Help Me! I'm Becoming A Nerd

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The answer is resoundingly "Yes!" The question was whether the keyboard shortcut I read about for deleting to the right by pressing the Shift key + Delete on my little Mac Bluetooth keyboard would work or not. My youngest brother brought it to my attention that there were two Delete keys on the full-sized Mac keyboard, and told me the second one was for deleting to the right instead of how the regular Delete key deletes as it moves to the left.

I found deleting to the right so useful that when I realized the little bluetooth keyboard I bought didn't have the second Delete key, I put it away and started using the full-sized keyboard again. I like both keyboards fine. They have that chiclet design like the laptops do, and they are both easy to use.

The big difference for me has been the absence of the numerical keypad. I never used it because I've never needed to. I don't use spreadsheets. I figured if I didn't use the numeric keypad it was wasted space on my desktop. It forced me to reach six inches further to the right to operate my mouse. That added to the muscle tension in my right arm and hand that doesn't need to be there.

Besides that, it's cordless. I can pick it up and go outside on my deck and write from there. I've wondered if I could type from my bed. It'''s allllmost like seeing whaat I'm typing in my mind's eeye. I can tell when I make a mistake, but mostly from muscle memory.

I don't have an iPhone or a Touch iPod, and I don't know whether they have bluetooth or not. I can't imagine these portable devices wouldn't, but if they do, or the rumored new tablet computer they might come out with has bluetooth, then, I'd have to tote this little keyboard around to type out messages or just to use those devices as portable computers.

I had problems with this small keyboard from the get go. The first problem was insurmountable by anything I could do as a consumer. The bluetooth version the Apple OS used didn't do right. Eventually they fixed that for the most part with a firmware upgrade. Now that problem only shows up when the rechargable batteries I use run low.

It's been cool for the last few days. There has been a little bite in the stiff northern breezes that reminds me that winter is never that far away. The heat of the day seems to dissipate faster now, and already there is a bit of a feel to autumn in the air.

In one way it's been an interesting day for me. I have an old TV antenna that was accidently ripped off the top of an old motor home I owned briefly. The motor home is long gone, but the antenna has laid around somewhere in the edge of the woods around the house for a long time.

The outside antenna I've been using is very old. It was used at my parent's house, and I inherited it when the State stole it from us through eminent domain. It got broken up a bit in the process of taking it down from over there and putting it up over here, but it still works as long as I turn it manually when I need to.

A signal amplifier is a must have for this area. We're a long way from any of the over-the-air TV broadcast antennas, and yet we're surrounded by them. The signal amplifier I bought has one input socket and two output sockets. The way I had it rigged I was only using one of the output sockets.

That extra output socket plagued me for a while, but at first I didn't know why. Earlier today I realized I had a three-way splitter around the house from other projects, and a ten foot long piece of coaxial cable. The brass splitter is shiny. That made me wonder if I could use both of the those battered up outside antennas in tandem and maybe get a little better reception.

I hadn't remembered how beat up the motor home antenna had become. When I located it in the edge of the woods just after dark, and brought it up under the porch light, it didn't take me long to figure out it was too far gone for me to use it without a lot of repair work I definitely did not want to do.

Just when I gave up any hope of checking out my interesting intuition due to equipment failure, I remembered that I had two amplified rabbit ears that half-way worked okay back in the analog TV days. Both sets of rabbit ear antennas included UHF antennas, and all the digital over-the-air broadcasts are transmitted in UHF.

I knew for sure neither of these now obsolete indoor antennas would pick up any of the closest digital over-the-air station on their lonesome. The very reason I had two of them was the first one I bought didn't pick up a strong enough signal.

I'd tried to get some digital reception with both of them even before the big change over from analog TV signals to digital TV signals only. Neither of the amplified rabbit ears could pick up a digital signal. That's why I had to rig up the old outside antenna from my parent's house, and then I had to amplify the signal I got from that.

I plugged in the amplifers in the base of the rabbit ears and then hooked both of them together with the three-way splitter (whose shininess started the whole idea), and then took the ten foot piece of coaxial I had and walked over to the signal amplifier like I was gonna plug it in and suddenly have three antennas for input.

To my rude surprise, that's when I realized the signal amplifier only had one input socket. I'd have to have a four-way splitter to use all three antennas, and I don't have one of those laying around the house, but that's not a problem. They're not only shiny, but they're cheap. A coupla bucks at most. '-)

I decided to remove the input cable from the signal amplifier and let it lay while I put the coaxial from the splitter and two independently amplified indoor rabbit ears antennas in its place to see if got a strong enough signal when combined. It sure did.

I got a great signal on several stations without the outside antenna signal at all, but some of the stations I was getting from the outside antenna weren't strong enough. This not only fascinates me from a technical point of view, but because it tickles my fancy as a miser.

The interesting part for me is that I can move the indoor antennas around in any arrangement I want to to try to pick up stubborn channels by either spreading the two antennas wide or maybe directly in line one behind the other. I don't see any ghosts or shadows from having two antennas spread seven feet apart.

That may be due to the nature of digital signals. It might be fun to figure out which configurations will pick the best signals from the various channels. I might be able to rig the whole deal in my attic. I've just recognized I might be on this techno binge because most of the mail I'm receiving these days is about technical stuff. I be-co-me what I consume.
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