So, my wife’s Powerbook G4 15″ has been having problems with its “8” key. Sometimes, you’d get one “8” and sometimes two or three…all the other keys worked fine, but I was thinking that I was seeing the beginning of the end, and would need to buy a keyboard. That was especially true tonight, when the numlock key was accidentally on, and it looked like most of the keyboard wasn’t working ;-). I decided that instead of forking out $120 for a new keyboard, I’d see if something was gumming up the “8” key. Well, this was the first time I’d popped the key off a Powerbook, and man, that’s a weird little mechanism under there. See this page for a picture of how the “scissors” works. Sure enough, when I popped off the key cap, there was a bunch of dog hair there — courtesy of our two chocolate labs. I cleaned out the dog hair, and set about putting it back together. I used my fly-tying lamp and magnifier to see how to assemble this…a real chore for 50-year old eyes. Took a minute to figure out how the key cap hooked on, but soon I was back in business. Booted up, and voila! A happy “8”.