Posts Tagged ‘Computer’

Even more nanny state stuffs

Parents should be prosecuted for allowing their children to play age-restricted video games, the chief censor says.

Current laws allow punishments of up to three months jail or a $10,000 fine for those caught supplying R-18 games to children. While there have been no prosecutions so far, chief censor Bill Hastings told the Dominion Post the laws should be enforced to help prevent the effects of repeat exposure to violence and sexual violence on young people. (via New Zealand Herald)

Well the first thing I started to wonder is how they are going to enforce that law. Sure that lousy TV3 programme called Target can hire under aged actors to buy restricted games, but unlike illegal selling of tobacco, distribution of games, especially compute games, does not work that way. Today's kids are pretty clever, much cleverer than what we use to. 10 years ago no parental control software can lock me away from computer, today, I recently heard a story from China,  a 14 year old kid is now spying on their parents' activities on computer.

That's a very unique case but most young people do know how to download pirated stuffs online - parents will also be responsible for this if S92A came to force last month (luckily it hasn't) as the Internet access is under the name of a parent. If this happens, I mean, is this really a fault of parents? They tried their best, education, use parental control software, lock out the computer ... but parents aren't nannies, even a nanny cannot watch with children 24/7.

There's a difference of wording, "allowing" or "supplying". Supply is a process that you handed out something that you know it is illegal, allowing can mean you simply don't know. Sure if a parent buys a clearly labelled r-18 games for their children then it is a offence, but if you simply don't know, and don't have access to information on what your children is playing?

About ... my keyboard

I regard input hardwares like keyboard and mouse as important parts of a computer, as important as a video card that allows to  heat water or fry an egg for your breakfast on it.

Yes you cannot do those things on your keyboard, but since most of us work on keyboard everday, it is important to have a handy, well designed one that allows you to enjoy work on it; oh, yes, and that ringing music like sound when you press the keys.

Also, please keep it clean ... I clean my keyboard once every three month. However, some people I encountered never clean their keyboard since the purchase, the keys are so dark, full of scums, you cannot even see what's on it.

I cleaned my keyboard today, and found the similar problem, but that's because the marks on the key wore out.

(click to enlarge)

I expect a four year old keyboard to have some keys wore out. That's not a huge deal, as long as I know where the home row is, I can touch type the rest.

It is interesting to see your most used keys, though.

Most of them are lefthand keys --- not surprised at all, it's the major weakness of qwerty layout, quite a lot of words can be typed use left hand only.

C,V,Z are my three most frequently used hot keys. I'm a really bad writer so I ctrl + z undo and copy and paste a lot.

A,E,D should be the most used keys then. I can undersand A and E, but why D is wearing that badly, no idea.

M,N twin is an interesting case. Those two are the ones I made most of my mistakes on, I'm always troubled to use my middle finger to get the M key.

Qwerty keyboard is the most "historic" part of computer. Its route can be traced back to mid 19th century in typewriters. I found it quite amazing that its about 150 yeras now since the first QWERTY layout typewriter, and yet we are still working on very similar way of input board, with little changes, except few new layout design, like the Dvorak.

In early 2000, I believed that the Direct Voice Input will take over keyboard as the main mean of input fairly soon. Well, vista does have a programme for this, but my accent, which is a mix of kiwi and Chinese English, can hardly depend on it. The programme can recognise my single word commands, like "sleep" or "open" quite well, but anything beyond that, it's almost totally unworkable.

It's still a long way to go before we can no longer have soring wrists after hours of work on computer

New Screen!

My old screen just recently died out so I dissappeared from here for quite a time.

As a student, I need a fortune to acquire a new 22" widescreen, but after few days of use, I can be sure that the money is well worth it. It has a very high cost-benefit ratio, the screen is not too large and too expensive, like the 24" ones in school, too large and you can hardly utilise all screen area at any moment. 22" is just about right to fit two word page in one screen, and you will no longer feel annoyed by the tool boxes in Photoshop.

Highly recommanded for people who usually do a lot of word and picture processing but is on a budget. You can buy a budget brand with decent quality at the cost of around NZ$ 350 -400.

It's bit hard to find a desktop background for widescreen monitors, so I made my own one. It's a resized （1680*1050） photo showing the Great Orion Nebula. Since the original photo is from NASA Hubble Telescope, it is not copyrighted - you can use it for whatever you like.