Technorama

Good review of Dell Inspiron Mini 9 inch laptop, up to the point where they say the keyboard layout is actually a negative:

"Perhaps the loudest complaint heard against the Mini 9 is its keyboard. The unit’s small footprint necessitated a tweaked keyboard layout which repositioned some keys, shrunk others and dropped some entirely."

My feeling is that Dell have made a good call on this, I've proposed my design in the past, and it is a good step in that direction! If you're reading this Dell, drop the: CapsLock, WinKey, WinMenu, RightShift, Delete and F-key overlay too :)

Labels: Keyboards, Laptops

We all use Italic fonts day-to-day, but why don't we have an anti-italic formatting button? (North American readers may call it counter-italic!?) I've posted on rich web typography before, I hope in the future we will have finer-grained control of our typography, including features like anti-italic!

Over six months after I had to fix my Mic configuration so it even works in Ubuntu I see the latest Ubuntu release still ships with it broken. Poor QA is the only reason holding Ubuntu back!

Ubuntu ships with the Mic disabled, so you need to manually fix it. The default Mixer configuration has Mic Capture disabled. So you need to go into the Terminal and make these changes to fix it:

$ alsamixer

You will see the [Playback] sliders. Use the arrow key to move right to the column named as "capture", at the top left of the screen it will now say Capture Mux. Set it to "25==25" which should be 1/4 white bar.

Next press Tab key, press arrow key to move to the first "capture" column, at the top it shows "Capture", set it to "7==7". Press Space bar to enable it and show "CAPTUR" in red.

Press right arrow key to move to the next "Capture", at the top left it shows "Capture Mux", set it to "25==25".

Next press right arrow key to move to "input", press up/down arrow key so this shows "Mic" and not "Front Mic" or "Line".

.. and we're done :)

Labels: GNU+Linux, Ubuntu

Unfortunately the UK is still using imperial measurements despite introducing metric in the 70s. Now the government is even urging councils not to pursue traders who still insist on selling goods in imperial measurements with no conversion into metric. When really we should be moving towards replacing Pints and Miles with Litres and Kilometers!

Labels: Metric, UK

Don't you just hate it when you click on the "email" link on someone's website and it takes you to a tiny web-form which only fits about 6 words per line, cramped into a small box? After struggling to write your message you invariably click "submit" and it says Error.. you click the "back" button optimistically and of cause the whole message is gone. Webmasters got overexcited and tried to run internet messaging through a web page, when really it should be left as standard email or IM.

Short run down of why web-forms are bad for messages:

• Tiny form boxes, pledgebank is a great example, limited to 7 words per line.
• Often arbitrary restrictions on the text that can be written. Lincolnshire NHS trust have a secret blocked character list including ",', and ; then they limit to 255 characters.
• Often fails to "Submit" and when you click back of cause it has lost all your text.
• Leaves me with no record in my Sent folder of what I've written.
• No way to forward the message I have sent to a friend, or another department at the organisation.
  

All these problems make it very difficult to send a website a message telling them one of their pages has broken links or typos etc. Web-forms can always be a secondary contact option, but email should always be the first option as it is the best. See Email 101 for tips on writing to the point.

Labels: email, Future, Web