Keyboard with random symbols

I purchased my macbook about a year ago and it worked perfectly fine until my 3 year old spilled water on the keyboard. I immediately took all the parts out, dried them off for over a week and turned it back on. Miraculously it worked fine again until power button was pushed. It didn't turn back on again.
I assumed that is the end of this macbook, it some how turned back on again after I tried few days later, except the keyboard types in random symbols and I dont know how to fix them. I was about to reformat OS X so now everything is blank, I tried redownloading the Mountain Lion. It was about to ask for my apple ID, so I tried typing it. Then again, another symbols.
I already brought them to genius bar but no luck (I purchased this macbook from ebay with already upgraded RAMS and hard drive so apple can't fix it except replacing everything inside which costs about $700... and I can't afford that.)
I guess the questions are:
1) What is wrong with the macbook? I highly doubt hard drive since I verified with Disk Utility and it says there's nothing wrong with it. And fortunately it seems like there's no damage to battery as well since it charges just fine. Is it the motherboard?
2) Or keyboard?
3) And how do you fix them? Or Is it possible to replace them on my own if I just buy the parts?
p.s. - I'm sorry if the information I provided is vague. I have nearly 0 knowledge of computers...

hello GaryFS, this is not a security issue but just a displaying flaw caused the mcafee site advisor extension - please try to disable or remove that in case you have it present until there is an update by mcafee that can fix the problem.
http://service.mcafee.com/faqdocument.aspx?id=TS100162
https://community.mcafee.com/thread/76071

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Hi, I recently bought a new iMac with the wireless keyboard, but the symbols are all scrambled, e.g shift/? produces *...any ideas please! Thnx

Hi, I recently bought a new iMac with the wireless keyboard, but the symbols are all scrambled, e.g shift/? produces *...any ideas please! Thnx

Have it replaced by the vendor.

My bluetooth keyboard was randomly typing letters by itself and now won't pair with anything.

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I have a customer running VDI 3.1. with Vbox as Desktop Provider
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I am also having this problem. I am getting random keyboard lockups at the VDI login screen. This only occurs at the login screen.
When this happens, my only option is usually a Stop+A. on some rare occasions a Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace-BkSpace may work.
Also if using a smartcard, puling it out and inserting it in again will do the trick.
We are using Type 7 Arabic keyboards.
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Keyboard typing wrong symbols

Why is my keyboard randomly switching and typing symbols?

Hello there, Chloe626.
The following Knowledge Base article offers up some great, in-depth steps for troubleshooting issues with keys not working as expected on your keyboard:
One or more keys on the keyboard do not respond
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1381
Particularly:
Some keys don't work as expected
From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
From the View menu, choose Speech.
Click the Text to Speech tab.
If "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" is enabled, the key or key combination set to speak text cannot be used for other purposes or used to type text--click Set Key and change it to a less-commonly used key combination (try to use modifier keys such as Shift, Command, Option, and Control). Or, disable the "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" option.
Click the Accessibilty or Universal Access pane in System Preferences, then click the Keyboard tab.
Make sure that Slow Keys is turned off. With Slow Keys on, you need to press a key for a longer period of time for it to be recognized.
In the Accessibilty or Universal Access pane, click the Mouse tab, and make sure Mouse Keys is turned off. With Mouse Keys enabled, you cannot use the Numeric Keypad to enter numbers--instead the keypad moves the pointer (cursor). (There is an option to enable Mouse Keys with five presses of the Option key; you may want to turn that option off to avoid accidentally enabling it.) If Mouse Keys is enabled and you are using a keyboard with no numeric keypad or Num Lock function, see Unable to type while Mouse Keys is enabled in Mac OS X.
If the function keys on the top row of the keyboard are not working as expected, see Mac OS X: How to change the behavior of function keys.
If the issue persists, use Keyboard Viewer to help isolate the issue:
Click the Language & Text pane (Mac OS X v10.6) or International pane (Mac OS X v10.5.8 or earlier) in System Preferences.
Click the Input Sources tab (or Input Menu tab in Mac OS X 10.5.8 or earlier).
Click the Keyboard & Character Viewer "On" checkbox to select it (click the Keyboard Viewer "On" checkbox in Mac OS X 10.5.8 or earlier).
From the Input (flag) menu, choose Show Keyboard Viewer.
If the keyboard is connected and detected by OS X, the keys you type will highlight in the Keyboard Viewer window. Open TextEdit (or any text application), and try to type something using the keys that were previously not responding to see if they highlight in Keyboard Viewer.
Start from the Mac OS X Install Disc, choose Terminal from the Utilities menu and test the keys which were previously not working. If the keys work while started from the Install disc, then the keyboard itself is working correctly. Use How to troubleshoot a software issue to isolate the software issue that may be causing the keys to not respond.
Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Pedro.

