h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sorry, Irv, meant to reply to you too. I find the three row keyboard of the iPhone and iPad easy. But then we've been using that kind of keyboard to make punch tape messages on Nimrods since Pontius was the Pilot.

We were taught touch typing on a normal keyboard in training. Totally pointless. Then we sat in the Comms seat and had to type wearing gloves too! And then they made the jet bounce around at 200 feet. You soon get the hang of the high speed hunt and peck style typing. Not as fast as touch typing, but quick enough for Government work!

*with way too many toys as it is*

The 'on-Pad' keypad on the iPad makes me shriek and tear out my hair. Because, you know, I like punctuation, capitals at the start of sentences, and diacritics. It's UNUSABLE for anyone except twitterers who don't care. But you can get separate 'proper' keypads for iPads, which basically turns it into a laptop, but hey.

Scrumph owns most of the technology round here. I have my four-year-old lap-top (battery completely fried, has life of less than 30 minutes). Scrumph has found me a reconditioned more-up-to-date replacement, but I haven't got round to shifting everything over yet, or, rather, to be Absolutely Honest, I haven't got round to getting Scrumph to move everything over while I drink tea and flap in the background.

But I love my old lap-top! First computer I ever had that was Mine All Mine.

Anyway.

Work had been tiring and tiresome and grrr this week. In a week's time exactly I will be on sick-leave for at least a week, as I'm having surgery, and so I am trying to make sure I don't leave any kind of disorganised mess in my wake. Of course, no one is letting me do this, because every time I get one task sorted, someone pops up and asks me to sort out something else, usually something that's technically not my job anyway, because it allegedly won't take me a minute. It was only after about five of these exchanges that I realised my boss had not told anyone at all, not a single other colleague, that I'd be 'away' next week, despite ORDERING me to leave the dissemination of that news to her. Oh, for the love of...

Tomorrow is going to be awkward.

'Since Pontius was the Pilot' =

Why not just buy a replacement battery, Ags? There are plenty of places that sell them. 4 year old isn't much. My 7 year old beast is still going strong. (But before you all shout....it doesn't have a Core i5 processor, 6Gb RAM, 17inch screen and HD graphics and a webcam)

Scrumph is strongly of the opinion that I need to be dragged screaming and protesting into the 2010s. But I liked it SO much in the late 2000s!

Tech wise apart from the preowned Cheap driodphone.

I have my shinymac (courtesy of Disabled Students allowance)
my ipod (got that when I was 19)
and my miniature camcorder (birthday present this year)
a DSi XL (a blue one, im very fond of it)
and a printer/scanner/photocopier type thing (also courtesy of DSA)

S and I have joint custody of a Nintendo Wii (plus Balance board)
he owns an Xbox 360, a PS2, a PSP and a Nintendo DS Lite as well as the MP3 player I bought him last christmas. His ageing laptop is dying a slow painful death (it runs Vista and has warring antiviri packages) and his nokia that was £20 2 years ago is also near death.

For a student and a recent graduate we are reasonably well tech-ified.

mini

Mini You would be well worth replacing Vista with a cheap student copy of Windows 7. It'll be well happy after that.

You're certainly not short of gaming toys!

Tech wise, of my own, I have a very old deskside machine that is now fried - I'm typing this on the one MC bought a couple of years back. My shiney new droidphone, a several years old digital slr.

At work is another matter. 150ish macs to look after (including the one on my desk), a few servers and storage arrays, a couple of small tape automated things, some small supercomputing kit. Small for that last one is relative. Those bits are all sized from can fit under a normal sized desk and don't make much noise for a big 'personal' computer to something the size of a large cupboard where it takes about 10 or 15 minutes just to power it up (that's after you've powered up the auxiliary computer that controls it).

Yes I'd quite like a nice shiney mac at home but that won't happen for some time given how much they cost (even with any kind of discount).

I'm too non-techie for this conversation. Half the time I don't even know what you guys are talking about.

As an update on my new computer at home, it is really, really fast and doesn't freeze up on me. So I'm a happy person.

And that is all that matters Hyp!

I'm procrastinating.

Oh, I don't know, maybe I'll procrastinate later.

I'm all for delaying procrastination...

I'll have to give it some thought first.....

I've never got around to procrastinating, I keep hearing it's a good thing so I keep thinking I'll give it a go, but then I usually get distracted by something trivial and by the time I've done that something else trivial has cropped up. It's almost like I'm avoiding procrastinating when in actual fact I just haven't got around to it yet.

I will, I keep meaning to. Just haven't yet.

What were we talking about?

To answer your question directly Irving. The 'keyboard' on the iPad is better than the iPhone. It has , and . on the main letter screen and if you hold on them for half(?) a second (probably a bit less) you get ' and ". However, some more word-processing apps also extend the keyboard to provide an extra row of keys - not investigated those personally. I'm not sure a virtual keyboard will ever be much good for long text input, of course there are quite a few physical keyboards available (some built in to cases).

Eats

I remember working in the Systems Control Point at Episkopi about 20 years ago and we had the old T150 teleprinters going to all the different places locally and abroad for communicating with different people.

had to peck type with that and a lot of the time you were using 'txt speak' before texting became the norm on mobiles as you had to impart a lot of knowledge quickly that everyone understood

I've got a Windows XP laptop that was only slightly newer than Service Pack 2, a desktop that's about two years old now (I'm thinking of getting a newer graphics card except that I currently can't really afford it), and a not-quite-so-smart phone. And a broken Playstation 2, a Gameboy Advance, and a Gameboy Color, none of which I try to do anything with these days.

I'm reasonably happy with what I have. (That said, I'm still going to try to make games which run well on the XP laptop ...)

For my Z-Machine Adventure idea, I'm leaning towards making a single page for each adventure with a "main thread" for the story, and leaning slightly-less-so towards a single page for the concept and one thread for each adventure.

I have my laptop which is coming up to 2 years old but is still working well. It is on vista which I would like to upgrade but to be honest I'll cope until I need to but a new one.

I bought a smart phone - a Sony Ericson one. Was really good until they decided to pull the Android updates for the phone. Im stuck with it until next summer but I will be replacing it with a HTC. All my friends went for Iphones when they came out and have replaced them with HTCs - much better apparently. I have an ipod which is incredible old but still works but I wouldn't buy any other apple product. I think they are often overpriced for what they are. Much better just buying alternative brands for less. I would love a tablet for when I am on the move - I could work on the 40min bus ride if I had a tablet! Better off with non-apple when school have windows and so do I.

[Bagpuss]

Just got the Samsung Galaxy Ace which is brilliant, on a good contract deal with O2