For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.
- “Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
- Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
- “It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
- If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
- YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
- This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
- This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
- This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
- Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
- An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.
For historical value should google ever fix the translation, it translates as FreeBSD 3.3
Heads up. It’s 2013 now.
Fixed, thanks!
Regarding keyboard layouts check these out:
Nordtast (German). There is no website anylonger (would have been in German anyways).
Neo2 & 3. Mainstream. The new one might be good.
Aus der Neo Welt (AdNW). Imo the currently best layout, for english and german.
http://www.adnw.de/ (it’s in German…)
The cool thing is that they use algorithms to calculate the best movement of the hands, that is: the shortest distance for fingers to move (= use the middle row most); switch hands as often as possible. Hereby every key gets a value, depending on its ease of pressing it. The 8 keys where the fingers normally lay have the lowest value; they then increase going outward. A programm then places the keys in a random position, then calculates the layout’s score ( probability of letter x value of the key). Following two letters are switched and the process repeats. Of course digraphs (like ‘th’) or experimental even trigraphs (german ‘sch’) are taken into regard.