Phones and keyboards
Jul. 22nd, 2008 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zubHrm. 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 "
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!
