μblog: engineering from the trenches

For one reason or another, both of the shift keys suddenly stopped working on June’s VAIO notebook. After some troubleshooting it seemed to be a hardware problem. With work needing to be done, I didn’t want to open the machine up and risk breaking more things so I thought that it would be easiest to remap the shift key to the caps lock key, one that shouldn’t be used too often. While it is straightforward to change this on a Unix/Linux system (xmodmap, loadkeys, etc), it turns out that there is also a straightforward method to do this on Windows. This requires editing the registry, however, the Windows Resource Kit has a nice graphical front-end to do this.  The installed tool is called remapkey.exe and has a drag and drop configuration screen. Long story short, the caps lock key is now the shift key, and everything is fine until tomorrow.

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