Add long passages for people who want a longer sit

Eleven passages of 320 to 600 characters, which is two to four minutes at an
ordinary speed. Five are public domain openings that run long by nature; the
rest were written to run long rather than padded.

The floor in getRandomTextItem stops a test being too short. Nothing stopped
one being long, and the dataset simply had none: before this the longest
passage was 320 characters and there were three of them.

465 passages, longest now 500 characters.

3 files changed, 55 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/data/packs/general.json b/data/packs/general.json
index 9a7db1a..6da7479 100644
--- a/data/packs/general.json
+++ b/data/packs/general.json
@@ -158,5 +158,25 @@
     "category": "general",
     "content": "Measurement changes what is measured. The moment a number becomes a target, effort moves toward the number rather than the thing it was standing in for, and the two drift apart until the number is worth nothing.",
     "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "general",
+    "content": "Learning to type well is mostly learning to stop watching your own hands. The eyes want to check, and every check costs the place in the text, so the first weeks of practice feel slower than the hunt-and-peck they replace. What changes is not the speed of any single keystroke but the number of decisions made per word. A trained hand does not decide where a letter is; it has already moved. That is why progress arrives in steps rather than a slope, and why a bad week is usually a week of watching.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "general",
+    "content": "The most useful thing about a fixed layout is that it is fixed. Whatever its faults, and it has several, the arrangement of letters on a keyboard has not changed in a century, which means the skill transfers to every machine you will ever sit at. A better layout that only you use is worth less than a worse one everybody shares. This is true of far more than keyboards, and it is the reason so many obviously improvable standards survive every attempt to improve them.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "general",
+    "content": "Errors cluster. Watch anyone type for a minute and the mistakes will not be spread evenly across the passage: they gather at the same letter pairs, the same reaches, the same moment attention wanders after a long word. This is good news, because a cluster can be practised directly while a general weakness cannot. The fastest way to get better is rarely to type more; it is to find the six combinations responsible for most of the damage and drill those until they stop being decisions.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "general",
+    "content": "Speed and accuracy are not a trade-off in the way people assume. Below a certain accuracy the corrections cost more time than the extra pace ever earned, so the fastest sustainable rate is not the fastest possible one. Most typists asked to slow down and stop making mistakes end up finishing sooner, which is a surprising result until you count the keystrokes rather than the seconds, at which point it becomes obvious and slightly embarrassing.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
   }
 ]
diff --git a/data/packs/literature.json b/data/packs/literature.json
index b0f2b6f..529b5a0 100644
--- a/data/packs/literature.json
+++ b/data/packs/literature.json
@@ -133,5 +133,30 @@
     "category": "literature",
     "content": "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. The words gather and press until they must come out, and the telling is not a relief so much as a surrender.",
     "attribution": "Maya Angelou"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "literature",
+    "content": "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.",
+    "attribution": "Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "literature",
+    "content": "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.",
+    "attribution": "Herman Melville, Moby-Dick"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "literature",
+    "content": "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons.",
+    "attribution": "Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "literature",
+    "content": "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect.",
+    "attribution": "Samuel Beckett, Murphy"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "literature",
+    "content": "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.",
+    "attribution": "Charles Dickens, David Copperfield"
   }
 ]
diff --git a/data/packs/technology.json b/data/packs/technology.json
index 0e1f4fd..c33a06b 100644
--- a/data/packs/technology.json
+++ b/data/packs/technology.json
@@ -148,5 +148,15 @@
     "category": "technology",
     "content": "Version control does not exist to store code. It exists to answer the question of what changed and why, which is the only question that matters when something has broken and nobody remembers touching it.",
     "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "technology",
+    "content": "There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. The joke survives because all three are the same problem wearing different clothes. Each is about the gap between a model in someone's head and the thing the model stands for, and each becomes visible only at the boundary where one part of a system hands something to another. Nothing inside a function is ever hard in this way.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
+  },
+  {
+    "category": "technology",
+    "content": "The first rule of distributed systems is not to build one. The second is that if you must, assume every message may arrive twice, out of order, or not at all, and design so that none of those is a special case. Systems that treat delivery as reliable do not fail gracefully when it is not; they fail at three in the morning, in a way that takes a week to reproduce, and the fix is almost always the design that was rejected at the start for being too complicated.",
+    "attribution": "Unknown"
   }
 ]