Howard Oakley
Wireless computer networking is surprisingly old, originating with ALOHAnet, one of the first steps towards the Internet when it connected the University of Hawaii to the US mainland in 1971. Its underlying concepts were formative in the development of Ethernet; it was also the first step in what became Inmarsat, the maritime satellite network, and grandfather to 1G, then 2G mobile phones in the last couple of decades of the 20th century.
This Christmas, we have an abundance of devices and implementations developed from that pioneering work. AirPort in various guises links Macs, media servers and iPads. Bluetooth binds mobile phones, keyboards and the Magic Trackpad. iPads and iPhones keep in touch (almost) wherever you go via 3G. Apart from the occasional mains and charger leads, we have cast aside cables.
But don’t throw away your old USB keyboard and mouse just yet. Radio may be miraculous and magic, but it can also be mercurial and mystifying. When I treated myself to a Magic Trackpad, I decided to switch to a dinky little wireless aluminium keyboard, small enough to rest on the pile of scrap paper on which I scrawl notes. There it rested, duly and daily accepting bursts of keystrokes as I wrote these columns, answered your emails and so on, until the keyboard developed a will of its own.
At first, it just lagged behind my typing, making me wonder if some Trojan was capturing my keystrokes and relaying them to a competitor publication. I checked some sensitive areas of my Snow Leopard installation, but as my mind was easing its suspicion, the keyboard started to duplicate letters that I had pressed. At times, it spewed out ts with a vengeance, halting attempts to type URLs. If I hit the Backspace key to arrest this stream, it went into reverse, gobbling up my hard-won words. My demon keyboard conspired with the Trackpad to render some lines uneditable: no matter where I put the cursor, each attempt to insert a character blew the whole line away.
I kept checking the keyboard’s battery level, but it never fell below 90%, although by now the Trackpad had dropped well below 50% with nary a missed tap. I tried pressing the keyboard’s power button and it responded with a new trick. Halfway through a sentence, my Mac informed me that the connection with the keyboard was lost. I pressed the power button again, and again, before it reconnected. Even a set of fresh batteries did nothing to assuage the demon.
I fell back on my ham radio experience, wondering whether something that I had done was rotting up its radio connection. With new batteries installed, I pulled the scrap paper pad from under the keyboard, and suddenly it kept its connection and adhered to my every key press. Happy Chrristmasssssss!
