Minh’s Notes

Today’s update to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) features a new menu that lets you know when your hard drive is being backed up to Time Machine. The menu naturally comes with a command to back up your pirated movie collection, lest the MPAA comes by and runs a big magnet over your computer. (See, backing up is cool!)

The command is accessible via a convenient keyboard “shortcut”: ⌃⌥⇧⌘B. (Hover over each symbol to see which key it stands for.) That’s a whopping four keys to hold down and one to press! Sure, you don’t want to accidentally start backing up your computer while Norton’s running in the background and you’re playing a scintillating game of… Chess. But you need the skills of a virtuoso to trigger a backup that way – you might as well just use a mouse.

At least you can take as long as you want to master that key combination: in Windows 95, there was an Easter egg that would display Bill Gates’s horse, Nugget, on your desktop. Unfortunately, you had to press Ctrl+F6+RtShift+Del and the right mouse button, simultaneously, before your wallpaper loaded.

Sounds like a job for Mavis Beacon.

Thanks to John Gruber for linking to the Macworld review.

Entry №1170, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 7:35 PM | Edit | Permalink
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If you type primarily in English, you have it easy: all 26 letters are right in front of you, one keystroke away. But if, like me, you do any typing in a language like Vietnamese, you’ll sometimes find it tempting to just use a typewriter, where you don’t have to worry about font support for accent marks or application support for various flavors of Unicode, and you can usually flip the page down a notch to turn a caret into a bone fide circumflex. It’s just easier.

When I absolutely have to use a post-1980s device like the computer (what horror!), my keyboard takes a beating, especially when I edit the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Since computers these days treat accented characters like ễ as distinct from their base letters (in this case, e), Vietnamese contains over 90 such characters, and there’s no way you’d cram that into a keyboard. So various folks have devised input methods for Vietnamese: you strike multiple keys, one letter comes out. Not the best way to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but you just try talking to someone without any vowels. Isn’t happening, unless you’re a Klingon.

Continue reading "Vietnamese VIQR Keyboard Layout 1.0 for Mac OS X" »

Entry №1160, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 8:10 PM | Edit | Permalink
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