Old school: Typewriter Guy

My keyboard reminds me very vaguely of a typewriter, at least when it’s in its case. I know they’re totally different except for their portability, but even so, that thought led me to look up an old friend — Typewriter Guy, formerly of Sesame Street. I’m glad I did. He’s still cute — his voice resembles Bill Cosby, he narrows his eyes like Mo Willems’ pigeon, and (odd for his species) has only 4 fingers on each hand.

I could never actually type on the electric typewriter we kept in the kitchen; I dictated little stories to my sister when I was 6. (My first brush with proofreading, a harbinger of my present equipment: she’d typed “no” for “know” and I cried.) So, I was fascinated by the little red typewriter who wheeled around singing “nuni-nuni-nu” and getting in and out of trouble with the letter or word of the day by typing on himself. The result of his hunting and pecking startled him: the punchline of being knocked out by yellow yoyos or engulfed by green umbrellas. I like to think I started to understand words then. To this day I cannot fully understand the spoken word unless I see it. Somehow that made it easier to adjust to using Dragon years later, once I got over the initial shock and the longer disorientation period (which I will never quite get over). I knew the shapes my mouth would make, and so could mentally “type” them before I said them. (Even so, I feel relieved every time I see that my words have survived their leap to the screen.)

Typewriter Guy has a cousin in my keyboard, besides: the letter H is designated by a hand that looks as though it could span all his keys, no problem. (I should add that TG himself was quite the one-handed typist — the other mitt was busy making magic tricks or poking a pencil in his tire.) If you want to see Typewriter Guy’s adventures with shrinking cats, giant ears and making words come alive, a YouTube fan has collected many of the cartoon shorts here. Nuni-nuni-nu…

Written Sign Language/ASL!

The thing I grieve most about having injured my good hand is losing much of my ability to communicate with my fingers — be that through typing, writing, or fingerspelling. (Even when I had full use of my right hand, trying to learn ASL one handed in a class full of two-handed people was incredibly awkward and I fell behind quickly. I used the ASL Browser to catch up, but all the same found myself spelling and abbreviating almost everything, because nobody understood much. This vlog by Carl Schroeder might give you some idea.) I’m grateful for being able to use speech recognition, but sometimes my thinking just won’t go that way.However, this morning I went browsing for fingerspelling fonts and came across the site for Sign Writing, part of Sutton Movement Writing. This is a system for transcribing ASL largely via computer, but can be hand drawn as well. It reminds me slightly of the diagrams in sign language dictionaries, but is a lot more cryptic at first because it uses geometric shapes to represent the face and hands rather than a sketch of the hands themselves. This, I think, I could learn. I wouldn’t need two good hands, or even full use of one.

If I understand correctly, I can input the symbols however I want — on-screen keyboard/virtual mouse, my keyboard, my voice — anything the computer itself uses for input. This will probably take some time to learn too, but at least it stands still long enough for me to understand it! Granted it’s not much for face-to-face communication, and I’ll probably be writing more pidgin than grammatical ASL, but considering I want it for the sake of my own thought process more than anything else, that is a very small quibble. This is awesome. Again the computer saves my arse…

TypeBooster and on-screen keyboards

Bugger it — now it only works with physical keystrokes, not virtual. It recognizes neither the Windows on-screen keyboard nor the Click-N-Type. If you want word completion with an on-screen keyboard, stick with Click-N-Type and edit the prediction dictionary to include phrases.

TypeBooster and Word update

I mentioned that the TypeBooster word completion/expansion program doesn’t work with Word XP or OpenOffice.org Writer 2.4. It still doesn’t. However, I was informed that it will in fact work with Word 2007. So, if you can stomach it…go to. Off to edit previous review…

Ctrl-Alt-Del (Task Manager) with Dragon NaturallySpeaking

The Preferred version of Dragon will not let you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the TaskManager by voice. However, if you absolutely need to get into the TaskManager to kill a process or to boot in safe mode or something, you can say “Press Control Shift Escape.”

Depending on which process is frozen, it may take a while for the command to go through.