Following a link on, I think, Slashdot, I visited Glowire. They sell Electroluminescent Wire which combined with the glowing keyboard on the new Apple PowerBook G4 17" inspired me to try a little mod to my own IBM Model M keyboard which I bought used from Goodwill computing in Austin.

I thought I'd try and give my keyboard the glowing keys treatment. Turned out to be pretty easy. First take the keyboard to pieces. This gave me a great opportunity to give mine a much needed cleaning. Next, run the glowire along the backing plate next to the keys. Finally, of course, reassemble it. It looks like there's enough space inside to put the glowire driver/voltage converter and battery but I've not done that yet because the converter makes an annoying whine and I wanted to try to quiet it a bit first.

Today I was looking at Bit-tech and I found a picture of a similar mod about three quarters of the way down the page. As you can see these sorts of mods don't photograph well, but it did encourage me to get round to putting up a picture of my own efforts. It shows more of the keys but less of the glow.

Testing