Camping!

Camping turned out better than expected! The journey was a bit of a marathon — I left Leicester on Friday at 9:09, arrived at Blaenau Ffestiniog at around half-past two, and found that the rain and mist was really rather bad... fortunately, I was very kindly spared from having to camp half-way up on my own in the mist on that afternoon (thanks so very much!), and so I went up on Saturday morning. Not really knowing the way, I headed straight through the marshy bits and got my feet utterly soaked, but I reached the campsite in the end, with a little help and encouragement!

After that, things only really got better — the weather cleared up — on Monday morning, I even managed a quick dip in the lake — and to top it all, I'm not even aware of anyone getting food poisoning! :)

I took lots of rubbish photos with my new camera (a Fujifilm FinePix J50, which has a 2.7 inch screen!), and I'll try to upload the least rubbish of these soonish!

Phones and keyboards

Hrm. Well, I really need a new phone. My Nokia 3310 is nice enough, but it's getting a bit dated. The main problem with the 3310 is that I need to charge it a bit more frequently than I'd like. I also really want something that I can tweak easily, which will also play Ogg Vorbis files. I might get a Neo FreeRunner (a.k.a. GTA02) but I'm not sure if that's at all risky... perhaps I should wait for a GTA03. OTOH, I could just carry on using the 3310 until the Openmoko software works reasonably well. I just can't decide...

Oh, one thing I should probably have ranted and raved about by now (i.e. I'm about to start being really boring!) is the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. I had long wondered why keyboards had their keys placed in such a strange order. It turns out it's to slow you down. Ugh. Well, I've been using the Dvorak layout for about two years now, and aside from the fact that it's probably saving my from the dreaded RSI, I've found that it's just made typing effortless. Yeah, it was a fair amount of effort to switch, but we really shouldn't be teaching kids QWERTY. It's nuts.

A very quick example of how Dvorak is easier is the command "grep -i '^[asdfghjkl]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l" which yields 154 on my machine — that is, 154 words (out of 74000) in the word list can be typed entirely with the middle row of keys. The Dvorak equivalent, "grep -i '^[aoeuidhtns]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l", shows that 1969 words from that same word list can be typed entirely with the middle row — as 'AEOUIDHTNS' contains the eight most commonly used letters in English, this isn't too surprising, really!