My computer keeps defaulting from a GB format to US format keyboard with a US flag in the top bar. How do I get it to go back to a GB flag and stay with a GB flag?

My computer keeps defaulting from a GB format to US format keyboard with a US flag in the top bar. How do I get it to go back to a GB flag and stay with a GB flag?
This only started 2 days ago.
I have seen much on line as this seems to be a common problem, however none of the suggestions posted seem to work.

Thanks Drew,
On clicking the US flag I had previously then unchecked the US box. It has rechecked itself, and I have unchecked it again. The GB English remains checked.
The flag icon has now gone completely from the top bar (just replaced with character and keyboard viewer) -but that's fine. That's different to previous attempts to fix the issue.
Hopefully now I will remain able to type a £ sign on the keyboard rather than get the criss-cross symbol. It may well default back in about an hour (which is what has been happening since this started 2 days ago). If it does I'll come back on here. Many thanks in the mean time for your help.

Trying, failing to build qt5 with debugging symbols

As per this article, I modified my PKGBUILD like so (-developer-build):
build() {
cd ${_pkgfqn}
export QTDIR="${srcdir}"/${_pkgfqn}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${QTDIR}"/qtbase/lib:"${QTDIR}"/qttools/lib:"${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH="${QTDIR}"/qtbase/plugins
export PATH="${srcdir}/python2-path:$PATH"
[[ "${CARCH}" = "i686" ]] && SSE2="-no-sse2"
PYTHON=/usr/bin/python2 ./configure -confirm-license -opensource -developer-build \
Don't know if I put the option in the wrong place, though, or if that information is outdated for qt5 - but it's not building for me. Here's where makepkg stops:
ln -s libQt5Widgets.so.5.4.0 libQt5Widgets.so
ln -s libQt5Widgets.so.5.4.0 libQt5Widgets.so.5
ln -s libQt5Widgets.so.5.4.0 libQt5Widgets.so.5.4
rm -f ../../lib/libQt5Widgets.so.5.4.0
mv -f libQt5Widgets.so.5.4.0 ../../lib/
rm -f ../../lib/libQt5Widgets.so
rm -f ../../lib/libQt5Widgets.so.5
rm -f ../../lib/libQt5Widgets.so.5.4
mv -f libQt5Widgets.so ../../lib/
mv -f libQt5Widgets.so.5 ../../lib/
mv -f libQt5Widgets.so.5.4 ../../lib/
make[3]: Leaving directory '/home/chris/Software/qt5/src/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.4.0/qtbase/src/widgets'
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/chris/Software/qt5/src/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.4.0/qtbase/src'
Makefile:45: recipe for target 'sub-src-make_first' failed
make[1]: *** [sub-src-make_first] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/chris/Software/qt5/src/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.4.0/qtbase'
Makefile:70: recipe for target 'module-qtbase-make_first' failed
make: *** [module-qtbase-make_first] Error 2
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
Aborting...
Not sure what happened. How do I get more information?
I need qt5-base with debugging symbols so I can get helpful traces for plasma-desktop crashes. So I should also ask: is it possible to modify the PKGBUILD to just compile qt5-base (and perhaps qt5-webkit and qt5-webengine)? qt5 is huge...
EDIT: and yes I had qtwebkit uninstalled at the time
Last edited by YAOMTC (2015-01-03 06:12:49)

I hate it when the only result for a problem is an unanswered question...
Anyway, invoking make manually uncovers what is the problem - there's a bunch of errors similar to this:
../gui/text/qfontengine_ft.cpp:1146:39: error: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions [-Werror=sign-compare]
for (int x = 0; x < slot->bitmap.width; x++) {
^
cc1plus: all warnings being treated as errors
So the -Werror is the culprit. Looking at the ./configure -help output it turns out that the -developer-build enables -Werror. But there's -no-warnings-are-errors. So yeah, passing -no-warnings-are-errors in addition to -developer-build should fix the compilation.
I have updated the wiki accordingly.
EDIT: the compilation gets a bit further, but it now fails because of tests.
EDIT2: it pays off to read configure rather than rely on some random suggestion from the wiki. There's a "-debug" option, which should just enable debugging. It hasn't finished compiling here yet, but it got a lot further than before.
Last edited by 6xx (2015-02-03 21:13:49)

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Hi,
I have a project that plays a random symbol when a button is clicked, however I want a random symbol to be shown each time the button is pressed for 20 times.
How do I limit the display to just show 20 random symbols from a pool of 50?
This is the code I am using on the button that displays a random symbol each time clicked:
// RADOMIZE
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You need to shuffle the array and then randomize the 20 elements".
Here is a example showing you how to do with 4 elements:
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My keyboard is randomly unresponsive for a minute or two after the latest update. This happens a few times a day. Does anybody else experience this problem?
I'm on a 2011 Macbook Air, using Mavericks.

