My mouse isn't working right now - I have one of those wireless mice that use AA bats. Unfortunately, I don't have any batteries laying around that are strong enough to make the mouse work again. A friend of mine used to talk about keyboard shortcuts, and I decided to hit the "Windows" key and roll... I'll get batteries later.
So far this is a very interesting experience. The Windows key brings up the "Start" menu. Now, notice that in the start menu the "P" in "Program" is underlined - that means if you hit "P" that that menu will open up, listing your programs. Arrow key around, continuing with the capitol letter method till you get to what you want, and then "enter" when you are on the program you want to run. That is how I got Firefox running.
Now, from there it gets more interesting... you have MORE underlined things at the top - File, Edit, View, etc... I had to hit "B" to get bookmarks to open, that threw up the left bookmarks sidebar and dropped focus (where the cursor is) to the search box. Hit the "Tab" key to get into the menu, and then arrow key where you want to go.
What was really fun was getting here to blogger - I had to use the "Tab" key to jump from link to link to form element till I got to where I can click "New Post" (or whatever it says). And now I am posting.
Nice to know I can do things this way if I have to. My friend says that once you get used to it, it makes things much faster in most cases, but I don't know. I like mice. I can do this if I have to, but it's almost like using a touchpad on a laptop to me.
Looking down at the Blogger controls, THEY even have keyboard shortcuts for posting. Cool! Now if I can figure out Firefox's spellcheck feature - I usually right-click on the red-underlined misspellings, but what key commands are right-click? Please forgive spelling mistakes on this post - I am trying, but my fallback isn't working!
Now, I have operated like this before - a zillion years ago, when computers were still many thousands of dollars expensive, I came into a WebTV, which allowed one to surf the net and email within a set top box with a wireless keyboard, a few hotkeys (mail, favorites, etc...) and the arrow keys to move you around the thing. They used to have a WebTV Browser that would allow developers to see their webpages from the perspective of a WebTV. Oh well.
Chuck, the TV show, is already on it's third episode. I forgot, and had the joyful surprise of watching three new episodes back to back yesterday. Nice! I saw them on the Hulu, and thanks to one sponsor, I saw them all comercial free (except a 2 second NBC tag and then a 6 second "this show is coming comercial free courtesy of ____" prefacing each show. Still working out the new Chuck - I like, but it seems more loose comedy than before, and I was really attracted to the show by the geek factor, which seems kinda downplayed now.
Also watching the Battlestar Galactica. I found the TV Miniseries included as the shows pilot episode, which was a nice surprise. And then the New Caprica "Resistance" webisodes were in Season 3's extras... Nice. Then in Season 4, the movie prequel "Razor" was included as the first disc. I thought I was going to have to buy that seperately. Anyway, kudos to the Battlestar Galactica crowd for the excellent packaging of their DVD sets and extras (although, at $40 each - unless you find a GREAT SALE, like I did - the sets SHOULD BE AWESOME.
