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?

OpenGL Debugger

Came across this BuGLe OpenGL Debugger, a great tool, allows inspection of states and backtraces, fantastic!

OpenGL has had some what of a resurgence in recent years primarily in the ES variety on mobile, but also on Mac OS X and GNU+Linux distributions thanks to Compiz ;)

Mobile Web Problem

Back in the 90s when we were all still creating our websites in HTML 3.2 we optimised pages for dial-up and compressed images down to the smallest gif we could. One unfortunate side effect of the Broadband boom in the UK worldwide is that websites don't cater for the optimal page sizes which mobile devices necessitate.

Even with the bandwidth problems of popular sites (BBC News front page is 278KiB) until last week the BBC News site did fit on my 800 pixel wide Nokia 770. However they have changed it now, so a minimum display width of 1000 pixels is required. We can of cause switch to the low graphics version.. but when the version before fitted, it is a shame we have to go back to a nearly text-only web page if I choose to browse on a mobile device.

A lot of web designers (including the BBC?) make the mistake of looking at the screen resolution of their visitors and assuming that people browse full-screen, when many people do not maximise their browser windows.. so that 1280x1024 display window is actually only about 800x600.

If you look at the resolutions of mobile devices you will see all the current Sony Ericsson models run at 240x320 resolution, and Nokia models the same. Apple iPhone is slightly higher at 320x480. LG KU990 Viewty comes in at 240x400

The other thing for website designers is to remember is that a 240pixel wide display which measures 2 inches across is 120dpi (compared to a normal desktop 72dpi), so if you display your text at 10pt, that will look 40% smaller (why aren't font sizes specified in cm on screen ?)

So web designers, remember there mobile market for browsing is growing all the time, optimise for small page bandwidth, and page width/height no more than 800px (my site comes in at 768px ;)

The other problem is sites with broken HTML, like the BBC News site, 375 errors. That is shoddy! (I should point out that blogger which generates my site has left 169 errors on the page, so I'm not in the clear either!).

Hebrew spam

Every day my server is getting pounded with HTML spam emails containing Hebrew characters. I'd love to have a simple set of rules to reject during SMTP session with a 55x code any email containing such character sets that I can't read anyway. I'd also like subjects of detected spams (which I don't train otherwise) to be utilised to reject during SMTP session with the 55x code. Both of these are better than accepting and sorting in a "Spam" folder, as the sending machine needs to know that its email isn't getting through. And if there are any false positives, they will never know unless we reject the SMTP session!

GNU+Linux rtsp and mms support

There are a lot of rtsp:// and mms:// served streams online, and GNU+Linux distros like Ubuntu are not yet being released with native support for playing them or saving them to a file. Mplayer, Kaffine and Xine are all unable to play the stream URLs. Mplayer seems to be able to play the audio, but it is all crackly and breaks up.

If we use the workaround of converting the RealPlayer RPM, installing libstdc++5 and then pasting that into RealPlayer we can play rtsp:// streams ;) but we can't save them :(

It's a shame, as there are a lot of sites like youTube Mobile. Which don't rely on Adobe Flash, so we would have otherwise been able to watch the streams. mms:// is common as WMV and WMA files are served that way often. To be a multimedia distribution GNU+Linux needs to support these protocols out of the box from Firefox ideally. The current workaround is to install the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox (unfortunately Firefox still needs a restart.. reminds me of MS-Windows restart issues still!).

K800 torch

My Sony Ericsson K800i doesn't come with a way to turn the light on as a torch like my old K700i did. Fortunately someone has created a Java Torch application! There is also a Symbian P1i Torch application for the Sony Ericsson P1i if your lucky enough to have one of those phones.

Flip, Slide, Clam and Open style mobile phones!

We've had Flip phones (aka Clam shell) and Open phones for years.. but it seems "slide" is all the rage.. I did used to like "flipping" but I'm not convinced on sliding yet! and it's another moving part which could break.. Here's me hoping phones in the style of K800i and P1i will remain popular ;) The market is definitely big enough to support the variety we have though.

Ubuntu FLV video seeking not working

After the problems with Flash in Ubuntu I thought I would try play the Flash Video (FLV) file I downloaded.

Unfortunately, while VLC and Mplayer can play it.. they can't seek.. so we either have to watch the entire clip or not bother at all..

Xine at first appears like it is going to work, seeking at the beginning of the clip works, but go beyond half-way and it locks, and sometimes needs to be killed as it is unresponsive :( Other FLV clips have all the same problems with VLC, Mplayer and Xine.

GNU+Linux is going to find adoption hard going when it can't play "de facto format" Video files out of the box. FLV is only a custom H.263 format after all..

Jobs commented on Flash not being supported by the iPhone, which is a bit odd considering it can play H.264 and MPEG4. Not getting Adobe's Flash may be a blessing in disguise for the platform though! Also.. at least Apple have not made the mistake of adopting Silverlight yet (like Nokia appear to have, after their good decision of purchasing Qt!).

Ubuntu mouse device changing

I highlighted the problem of flaky second mouse support in ubuntu before. My fix works well, but you will find that as xorg does not reference devices by UID, numbering will change and mean that mouse2 becomes the USB mouse!

So really X.org needs a revision to reference by UID, and the Linux kernel needs to expose that to X.org like it does for other devices in /dev

ISS tracking

Ace, we can track the International Space Station in real time!