My Logitech speakers' control pod is malfunctioning. When I turn the volume knob I get horribly loud static in the left front speaker. I've tried several times to fix it, and have called the company twice. I even squirted compressed air and tape head cleaner inside the volume control, but I still get the popping sound whenever I adjust the volume knob.<\/p>\n
Other than the volume knob popping, the speakers are fine. So, I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars to replace them.<\/p>\n
Instead, the other day it dawned on me that what I needed was an easy way to adjust the volume without turning the knob. I wanted a non-software solution (since I multitask and it's hard to find the volume control quickly). I thought about buying an external mixer or USB volume knob, but that seems like overkill.<\/p>\n
Instead, I decided to look at multimedia keyboards. These are keyboards with extra keys mapped to common multimedia functions. They range in price from $6 up. Most have volume up\/down buttons. A couple have volume knobs, but they start around $25.<\/p>\n
The one that caught my eye was an HP multimedia keyboard (sold by Amazon.com) with a volume knob. I love the placement of the volume knob: it's in the upper right corner, close to where my mouse usually is. Other keyboards put the volume controls in the center top, which is less convenient.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it arrived today. I followed the part of the instructions that said to turn the PC off, then plug in the keyboard, and then turn the PC on. However, I didn't bother installing any drivers. Funny thing is, it worked anyway, with no driver installation. I can adjust the volume and start and stop windows media player using the keyboard. Cool.<\/p>\n
One bad thing is they put the normal function key labels (F1 .. F12) on the front rather than the top. Weird. I guess I'll get used to it.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this was a really boring blog entry, I know. I don't know why I keep writing these things. It's not as if anyone reads 'em.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Logitech speakers' control pod is malfunctioning. When I turn the volume knob I get horribly loud static in the left front speaker. I've tried several times to fix it, and have called the company twice. I even squirted compressed air and tape head cleaner inside the volume control, but I still get the popping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tripalot.com\/travis\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}