GoKawiilMy cat Mira is perfect, and has never done anything wrong. She also loves walking on laptop keys—both my MacBook and my wife Kathy's Windows PC.
Has your pet ever made a tech-related discovery? Share your stories at the bottom of this article.
You might think that walking on laptops is an example of Mira doing something wrong. She disagrees. And, in any case, we've both learned a lot about how our computers work because of this. Every time she walks across our keyboards she triggers some new, confusing keyboard shortcut. I wonder how she did it, but then I find out the keyboard shortcut by Googling around. Here's what I learned.
Mira Hides Important Things
Multiple times Mira has walked across my keyboard and caused most of my windows to disappear. This sends me into a panic—is my work gone?—until I click a dock icon and realize everything is still there. What happened?
It could be a few things. On the Mac the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-H hides all windows except the current one. Or maybe Mira switched virtual desktops in Mission Control—that's done with Control-Left/Right arrow key, and could make it look like all of my windows are gone.
Mira's pulled this trick off on a PC too. Windows-, (comma) hides all windows while Windows-Ctrl-Left/Right arrow key switches virtual desktops. So there's all sorts of ways for Mira to induce anxiety while also teaching us more about how our computers work. Lovely.
Mira Takes a Screenshot
I take screenshots on my Mac constantly, so it wasn't much of a surprise for me when Mira managed to trigger Command-Shift-4 to trigger taking a screenshot of a specific area on my screen.
But I didn't realize I could do the same thing on a PC: Windows+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut for that, apparently. Now I know this, and I'm going to use it all the time.
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