Wikipedia

Pointed back to the tremendous free encyclopædia by Camilla, who got caught in a web of techie stuff, I see various people have been in editing my entries in the last month. Aaargh! So tonight, to resolve all the new dead links, I've written about another half-a-dozen entries. reddragdiva is right, it IS addictive. One even changed while I was still working!

I've perpetrated the entries on TS1000, TS1500 [new], TS2048 [new], TS2068, Miles Gordon Technology, the DISCiPLE [new], the PlusD [new] and the Sinclair Interface 1 [new].

What's next, I wonder...

Accent Composer

Oh, and if you've ever wondered how I type things like "encyclopædia" or "Västerås", it's using the wonderful Accent Composer from fellow-CIXen Warren Kovach - like me, a biology graduate who moved to IT whose middle name is Hiram. :¬)

This was my idea, more or less. It's a Win32 reimplementation of the old free Digital utility Compose, which DEC gave away free with DECWrite for Windows (a truly horrible old wordprocessor, thankfully long forgotten.)

It simulates the special "Compose" key on DEC dumb terminals. Accent Composer (probably ™, © and ®) lets you type all sorts of accented characters by hitting the "compose" key - by default, Alt Gr - then 2 ordinary characters.

e.g.

ç = c + ,
¥ = Y + =
æ = a + e
å = a + o
ä = a + "
è = e + `
é = e + '

They're all pre-programmed in and generally really easy to remember. You can do bullet points (compose-b-u), opening and closing single and double quotes and many other characters, it works in all Windows programs and there are no arcane keystrokes or ANSI codes to remember. It's shareware but it's only £15 or $25. I was a beta-tester (or should I say ß-tester?) and I have a free license, though. :¬)

Enjoy!