freesat UK digital HD service launch today

UK Digital Satellite TV has been around for a couple of years, but today it launches as one integrated system with 7 day programme guide all setup!

The DVR (Digital Video Recorder) option isn't available yet, but TVs from Panasonic are on sale with HD support integrated now! Channels now include BBC HD and soon ITV1 HD. Now just need Channel4 to exit their tie-in with Murdock's BskyB and a couple more channels ;) Use MythTV DVR to share those programmes around the house.

Title abbreviations

Mister became Mr., which dropped the punctuation to become Mr. Mrs and Miss combined to become Ms. and then Ms without punctuation.

How long till we simply go for M. ? and then Just "M Smith". The only problem is what happens when the first initial is needed and that is an "M", looks a bit silly as M M Smith.

Germany generaly does H. now instead of Herr so it seems only a matter of time.

Time for a new phone

I've been looking at getting a new phone recently, my Sony Ericsson K800i is 18months old and tech has moved on. The Nokia N95 isn't that much better than what I've really got, but the N96 looks promising, even if it still has the tiny 240x320 QVGA display! The Sony Ericsson W999i looks ace, and features the QWERTY rocker-button style keyboard which was popular on the M600 and P1i.. but it's not out yet.

My fav would be one of the two models out only in Japan at present: Sony Ericsson SO905ics is a 5MP Cybershot phone complete with FWVGA (864x400 px) DVD resolution display. The other choice is the Sharp 922SH, again decent screen size and handy QWERTY keyboard, but I don't know if this is touch screen, which is really needed for browsing the interweb (so hard on E90 as no stylus!). Hopefully equiv models to 922SH and SO905iCS will be released in GSM+3G unlocked varieties soon so I can give them a try.

youTube links

Why are youTube links not the name of the clip? Take http://youtube.com/watch?v=HiUwKQzNXA8 for example, when it could have been http://youtube.com/watch?The_Cameron_Sneeze_Clip ! One of them lets us know what we are getting when we click on it in an email from a friend etc.

Modern keyboard layout design

I'm disappointed with current keyboards so I thought I would design my own layout. I've looked around at desktops, laptops and mobiles and they just haven't moved with the times. Even Nokia's N810m PDA has a keyboard layout which seems to have been inspired by Sharp's MZ80A with a grid pattern QWERTY. Nokia E90 and E91 is just as bad (or worse.. as it isn't touch screen..!)

Starting with my Dell Laptop, I see may superfluous keys, taking up valuable space, drop the following:
Blue numeric keypad overlay
NumLock
Pause
PrintScreen (move it on to "+" key to be used with Fn).
Insert (has this ever been useful?)
All F keys, move their F function onto the number 0-9 keys.
"¬`|" key removed, and Esc moved down.
"|\" key.
WindowsFlag key
Right Ctrl key
Right Alt Gr key
ContextMenu key
Caps Lock key
PageUp (moved onto normal key, used with Fn)
PageDown (moved onto normal key, used with Fn)

Certain keys aren't big enough, Shift, Space, Backspace, Delete and Enter, so these should be a decent size.

This leaves a modern optimal layout of:

Esc, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, -, +
Tab, Q, W, E, R, T, Y,U,I,O,P,[,],ENTER
Shift,A,S,D,F,G,H,J,K,L,;,@,
Ctrl,Z,X,C,V,B,N,M,,.,? UP
Fn, Alt, SPACE LEFT,DOWN, RIGHT

Down to 55 keys!

Use this on mobile platforms like Nokia 810, cut out the punctuation+arrow keys to take it down to 40.

Now we just need some standard locations of the quote and @, as they are pretty handy on English keyboards, but foreign keyboards like American and Norwegian don't have some wierd locations. Can't they just use the same locations as the UK convenient ones?

Check out this wacky keyboard design, it's a shame no vendor has dared to change keyboard layouts in the last 20 years!

I've tried out the Asus Eee, but the keyboard is traditional and wastes space, with my layout it could just work. The new Eee 900 is 22.5cm wide, I think 26cm wide would be better to fit in a fuller QWERTY, but it could be enough. HP 2133 Mini-Note PC is 25.5cm wide, which would be a better choice for similar size, but the keyboard is still a legacy cluttered layout.

I'd like to try out a DOVAK keyboard layout, but it would be hard when i needed to use a QWERTY layout on someone else's PC.

Ubuntu AMR playback fix

If you're running Ubuntu like me you may have found that videos you've taken on your mobile don't play with audio when you've copied them to your PC. This is because AMR audio codec support isn't included in Ubuntu, or part of their universe and multiverse extension repositories. However, AMR is in debian-multimedia.org, so follow the guide on adding it to your sources.lst, and then install "ffmpeg". you can then play your videos by:

ffplay video.3gp

It's not great, but it does work.

Installing libavcodec* from debian-multimedia doesn't get it working in VLC or the updated mplayer though (I presume mplayer wasn't compiled with external AMR codec support enabled).

It's common multimedia support which is really needed in Ubuntu, this is the sort of thing everyone wants working out of the box! The alteriative is to follow one of the compile guides.

Web font sizes

Text always look small on pages when browsing at a higher resolution on my laptop I notice. Which shows that the web browser is rendering at the dpi level, rather than millimetreage. So 12pt font at 72dpi (28dots per cm) screen res will be 4mm high. If the res is 144dpi that 12pt character will only be 2mm high, which is tiny!

So shouldn't text be rendered at a millimetre size to make it consistent across displays?