacks of old electronics.  In past rounds of clean-up, I succeeded in collecting such things into a single space - but that space was taking up more than a full shelf of space and empirically hadn't been disturbed in months - so probably contained stuff we didn't need.

Sure enough, my purge uncovered many tech toys dating back to the 1990's in some cases that just didn't need to take up real estate in our home.  A grocery sack of items will now to to spouse's office where his IT team can be trusted to clean off drives and make things otherwise secure for donation or recycling; we also filled the recycling with lots of old manuals and documentation, and some items (like 3 inch floppies containing Win 95) went into the trash.

I also uncovered a keyboard which is quite compatible with our current desktop.  The current keyboard is nice - a very sleek apple keyboard, high on the "form factor".  But the older keyboard, while less sleek, has USB ports on it, which means that I could dispense with having a separate USB hub on the desk.  So I conclude that the form of the older keyboard is, on net, actually better than the new one.

But the old one was... filthy.  I am bad about eating at my desk, I have cats who wander the desk, the house has a certain amount of dust... the cumulative result was just gross.  So, before putting the thing into action, it needed a good cleaning.

How do you clean a mac keyboard?  It's simple:

1.  Take a photo or three of the keyboard before you start, both to document where the keys are positioned, and to remind yourself how gross it was when you started.

2.  Then just pop out the keys one at a time.  It helps to lay them out in the order they sat on the keyboard as an additional way of keeping track of what goes where.

3.  Then start wiping down the base of the keyboard.  Maybe take a picture to again remind yourself how gross it was.

4.  Once the keyboard is clean, you can start wiping down the keys one by one and replacing them on the keyboard. Once it's done, let it dry overnight to be sure that you don't have any dangerous dampness down in the electronics.  Oh, and take a picture to show how much improved it is!