ZebraBook

by Mark Herbert

overview

I use my PowerBook G4 everywhere but as it belongs to work, I cannot void the warranty nor do anything permanent. What I wanted was a simple, yet effective hack to make my PowerBook stand out from the rest. It all started when a friend broke the delete key off his iBook. He was given a dead iBook keyboard from our local Apple Service Centre to fix it. As the keys on both keyboards are the same size, all I needed to do was swap a black key for a white one wherever I wanted it. I decided to make a stripe pattern, although you could make any pattern you like.

keys

Each regular sized key is held to the plastic bracket underneath by two very small clips at the top and two small hooks underneath. Removing them is straightforward in practice but difficult to explain. Prise each key off by placing a fingernail underneath the top and lifting. Then slide the key towards the top of the keyboard and upwards to remove. Simply do this in reverse to place them back on, it is really easy to line the clips up with the bracket on the black keys as you can see through them, if you use this as a guide the white keys are almost as simple.

The smaller keys (the arrow and function keys) are held on in a similar fashion except the clips are on the left side, and the hooks are on the right hand side. You need to be more careful with these keys as the brackets are more fragile. I managed to break a bracket as I was removing an arrow key, but was able to replace it with one from the donor keyboard with a little bit of fiddling.

capslock

The larger keys (shift, spacebar etc.) have a small metal bracket along with the clips. The iBook and PowerBook keyboards use a slightly different bracket for the Caps Lock key, you can use the iBook bracket on the PowerBook but not the other way around so I suggest that you swap the brackets before you place the key on the keyboard.

This was quick and simple and is easily undoable, and it certainly acheived it's goal of making my PowerBook stand out. It also had the unplanned benefit of gaining a second command key (in the place of an enter key), which I remapped using the excellent DoubleCommand. If you decide to do this to your Book and you come up with an interesting pattern let me know.

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