Posts from August 2015

I seem to have somehow messed up my left hand. I'm not sure what the problem is yet, I'm speaking to the doctor and have had an x-ray to check out one possible cause, but the simple fact is that my left hand has an issue. Sometimes the arm is painful, pretty much all the time a couple of fingers are near-numb. One unfortunate side-effect of this is that I'm finding typing rather uncomfortable. Except, that is, when I'm typing in my iMac.

Given that the vast majority of the typing I do is on my Windows 7 desktop machine I decided it was time to look at getting a new keyboard, one that was as comfortable to type on as the Apple keyboard. Given that I really needed to be in a position where I could actually try the keyboards out I headed off to the local PC World.

Long story short: none of the Windows-oriented keyboards I tried did it for me. None were as comfortable as the Mac keyboard. I tried a few a couple of times and then suddenly had an idea... Apple do a full-size keyboard and, from what I've seen in the past, it does work with Windows, after a fashion. So I went to talk to the Apple guy, checked they had one in stock, handed over £40 and headed home again.

Having now worked with it for a couple of days I think this might be one of the best keyboard purchases I've ever made.

It's not ideal, of course. The keyboard isn't designed to work with Windows, it's designed for the Mac. But for the most part I'm finding that it's not confusing and I'm adapting just fine.

I had to go searching for an unofficial layout that I could install (one that's actually old enough that it doesn't even say it supports Windows 7) and installing that seems to have cured a few issues. The issues I do have remaining are:

• Depending on the application I'm in, @ and " are swapped. Really, I'm not kidding. In SublimeText @ and " are the right way round; in Skype they're the wrong way round. I suspect that this might be down to the fact that I need to restart applications so they take up the new mapping (a reboot of the machine might be in order here).
• The keyboard has no marked insert toggle key. There is one, it's the 0 on the numeric keyboard if you have (also missing, but with a mapping) numlock turned off.
• Alt and Win are the wrong way round. The Cmd key acts as the Win key and it is in the same position as Alt is normally in. I'm actually adapting to this pretty quickly.
• Apple hates the # key. Much like I have problems typing # on the iMac, the same issue exists when typing on Windows too. Whereas on the iMac I have to use Alt-3 to get a #, on the Windows machine I have to use Ctrl-Alt-3. Not ideal but it works.

They're the main issues I've discovered so far. It's possible that there are other niggles waiting for me but, hopefully, there's workarounds for them too. Mostly though I'm finding that the small adjustments I have to make to how I work are worth it given just how comfortable this keyboard is to type on.

I really do wish there was a Windows-oriented keyboard that had the exact same build quality.

I've never really liked Facebook. I forget exactly when I ended up on there -- perhaps 2009 or so -- but I can remember exactly who to blame. It was all the fault of Rich Daley. On an atheism-oriented BB that has long since fallen off the net he convinced me that it was "X for adults" (where X was a popular early social network whose name totally escapes me now) and I fell for it.

And I hated it.

But I stuck with it.

I stuck with it until September 2011. I realised that after a few years of using it I still found the site confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive too. On top of that I'd made the common mistake of allowing anyone I'd ever run unto on the net add me there and so the contact list was huge and out of control -- I didn't really know who most of the people were. So I deleted the account.

Back then there was, as I recall, no explicit delete option, or to do the delete thing you had to deactive and wait 14 days, or some such thing. I know that I followed the advice in the docs and did whatever was required to have my account totally deleted.

This week, at the urging of friends, I finally decided to create an account again. I initially tried to create the account using the old email address (well, actually, a variation on it that would appear to be the same to systems that understand the significance of a + in an email address) but it told me that the address was in use. Which was a worry.

So I created the account using a different address (my actual "main" address this time, as opposed to my Google address) and set about setting it up.

In doing so I tried to tell it that I wanted to associate my old address with this new account and, again, it refused, telling me there was an active account for that address.

I then went and checked and, sure enough, there was my old account, still there, all the data, nothing had changed!

Fucking Facebook!

These days, however, it does look like there are very clear instructions on how to actually fully delete an account, so I've tried again for the old account. It's another 14 days of deactivation but with an actual promise that, yes, this time, they'll delete all my shit.

They better.

Meanwhile... I have a shiny new Facebook account. And I still find it confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive.

Oh goodie! An update for Adobe Creative Cloud on the iMac!

Oh! Improved update experience too! I really must install this then...

Well fuck.