Keyboard

Keyboard is important when using computer ;-) (Unless you studied from a book that calls mouse "our best friend" while talking about text editing...)

So you think you can type well? ;-)

No, I'm not trying to say that I can type 1000 words per minute while watching TV ;-)
I just wanted to show that "typing" is not always so simple as we usually think, and normal typing is usually relatively simple to what typing may look like. I made a small video presenting different keyboard layouts, etc on Windows XP. And I never meant I can use them better than average US-ASCII user - I had to guess much to type anything. And I don't know most of the laguages, so it's mostly random text with Engish comment from time to time... However, I still think it may be interesting to watch. At least you will know how I can type stars (☆), etc :-)

Download (zipped avi, 8MB big)

Japanese keyboard

BTW of above, have you ever asked yourself how a Japanese keyboard would look like? Thousands of buttons? No, it's not that bad. But space bar should rather be called space button, as its size is close to a normal buton size...

Want to see? Check my Japan 2005 gallery!

Buttons next to space bar are used to switch between different input modes (English, hiragana, etc). I don't know well, because I don't have a keyboard like this at home..

So, how can one type on such keyboard? Relatively easy :-) You need to type word's pronunciation (either in romaji or kana - depending on your input mode), press space. If you're lucky, the right kanji appears. If not - press space again to get a list of all possible candidates. If you watched the movie above, you could see this happening, I guess.

Misc

Polish (programmers) keyboard layout with a dot as decimal separator (for Win2k+)