Resources for AP Physics C Students (How to Get Old Multiple Choice/Free Response)

I have now realized that no matter what I post here, it will be easy to find and someone will probably find it useful. I spent a lot of time searching for these sites when I really should've been studying.

• College Board AP Physics C Problems and Course Description - odds are, you've seen this already. Unfortunately, the College Board, for reasons beyond my comprehension, does not provide scoring guidelines for older years. These are, however, available from Los Altos High School below.
• The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond - Internet-accessible half-hour videos on Physics C concepts produced by Caltech. These deal with almost the entire Physics C curriculum, and, although they're fairly basic, are a great tool. Since our Physics C class doesn't really have lectures, these videos have been especially useful to me.
• Los Altos High School AP Physics C - a course page with a very helpful collection of resources, from the scoring guidelines that the College Board website is missing to PowerPoint presentations on various topics.
• Hockaday Physics - another course page with older AP exams and solutions. Unfortunately, it seems about half of them are password-protected. I have no idea what the password is, but what's available is certainly useful.
• Mr. Milligan's AP Physics - yet course page with example problems and practice multiple choice. Most of the practice multiple choice sets even have answer keys.
• SI Prep Physics C - one final course page, with more tests, but no answer keys.

As a final note, Googling for past exams for any AP topic is pretty easy. For Physics C, the preferred search string is something like '2001 "ap physics c: mechanics" filetype:pdf'. Replace 'mechanics' with 'electricity and magentism' if you want E&M exams, and replace the year with whatever you want. The College Board is evil and likes to prevent students from getting access to AP materials, so they take down sites offering past exams frequently. If the sites above aren't working, try searching on your own.

Just be aware that you'll never find any released multiple choice newer than 1988 anywhere online. Those are the sites the College Board kills most quickly. God forbid students should actually have access to the materials to prepare for the tests they're going to take.

If anyone who ends up arriving here has more suggestions, please comment.

Dealing with a broken keyboard on a PowerBook

Recently, I spilled some water on my PowerBook keyboard in my sleep. I didn't remember it at all, but I woke up in a puddle of water with a PowerBook making scary noises. After I unplugged the beast, it wouldn't boot for a good 18 hours, but once it dried out, everything functioned perfectly, except for one part: the keyboard.

I seem to have been very lucky in that my letter keys all work (if they didn't, I'd probably have to buy a new keyboard). Unfortunately, my arrows are dead. I have a left arrow, but no up, down, or right arrows. Caps lock and equals also seem to be casualties, but caps lock is really unnecessary and fn+hyphen serves as a replacement for equals.

I figured these minor problems weren't big enough to justify the purchase and installation of a new keyboard, so I set to work circumventing them.

First attempts

My first thought was to modify the keyboard layout. There are a number of tools that make this very easy, among them Ukelele. I set F9-F12 to set as arrows on the U.S. Extended layout, then put the layout in /Library/Keyboard Layouts and restarted. No luck.

While Finder and iTunes respected the new settings, nearly every other application completely ignored them. Without being able to use my keys for text editing, I was going to be out of luck.

Solution

My next thought was, why not edit the keyboard driver? In my search for information, I found this tip. All PowerBooks and iBooks still use ADB rather than USB, so I pulled out Ukelele, selected "Show Key Code" from the keyboard menu, found the key codes for F9-F12 and the key codes for the arrow keys, and converted them to hexadecimal. (There are a number of sites that do this. I used this one but a quick Google search shows many more.)

My ADBVirtualKeys section now looks like this (sans line breaks, of course):
<key>ADBVirtualKeys</key>
<string>0x00,0x01,0x02,0x03,0x04,0x05,0x06,0x07,0x08,0x09,0x0A,
0x0B,0x0C,0x0D,0x0E,0x0F,0x10,0x11,0x12,0x13,0x14,0x15,0x16,0x17,0x18,
0x19,0x1A,0x1B,0x1C,0x1D,0x1E,0x1F,0x20,0x21,0x22,0x23,0x24,0x25,0x26,
0x27,0x28,0x29,0x2A,0x2B,0x2C,0x2D,0x2E,0x2F,0x30,0x31,0x32,0x33,0x34,
0x35,0x3B,0x37,0x38,0x39,0x3A,0x7B,0x7C,0x7D,0x7E,0x3F,0x40,0x41,0x42,
0x43,0x44,0x45,0x46,0x47,0x48,0x49,0x4A,0x4B,0x4C,0x4D,0x4E,0x4F,0x50,
0x51,0x52,0x53,0x54,0x55,0x56,0x57,0x58,0x59,0x5A,0x5B,0x5C,0x5D,0x5E,
0x5F,0x60,0x61,0x62,0x63,0x64,0x7B,0x66,0x7D,0x68,0x69,0x6A,0x6B,0x6C,
0x7C,0x6E,0x7E,0x70,0x71,0x72,0x73,0x74,0x75,0x76,0x77,0x78,0x79,0x7A,
0x3C,0x3D,0x3E,0x36,0x7F</string>

After a false start (you must delete the cache as detailed at the bottom of the tip page) I got it all working, except for the fn+arrow = page up/down trick. Apparently, despite all appearances, that's not what fnVirtualKeys is for. If anyone can explain fnVirtualKeys to me, feel free to shoot me an email.

Alternate Solution

If it's just your arrows that are broken, OS X provides text editing shortcuts that mimic their function. These shortcuts are:

ctrl+B - left arrow (backward)
ctrl+F - right arrow (forward)
ctrl+P - up arrow (previous line)
ctrl+N - down arrow (next line)

In addition, simple keys mimic the action of page up/down in uneditable text boxes, Safari, and Mail:

space - page down
shift+space - page up

I hope this helps anyone in the same in which predicament I found myself.

UPDATE!

I've decided I'm going to start writing about things that aren't my life here. I may still be occasionally writing about my life, under the "General" category, but anything under "Tech" is probably irrelevant to most of my friends. Deal with it.