Don’t look now, but some units of the Macbook Air being sold on the gray market come with non-American keyboards, specifically Western Spanish ones which confound users because of its strange and unfamiliar physical layout and even more confusing keyboard assignments—pressing a key is always an adventure. I know this first hand because I procured one such Macbook Air for one of my bosses.

The sealed box looked typical for all intents and purposes, until we opened it up. The sparse documentation was all in Spanish, and the keyboard looked very odd and things quickly went downhill when we started typing on it. To our consternation a lot of the non-alphabetical characters that came out on the bright screen were totally different from the ones we pressed, going by what was printed on the keytop. Us Filipinos used to a US layout were in immediate trouble. Talk about lost in translation.

Strangely, info on alternative keyboard layouts were sparse. It took a while but we eventually found a solution for the key mismatching. From the outset it was obviously a matter of changing keyboard profiles—but which one?

For Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Airs with a Western Spanish keyboard, just go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu and select Spanish - ISO. If you don’t have it in your list of choices, you’ll have to dig out your install discs and load up the Spanish language choices so Spanish - ISO pops up as an option. After this, your keys won’t lie to you anymore; what you press is what you’ll get.

Now you’ll just have to live with the odd placement of keys, but that’s a whole lot better than the guessing game you had before. If you find other odd keyboard layouts, not just on Macs but on external keyboards from Apple, you can just use this method to pin down the right input menu profile.

HP Gaming CTO and VoodooPC Founder Rahul Sood uses a Macbook Air to cut his birthday cake, puts up the pic on his blog.

Many Mac users have been hoping for safer, faster Solid State Drives in their lappies ever since the Air was launched with the option. In fact, many secretly pray that SSDs become (cheaply) available with all new Macbooks, hopefully to be announced at the WWDC Jobs keynote in a few days, cost, capacity and availability notwithstanding.

But what about us with existing clunky and primitive old Macbooks and Macbook Pros? Will we be doomed to be forever looking from the sidelines, laboring under the slower, power-hungry and easily damaged old-fashioned harddrive?

Never fear, ExperCom is here!

ExperCom is offering a service that does SSD upgrades for both new and old Macbooks or Macbook Pros, at prices ranging from US$550 to US$899. Or you can buy preconfigured units directly from them at US$1649 for a white Macbook with a 60gb SSD or a Macbook Pro with a 120gb SSD at US$2649. No word if they’d do it for your tangerine toilet seat iBook G3, though.

Check out the site here. It even includes charts and explanations why SSDs will cure cancer and bring about world peace. That is, if you’re one of the few still sitting on the fence, mind-fogged by the black propropaganda being spread around by traditional harddrive manufactures that SSDs are fragile, low-capacity, expensive cr@p.

The temptation is great, but think I’ll hold off until they offer higher-capacity and cheaper SSDs - or upgrade to some future Mac altogether.

But it is something to think about, isn’t it?

This is the kind of attention-grabbing nonsense reportage that gets picked up and passed around the net so much because of its amusing nature that it enters the public consciousness and becomes common knowledge despite not having any basis in actual fact, changing the image of the subject forever. That said, this one’s too good to pass up, so we mention it here too. Heh.

I’ve read reports that complaining of the harsh edges of its top case, but this is a first. Someone actually got cut by the sharp edge of, allegedly, a Macbook Air.

This used to be one of those well-worn jokes going around after the MBA was introduced, but somehow it’s actually happened. A user named Bajuware from a German Mac user group reported that his arm got cut up by the edge of a Macbook Air, although it doesn’t seem too clear if it was really an Air or a regular Macbook Pro that attacked him, which changes the whole issue from poor design to just a defective user. (The original post is here, if you sprecken sie Deutsche.)

This now brings up a wonderful opportunity for reactionary alarmists to try and get the Air banned or taken away from, say, kids and clumsy German Mac users.

The fact is, anyone can get cut by anything, if he tried hard enough. I mean, a No.2 pencil can poke an eye out, but it’s still in the hands of billions of children the world over, right?

Even if the Air is eventually deemed dangerous for public use, I think I’ll risk it. Mainly because my Mac is my main tool for breadwinning these days, and I’m not about to let it go. Besides, it’s also great to know that I can actually slice the bread with it as well.

The geek version of the saying “You can never be too rich or too thin.”  is “You can never have too much RAM or harddrive space.”

MCE Technologies took half of this to heart and is now offering the MCE OptiBay Harddrive, a 500gb 2.5″ harddrive replacement for the optical drive of the 17″ MacBook Pro. This, along with another half-TB for the factory-installed harddrive of the lapzilla, you can conceivably have a full terabyte in there and fulfill your lifelong dream of keeping every single file you ever owned or made with you at all times.

Sure, like a MacBook Air, you’ll be optical drive-less, but heck, think of the bragging rights!

And if you’re worried about the displaced Apple-issued hardware, MCE thoughtfully includes external enclosures for both the optical and the hard drive. (For the US$799 tag, they’d better! Add US$149 for a quick MCE overnight install, or US$99 for more leisurely shipping back and forth.)