I picked up my little KORG Air midi keyboard yesterday, and tried to do a little melody with it.

-=-=-

The Keyboard

Uhoh!! It no longer works with my iPad!!
At which point I remembered getting an email about iOS updates and Bluetooth, which required me to update the keyboard.
I did a quick Gmail search, and sure enough, there it was.
Dated February 2019.. An email that I set aside "until I bother to use the midi keyboard again"

Over the past couple of years, finger-prodded melodies have become the norm for me. I was never that handy at "performing" and my lack of keyboard usage shows this.
So, I downloaded the update, and prepared to hook up the midi keyboard to my Mac.
No Bluetooth here.. It has to be physically connected to the Mac for the update to go through, so I'd need a USB-A to USB-B cable for this, as well as a USB-A to USB-C dongle to plug it into the Mac.

Hmm..
I knew where the USB-C dongle was. It's attached to the Logitech keyboard I use with my Switch for SmileBASIC coding.
But.. Where do I keep the USB-B cables?!

Into the drawer of Cable Dispare I delved. Deep deep down until I had to come up for breath.
Nope..
There's hundreds of USB-A to A's, A to Mini, A to Micro, even a couple of C's in there. But not one single B..
Stupid USB having more than one standard port.
Grrr..

To the Amazon..
I ordered a standard "USB-A to USB-B Printer Cable", and then something else I'd mostly forgotten to fix, suddenly popped into my head.

.. Aaah yes.. the Printer.

The Printer

I spent the next few hours trying multiple methods to get my Printer working properly with my Mac and iOS devices. It's a Dell Laser printer, and it works really well. In Windows.
It USED to work ok on MacOS. I had it printing from my MacMini a few years ago. But .. not any more. And no matter what I tried, including updated drivers and the like, it still wouldn't do it.
I could get it to connect to the printer, but that's about all. No printing, here.

And it's never printed properly from my iPhings either. You have to use the Dell Printer App, and it gives you zero options for printing methods.
It's great if you have a PDF, with predetermined sizes and such, but anything else is pretty much random as to how it'll end up looking on the page.

Having just paid the month's bills, and looking at my bank account, I figured .. what the heck.
I ordered myself a nice new Lexmark Laser printer, to go with that printer cable I'd just bought.

D'oh...

Lesson of the Day : Be absolutely sure to keep your cables organised, or it might end up costing you several hundreds in additional things that you probably don't actually need.