After reading an article over at wired.com earlier this week I wondered how fast I typed these days. The girl in the article managed to type 120 words per minute, and I know I was pretty fast in school when we worked on type writers, so up to the test.
First I tried copying a Swedish text from paper while a friend was standing next to me with a stop watch, the result measured around 80 wpm (although I think I could write a bit faster if I’d tried a couple of more times).
Second up was finding a program on the computer that just gave me random words and performed the same measurement. After a quick search with apt I found the package ‘typespeed’ and gave it a spin. A couple of tries later I didn’t even manage to get past 52 words per minute, but this test was in english, and there were some words I hadn’t heard of before, but still, both 80 and 52 are WAY less than 120.
Ok.. so finally time to get to the point. This ReCaptcha thing has been around for a while now. For those of you who haven’t heard about this wonderful project, here comes a short resume: ReCaptcha is like regular Captcha, but with two words, one known word, and one word that a computer has failed to interpret while digitalizing a book. So each time you solve a Captcha, you help opening up the world of cyberspace to a dear old book. Each word will be sent out to a lot of Captchas thus providing a kind of voting mechanism that filters out the typos.
Ok.. so finally time to get to the point (really). It would be pretty damn neat if you had a typespeed program that fed you a specified ratio of unknown words for you to train up your fingers with. This would ofc not distort the actual word before displaying it like done with Captchas. Unfortunately I guess it’s a bit more common with people having to fill in captchas for blogs etc, than people trying to improve their writing speed using some silly program.
Anyways, way past bedtime (perhaps the reason for the idea in the first place), so good night intarweb, see you tomorrow!