Spitting Out Teeth

SPITTING OUT TEETH COMPUTER GEEK TIP O' THE WEEK


I woke up this morning and, as is my usual routine, I turned on the ol' trusty Power Mac G4 tower and went online. I tried to type a search into Google and it came out looking like this--

tannermccuinsexgodnudepics

Ok, so maybe that wasn't really what I was searching for (or was it....) but note the lack of spaces. I was still using the same keyboard that came with my G4 in 2002, so i figured that it must have finally died.

I went to Small Dog and picked up one of the fancy new Apple keyboards (the ultra-flat, MacBook style ones) and brought it home. I plugged it into the G4 and tried another Google search--

jbledouxasslesschapshighresolution

Dammit! What the hell is going on here? I unplugged the keyboard and tried it on my MacBook--works fine. Restarted the G4, tried again....nothing. I did a Google search and found one temporary workaround--Shift + the space key worked. But that was a major pain in the ass and obviously not a permanent solution.

I desperately tried a variety of Google searches until I happened across this promising sounding one--

"A few weeks ago space bar on keyboard stopped working unless I use shift key. Tried new keyboard same problem."

Now we're getting somewhere--someone with the same problem! After a bunch of useless comments, the final suggestion on the page was the winner--

"Open the Speech pane of System Preferences and check whether either the speech key or the listening key has become set to that keystroke; if so, change the setting."

Sure enough, as soon as I opened up Speech (which I never use), the space bar was indeed selected as the listening key. I changed it to F19 (god knows I'll never use that one for anything else) and tried another search--

Casey Rea-Hunter .jpg banana hammock

Success! Just thought I'd pass this one along just in case any of you Mac users ever run into the same issue.