maple "mavica" syrup [6502] @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

i WAS going to try to clean the keyboard from the inside to solve stubborn keys, but check out how thick this metal plate is! nothing i have is strong enough to bend them straight to open it

if i had to guess, they are probably linear spring switches (no tactile feel or click)

d'you know what? i'm not immediately seeing any split gears, believe it or not

i think they might be grinding for another reason, like the carriage movement resisting too much

golly!

(the laptop doesn't ever reach dangerous CPU temperatures so i don't really have much of an incentive to do all the work of taking my server down (literally, from a high shelf) and going through the tedious business of replacing a laptop fan, if i even find one for this model)

the tired faulty fan on my home server laptop sometimes sounds not unlike a pot of water very quietly coming to a boil. i stopped and just listened for a minute to all the sounds in the silence of my room and it was pretty relaxing

i won't have much time to work on it today, so maybe this weekend i'll take a look at the gears. those i can get from eBay for a more reasonable price than the pens (because the pens are only sold domestically), but first i'll see if i can do anything to them without replacements

so the next step is to try and focus more on sourcing new pens through whatever process. there's a place you can still buy them in the US but i'm not in the US and that makes it prohibitive, unless someone wants to donate me some pens for cost of shipping

so after more work yesterday and more frustratingly broken pens, it doesn't look too good for restoring the original pens. i still have black and blue working ok, green sputters but looks like the ballpoint is not getting enough ink, and i have no working tips left to make a red

there's not going to be a stream tonight. sorry

sorry, i can't. the more i try the more frustrated i get that i wasted $500 on a 5ghz router i can't even make discord calls on from one room away

ehhnn

we'll be saving the games for 2 weeks from now, yakuza 2 next week

let's see if i can rig up some remote controls...

the ballpoints in these pens are VERY fine and the tip holding them is plastic, so they're very easy to break. the black pen i have right now is using the tip from one of the gray extra pens (supposedly "correctable" pens, but mine had weird greenish and reddish inks in them)

also, just so it's noted i _did_ ruin three pens so far: one of them i didn't notice the ballpoint had vanished, one of them basically crumbled when i tried to take it apart, and the other one i tried a method of getting the ballpoint unstuck and it just dropped into the pen body