Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 November 2

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November 2

human

[Question moved to WP:RD/S by Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.] Tevildo (talk) 21:05, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Угьш ъькяея шгся сяякеБ redux

On 24 October I left a hasty note asking "Угьш ъькяея шгся сяякеБ", which was reverted as "gibberish". I repeat the question - in a more readable form: "What makes this happen?" "This" as astute readers will have realised, is a keyboard suddenly switching to Cyrillic. Platform is one of the the library's Windows 7 machines.

Supplementary, of course, is "How do I get it back to normal if it happens again?"

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:43, 2 November 2016 (UTC).

This is the relevant page from Microsoft. This is a more advanced troubleshooting procedure if the obvious steps don't work. See also Language bar. Tevildo (talk) 00:04, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

• I'm curious about how you typed that. When I switch to Russian (on MacOS) and try to type "What makes this happen?", I get "Црфе ьфлуы ершы рфззут?". How many wildly different Cyrillic layouts exist? —Tamfang (talk) 20:21, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Tamfang I too am curious. I did not do any of the steps Tevildo mentions (and no admin access I think), useful though they may be in future to fix such an issue. At most I may have pressed CtrlAlt\ or some such. Code pages such as Windows-1251 and Macintosh Cyrillic encoding might be relevant. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:52, 3 November 2016 (UTC).

I, too, wondered; the second word has six letters versus five in "makes", and the "happen" word has the second letter doubled, as if it were "haapen". Of course, if you made a couple of typos, that would resolve both issues. Nyttend (talk) 22:53, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Угьш ъькяея шгся сяякеБ
What makses this issken

Assuming that the unique letters and some critical ones (H, S, etc.) are correct, I get this transcription. An odd set of typos, but when the computer isn't putting out what you meant to put in, it's not surprising that you'd not catch some mistakes. Nyttend (talk) 22:58, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

And then it occurred to me to try working backward: pretend I'm accustomed to the MacOS Cyrillic keyboard and try to type “Угьш ъькяея шгся сяякеБ” on the Latin keyboard; I get “Eumi ]mrztz iucz czzrt<”. —Tamfang (talk) 20:12, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

IIRC, Alt-Shift is the hotkey for the installed international settings; it seems to cycle through all of them. It's probably on the top-10 list of stupid GUI features by Microsoft, because a "hotkey" consisting of nothing but modifiers is bound to cause confusion. The simplest remedy is to install the language you need and nothing else.

To fix that one for real, MS could add an "exclude from Alt-Shift cycle" field to the settings. Then, you could exclude all to disable the feature or all but the most important to make it one-way. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 15:47, 7 November 2016 (UTC)