When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
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from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
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from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

How do you use the same wireless keyboard with multiple devices?

My apologies in advance if this question has been answered previously. There was nothing in the owner's manual (for the keyboard) that answered this. I did do a rough search that did not yield an answer to this:
I have one wireless keyboard I am using with my Macbook Pro. I understand this keyboard can also be used as an input device for my Apple TV and my iPhone - both of which I currently own.
And although I am able to use the keyboard with those devices, I am forced to "forget this device" after having used it on either the Apple TV or my iPhone so that I can use it on my MacBook Pro. Is there any combination of keys that one can press on the keyboard that would cycle through my three devices? As it is right now, if I don't "forget the device" on my secondary units, it somehow defaults to a peripheral OTHER than my MacBook Pro and I'd like for it to always default to my computer.
Thank you for any information/advice.

Bump

How do I use my apple bluetooth keyboard with touch and will I still be able to use it with my ipad?

How do I use my apple bluetooth keyboard with touch and will I still be able to use it with my ipad?

iPod touch User Guide (For iOS 4.3 Software)

Apple wireless BT keyboard with TEXT MESSAGING?

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The Bluetooth keyboard will work with the messaging application.
I know I always turn the Bluetooth off on the iPhone so when I pull out my keyboard it is a bit of a pain in the ***. Granted I only use it with long emails on the road that would take an hour to write with the keyboard on the iPhone, so it's not too bad. The iPad dock keyboard will also work with the iPhone and iOS4.x so if you need a keyboard and don't want to deal with the Bluetooth than that is an option too, just a thought.
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My macbook pro is stuck on grey screen with apple symbol in center with the progress circle under it continusly spinning. After I had turned it on. Prior to turning it on I had to force close and shut down a few hours prior. Please Help?

My macbook pro is stuck on grey screen with apple symbol in center with the progress circle under it continusly spinning. After I had turned it on. Prior to turning it on I had to force close and shut down a few hours prior. Please Help I have tried everything I know to do

Unfortunately this means that there is a problem in the boot sector of your hard drive. It might be indicative of a fundamental corruption in the coding that allows your computer to boot your operating system from your hard drive. I had this problem twice and it resulted in me having to get a new hard drive and restore my data.
In other words, your computer can't talk to your operating system so you can't access your data.
Here is my advice: DON'T CALL APPLE TECH SUPPORT though they are kind and usually helpful it will take you an hour just to explain the situation and they will only tell you to do what I'm gonna say here.
First: Shut down your computer completely
Two: boot up while holding down the following keys: command, option, p, and r. The computer will reboot 3 times. This solution will likely fail so if you're frustrated skip to the next step.
Three: Boot up while holding down the option key. Select recovery drive. Select your default language. Select disk utility, click on Macintosh HD, and select "verify and repair volume." Likely the verification will produce some line like "unused node not erased." Or something like that. If anything using the words "node structure" comes up, you need a new hard drive.
If after verification and repairs you still can't boot I sincerely hope you have apple care because you will need a new hard drive. Set up an appointment to come in to the apple store, they will tell you to go and get data recovery, just ask them to give you the old hard drive. Unless you have an up to date backup in which case you can just restore from that. If you're lucky the only issue is with the boot sector which means that if you ask them to give you the old hard drive, you can buy an enclosure and you have effectively been given a free external hard drive. It still works to store data just not to load an operating system.
If you have a back up drive bring it to the apple store and they'll do the whole thing right there, it should take around an hour and a half but may take longer.
Hope this helps, it's annoying but it's your safest bet.
All the best.

How can I change from the Swiss german language to the Swiss french language and have a keyboard with accent

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mario from le locle wrote:
Franklin, you ask me to select the French (Switzerland keyboard) but I have not that keyboard on the list !
Then something is not right with your iOS 5 installation. You should try resetting your device.
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I would really like to buy a keyboard that has a good pointing devise integrated into the keyboard.
Here is one of the only devises that appears to satisfy this but it is Windows only:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices/192&cl=us,en
Does anyone know of one? It seems like a logical product for Apple to offer since it frees users from the confines of the desktop only computing experience that mouse dependency requires.
Also, for these forums should there be a Peripheral section under hardware since Apple sells mice and keyboards?

Hello skarlsrud
Welcome to Apple Discussions!
I don't have that keyboard, but a little searching turned up some folks using that keyboard with there iMac's.
Have a look at this ☞ [Logitech Forum Thread|http://forums.logitech.com/logitech/board/message?board.id=mackb&thread. id=397] to see what other users say.
Also here is the ☞ [Logitech Control Center for Macintosh® OS X|http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/494/3129&cl=us,en] download.
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