Tag: keyboard
exploring second life
Evan spent some time exploring in Second Life this afternoon, exploring Hawaii, NASA island, and winding up in Borocay. He loved the medical facilities on the island.
uploading…
I spent the day doing the usual day-after-vacation stuff. 47 loads of laundry. and processing 1100 photos into 117 keepers, then uploading to Flickr and Mindfulseeing – and accidentally spamming the 3 people that follow me on twitter with automated updates for each of the 15 posts. oops.
working
I’m working on a paper for an edtech course – drafts and ideas in my moleskine notebook, with text flowing together in OmmWriter.
I set a timer for random(300) minutes. It picked 43, so the @dailyshoot randometime project photo wound up during my paper-writing window this morning. Exciting stuff.
Set an alarm for a random time today. Any time. When it goes off, pick up your camera and find a photo near where you are.
Get out there, take a photograph, upload it, and tweet a link to @dailyshoot with the hashtag: #ds127
presenting
Me, presenting the “Identity in the Open Classroom” session for the From Courses to Dis/course: Exploring the Future of Courses online conference. I picked a topic that I’ve been thinking about, but hadn’t done much with, so it gave me a chance to pour through research and writing on the subject and put together a presentation. I think it went OK, and there was great discussion.
Dvorak Keyboard Layout – point of no return
Well, I guess I’m committed to Dvorak now. Prompted by some tips from Ryan Poling, I just rearranged the key caps on my Powerbook’s keyboard. In the office, I use an external USB keyboard that has already been fixed to support the Dvorak layout. But, this afternoon on the bus ride home, I cracked the ‘book open to hack on my Rails bookmark manager – and realized that although the key caps were still QWERTY, I was starting to think in Dvorak. Light at the end of the rainbow…
Ryan suggests buying a little wire tool for popping the key caps off. I just followed the tip of very carefully pushing down on the bottom edge of the key while gently pulling straight up on the top edge. Worked like a charm.
It also strikes me that Dvorak should be a touch more efficient for writing code, with the curly brackets and punctuations positioned a bit more optimally. If I pay attention while typing, I’m really surprised at just how little finger movement is required.
Well, I guess I’m committed to Dvorak now. Prompted by some tips from Ryan Poling, I just rearranged the key caps on my Powerbook’s keyboard. In the office, I use an external USB keyboard that has already been fixed to support the Dvorak layout. But, this afternoon on the bus ride home, I cracked the ‘book open to hack on my Rails bookmark manager – and realized that although the key caps were still QWERTY, I was starting to think in Dvorak. Light at the end of the rainbow…
Ryan suggests buying a little wire tool for popping the key caps off. I just followed the tip of very carefully pushing down on the bottom edge of the key while gently pulling straight up on the top edge. Worked like a charm.
It also strikes me that Dvorak should be a touch more efficient for writing code, with the curly brackets and punctuations positioned a bit more optimally. If I pay attention while typing, I’m really surprised at just how little finger movement is required.
Dvorak Keyboard Layout
Back in 2000, I was working on a very large project, writing a lot of code. So much that I started to suffer the early stages of the dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (with the übersexy wristbraces, too). I’d heard of a different keyboard layout that was designed to optimize typing efficiency by minimizing the amount of movement by each finger. The keys were arranged so that the most commonly used characters are on “home row” and exact placement of keys was determined via statistical analysis.
I find something elegant and compelling about a keyboard layout that was designed for efficiency. It’s also rumoured to help alleviate CTS. So, I pulled out my screwdriver and rearranged the key caps, and configured my Mac to use the Dvorak layout (this was way back in the paleozoic MacOS 9 days). It took me about two weeks to really get into it, and I wound up being able to type faster, with no pain.
When MacOSX Public Beta was released, I was horrified to find that it didn’t have a Dvorak layout – so I rolled my own (which was replaced by a better official layout in MacOSX 1.0). I eventually reverted to QWERTY when I started working with the Learning Commons because it was too difficult to mentally switch between Dvorak and QWERTY (I was using a shiny new Powerbook G4/400, and wasn’t about to rearrange the keys on that bad boy).
Fast forward a few years, and I’m starting to have that familiar wrist pain again (still no keyboard tray, a month after moving into the new cube). I’d decided to give Dvorak another shot, and just finished fixing my inherited Apple Pro keyboard. It’s taking me a little longer to type, but It’s starting to come back to me.
Now I just have to use more words with the letters “A” and “M” – since they are in the same position in both layouts.
Back in 2000, I was working on a very large project, writing a lot of code. So much that I started to suffer the early stages of the dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (with the übersexy wristbraces, too). I’d heard of a different keyboard layout that was designed to optimize typing efficiency by minimizing the amount of movement by each finger. The keys were arranged so that the most commonly used characters are on “home row” and exact placement of keys was determined via statistical analysis.
I find something elegant and compelling about a keyboard layout that was designed for efficiency. It’s also rumoured to help alleviate CTS. So, I pulled out my screwdriver and rearranged the key caps, and configured my Mac to use the Dvorak layout (this was way back in the paleozoic MacOS 9 days). It took me about two weeks to really get into it, and I wound up being able to type faster, with no pain.
When MacOSX Public Beta was released, I was horrified to find that it didn’t have a Dvorak layout – so I rolled my own (which was replaced by a better official layout in MacOSX 1.0). I eventually reverted to QWERTY when I started working with the Learning Commons because it was too difficult to mentally switch between Dvorak and QWERTY (I was using a shiny new Powerbook G4/400, and wasn’t about to rearrange the keys on that bad boy).
Fast forward a few years, and I’m starting to have that familiar wrist pain again (still no keyboard tray, a month after moving into the new cube). I’d decided to give Dvorak another shot, and just finished fixing my inherited Apple Pro keyboard. It’s taking me a little longer to type, but It’s starting to come back to me.
Now I just have to use more words with the letters “A” and “M” – since they are in the same position in both layouts.