I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix.
It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand.
About 10 minutes later, a bunch of graybeards come around the corner yelling “WTF are you doing!”
Turns out that the dictionary that hit my hand was perched across two keyboards, holding down the “enter” keys of two terminals. Turns out that for reasons unknown, those terminals had to be repeatedly hitting the enter key in order for the logins and print jobs of about 40,000 people to work.
I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.
I do this, too. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to remove the caps lock key. I never used it in my 20 years of PC usages and I don't get why it's still there.
Back in my CounterStrike gaming days I would also remove the Windows key because it would crash the game when accidentally pressed.
I work about 30/70 on Mac and Windows. I have the caps lock key mapped to ctrl on Windows and cmd on Mac since they’re roughly equivalent. Makes switching my muscle memory when I switch my OS far less necessary. No more hitting ctrl-c to copy on Mac and instead sending a SIGKILL to the terminal!
That's a really good idea. Most of my application switching needs are covered by the built-in Windows "Win+1 opens first icon on the taskbar, Win+2 opens the second...", but this could cover the lesser used ones like Outlook.
Ahh the good old CounterStrike quick exit! If you were lucky you could alt-tab back in, but you'd have a big mouse arrow where your reticle used to be :D
I ended up coding a utility (in VS6!) to disable the windows key when you launched the game.
dude that windows key always messed me up, esp because my computer was a load of crap, and it took hella days to minimize/maximize the window again, usually I had to reboot the machine.
I've mapped my caps key to ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ ｔｅｘｔ, initially for quick-response memeing but it turns out it's actually quite helpful for increasing expressiveness on various chat protocols.
Not a hack, but once we couldn't figure out why a printer dropped off the network.
Turns out the cleaners were thorough enough to clean deep down behind a desk and turned off a surge protector that a 5-port network switch was plugged into.
Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)
I use AHK to remap CapsLock to double-click to reduce the strain on my mouse hand, but I can access the original CapsLock function via shift-CapsLock. Try it -- maybe that will help you.
I've worked at a place with a very similar hack before, but it was for a bunch of windows servers. The issue was a process was trying to scan various Office files, and even though no actual Word/Excel/etc app was running warning dialogs could suddenly appear blocking the scan process. The problem was "solved" by some frustrated ops guy that wrote a service that scanned for dialog boxes and closed them.
Similar but inverse to this, I was fixing a critical server and it usually came up in a minute or less. 5 minutes later I get concerned, I walk into the server room and it’s still trying to boot. I scratch my head and see a usb keyboard attached.... with a screwdriver sitting on my space bar.
I have heard a similar story that existed in my company before it joined. It was a system that raised and dispatched jobs to engineers, and unless the space bar was held down on the master terminal, it stopped sending jobs out.
It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand.
About 10 minutes later, a bunch of graybeards come around the corner yelling “WTF are you doing!”
Turns out that the dictionary that hit my hand was perched across two keyboards, holding down the “enter” keys of two terminals. Turns out that for reasons unknown, those terminals had to be repeatedly hitting the enter key in order for the logins and print jobs of about 40,000 people to work.