The Norwegian alphabet has 29 characters and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to find a good way to type Æ, Ø and Ã… on my UK keyboard (particularly as my manager’s name is Jørgen and I think it only polite to spell it correctly!). It’s a laptop keyboard so no numeric keypad making character codes difficult to use and after a while you tire of using Character Map or cutting and pasting the whole time. Windows’ UK Extended keyboard layout unfortunately doesn’t stretch to these characters (apparently it was added in SP2 mainly to support Welsh). For a while I tried using the US International keyboard layout which gave me shortcuts for these characters but messed up other important characters like ” and @ so I had to keep swapping layout. John Sullivan’s UK International Keyboard Layout finally came to the rescue – a standard UK keyboard layout with sensible shortcuts for these characters and lots more besides.