English Chess Forum

Results for the team competition are on the 4NCL website.

Congratulations to Barbican 1 on taking first place without dropping a match point.

Our usual thanks to the control team for all their hard work.

Nice to see a slightly stronger turn out this year, including 3 GMs as well as Ameet Ghasi, spread across four different teams. It was rather surprising that neither Barbican 1 nor Sons of Anarchy 1 conceded any matchpoints to anyone else.

...... and congratulations to Matthew Turner on finishing outright first in today's individual event with 6.5/7.

Sorry - no idea how to do a decent looking 1/2 symbol.

ALT-0189 on the numberpad should do it.

½

So it does.

Couldn't whoever is responsible for these things have made it just a little bit easier? How is someone of my mature years supposed to remember something like ALT-0189?

I have all manner of c**p on my keyboard that I never use - including two sets of numbers and things like Pg Up and Pg Dn. And what on earth are End and Home for? Why not include some useful stuff like 1/2 symbols (sorry, ½ symbols) instead of all the other rubbish I never use? And what's with all this F1-F12 business? And while I'm on the subject, why have the Caps Lock key so close to the rest of the keyboard that when I hit it inadvertently I type for several lines before realising I'm doing so in capital letters?

Who designs these things????

A lot of different people over time There is probably an easier to remember way to do it via an on screen keyboard somehow. The default one in my Linux set up here doesn't seem to have the rarer symbols. Odd.).

Mike Truran wrote: Who designs these things????

I think of them as Midwich Cuckoos. They certainly cannot be human.

Mike Truran wrote:I have all manner of c**p on my keyboard that I never use - including two sets of numbers and things like Pg Up and Pg Dn. And what on earth are End and Home for? Why not include some useful stuff like 1/2 symbols (sorry, ½ symbols) instead of all the other rubbish I never use? And what's with all this F1-F12 business? And while I'm on the subject, why have the Caps Lock key so close to the rest of the keyboard that when I hit it inadvertently I type for several lines before realising I'm doing so in capital letters?

Who designs these things????

You are certainly not the first person to whinge publicly about this and I'm sure very many people curse privately. The science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle, has been complaining about this almost as long as he has been blogging - http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/ ... l#capslock.

I thought I remembered him talking about a program that allowed you to remap the keyboard but maybe it was a special keyboard that allowed that.

FWIW his suggestion is to stuff tissue paper around the caps lock key until it becomes inoperative. The only problem is I'm not sure how that affects its immediate neighbours.

Brian Towers wrote:The science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle, has been complaining about this almost as long as he has been blogging - http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/ ... l#capslock.

Ack! The distraction!! Make it go away...

(How long has he been blogging for?! That is impressive.)

NickFaulks wrote:

Mike Truran wrote: Who designs these things????

I think of them as Midwich Cuckoos. They certainly cannot be human.

I particularly like references like these - as only a certain age group will have any idea what you're on about. Similarly on "Popmaster" on Ken Bruce's Radio 2 morning show when the contestants have no knowledge of 60's music - last week someone thought Petula Clark was Dusty Springfield!
Unfortunately conversely anything after 1990 is a complete anathema - why do modern hits always have XYZ featuring DJ Rapper or similar?

PS. Mike, on Chromebooks, they dumped the Caps Lock key altogether, and the function keys as well (or rather, they produced specific symbolic function keys that are easier to learn how to use). There are downsides though. And it took me embarrassingly long to learn how to use the touchpad properly.

The QWERTY design shows no signs of going away, though.

Oh, but Chrome/book did do away with the 'backspace' button triggering 'back' in browsers. That annoyed me a lot, as it was one of my most frequent actions. Now I just use two fingers on the touchpad and swipe left. Using three fingers and clicking in various places kills the internet, apparently.

(Three fingers allows you to move around between different tabs - a key skill!)

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: The QWERTY design shows no signs of going away, though.

The design I hated the most was the keyboard on the original early 1980s IBM PC. This had a numeric keypad, but combined this with the up, down, left and right cursor movements. Now think about how you might do numeric work on a spreadsheet before the widespread use of a mouse or pointing device. The PS/2 keyboard, variations on which are or perhaps were the default standard for desktop machines separated these out. I got used to using the 1234 that's above the qwerty line of keys.

I looked up what "home" and "end" were for. These will move the cursor to the start or end of a line. Usually people would just use the mouse, but the keys pre-date pointing devices. Function keys also were mapped to particular sub menus, again it's when you don't have a pointing device.

Things that were around in Windows 3.1 are usually still there in later versions, just hidden away. If you can find it, Windows Character Map does all the obscure characters like ½ and ê. It's there in Windows 7, because I just used it.

Roger de Coverly wrote:I looked up what "home" and "end" were for. These will move the cursor to the start or end of a line.

Or the start and end of some documents (e.g. PDFs opened with Adobe Acrobat).
Or <ctrl><Home> and <ctrl><End> to go to the top left cell and bottom right cell of Excel spreadsheets.

<PgUp> and <PgDn> allow you to scroll through many documents (e.g. Acrobat, Notepad, Excel) a screen at a time.

These four keys also work in Chessbase to go to the first and last games in a games list, and to scroll through games lists a screen at a time.

When you usually use a computer with a Trackpoint, but no mouse or touchpad, these keys are definitely all useful.

Roger de Coverly wrote:I looked up what "home" and "end" were for. These will move the cursor to the start or end of a line. Usually people would just use the mouse, but the keys pre-date pointing devices. Function keys also were mapped to particular sub menus, again it's when you don't have a pointing device.

This is just wrong.
Talk to a touch typist. They will tell you that taking one hand away from the keyboard to operate the mouse is a major distraction which slows them down. All these special keys are for them and they are the true keyboard experts. Even the QWERTY design was specifically to slow them down in the early days of mechanical typewriters because too high a speed would lead to lever jams and damage.

I must also say "Hats off" to Mike for one of the fastest ratholing efforts I have ever seen. To start a rathole with the 3rd comment, even though I'm sure it was unintentional, is impressive.

Indeed. And it was my own thread too.