Yesterday, I was trying to do some work in Chrome and realized that one of my go-to key combinations (Ctrl+F4 to close the tab) was not working. I spent a few minutes checking if it was just Chrome, but it turned out that all of my apps were having this problem. Every combination using F3, F4 and F5 was not working.

Today, I finally figured out what went wrong. I had somehow enabled the multi-media keys on my Kinesis. It is kind of a random combination, but to turn on the mutli-media keys, hold down the “=” key and the press “n” (=n). This will make the following key mappings:

F3: Previous track
F4: Play/pause
F5: Next track
F9: Mute
F10: Volume down
F11: Volume up

Most importantly, to turn off the multi-media keys, hold down the “=” key and press “w” (=w).