Terminally Incoherent

I have a nice little binary clock from ThinkGeek standing on my desk. It is a silly gadget, but as any geek I lust for this sort of things. Awesome little toys which remain incomprehensible and mysterious to mere mortals. It is sort of a symbol - normal people look at the damn thing dumbfounded. Fellow geeks, smile with approval when they see it - they know they found a kindred soul. Then there are those people who don’t actually believe that this toy shows time, or that you can reliably read it - so they challenge you.

Tell me what time does it say it is, right now! Quick!

The problem with these clocks is that unless you are standing next to it, in a well lit room they are incredibly hard to read. Reading one from across the room - especially when it’s dark, and the unlit lights cannot be seen, is not easy. For example, imagine you wake up in the middle of the night in a dark room and you glance on your binary clock. What time is it?

At the first glance I would say it’s either 11:15 or 11:19 depending on whether the highest dot is in the 4 or 9 position. It is hard to tell without any frame of reference. And that is the point here. All we see are dots suspended in black void. If you would approach the clock and look more carefully, you would see a different picture:

Oops. It’s actually 1:11 and 50 seconds. Because you had no frame of reference and you didn’t see the “zero” columns the whole image shifted slightly in your mind. Of course if you wait a second or two you will notice the last row changes way to quickly to be considered “minutes” and another row will appear as the seconds pass. This will let you guess it is actually 1 instead of 11. Similarly, you can distinguish a 4 from an 8 by observing the seconds column and comparing relative distances. But it is in no way intuitive, or quick. Unfortunately this is the design of every single binary clock gadget I have seen on the market.

The problem is that the unlit LED’s are as important as the lit ones when you try to read this sort of a time piece. A slight change in design to actually illuminate the LED’s in OFF position would make these devices much more readable. How do you illuminate them in a way that would make sense? You can do it in the way I shown on the picture - simply show an outline, or a filled dot. This could be done using some sort of a shutter or a film to cover the OFF LED’s and fully expose the ON ones. Alternatively you could use different colors or intensities. For example you could use a contrasting scheme with dim red lights for OFF and bright green/blue LED’s for ON.

How does that look? How would it look on the other end of a dark room? Personally I think such design would be much more functional. A binary clock we could actually read from far away, and in poor light conditions. Imagine that! What do you think? Are you happy with the current design? What is your suggestion to make these things easier to read while retaining the charm and geek factor of a binary clock?

I was skimming through the PC Gamer today, and I saw a review for an interesting gaming device - the Novint Falcon. What is it? Well, let me paint you a picture:

This incredibly, awkward, odd looking contraption is essentially a force feedback joystick which works in full 3d, encompassing the the X-Y plane traditionally used by mice (up-down, left, right) and the X-Z plane (ie, forward-back, left-right) usually configured with joysticks. How do you use it? It seemed a little bit confusing to me so I decided to look for some videos of it in action. Apparently you wiggle that little ball in the air, moving it left, right, up, down and also pushing and pulling it away or towards you. Check out Veronica Belmont playing around with it:

I have two observations about watching this. One is that Veronica is kinda hot, but that’s besides the point. Second is that the Falcon looks incredibly uncomfortable. I’m sure that the tactile feedback is interesting but I can’t imagine using this device for an extended period of time. For one, there is no support for your hand. Most joysticks have solid base letting you rest your hand on it, and mice are used on a flat surface where your hand is naturally supported. The falcon on the other hand has you holding the controller in mid air. Carpal tunnel in the making if you ask me.

The buttons seem to be in very awkward position, and the whole device looks both overly bulky and at the same time somewhat fragile and delicate.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the innovative new experiments with the I/O hardware. If you can bring us a brand new method for interacting with our games, more power to you. For example, Wiimote was a slam dunk! Excellent idea, great execution and support. People who don’t even play games are loving it.

The Falcon seems like a great concept at first - I love the idea of unifying the X-Y and X-Z controls, and taking the force feedback to the next level. But the execution seems to be less than promising. Look at poor Veronica - despite of what she is saying, she looks extremely uncomfortable using that thing. Besides, even if the construction was different, and the control was more comfortable and intuitive, I think it would still fail. Why?

Well, let’s look at the facts. The device costs $239, and virtually no games support it. The website features Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 mods adopted to work with Falcon, but I doubt any big (or small) game dev studio would even consider building in support for it, because only few potential customers would need it. It’s like a self defeating loop - no one will buy it, because there are no games for it. No one will make games for it because no one is buying it. Unless you are a gaming giant (like Nintendo) there is only one way to get out of this loop - make the device so cheap that people will buy even if there is only few games that support it, and no prospects for growth in that area. If many people buy it just for shits and giggles you may reach a critical mass at which point game developers will notice your device and start utilizing it. But if it’s more expensive than a high end mouse, you have a problem.

Also, you are really better off making an exclusive deal with one of the big console makers. You have the innovative controller, they have the captive market. If they support your controller, you have it made. If they don’t, the console segment of the gaming market is still big on expensive gaming peripherals. Majority of PC on the other hand gamers are perfectly content with mouse+keyboard combo, and never even considered purchasing additional input device for the purpose of gaming.

As you may know, I got the Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse for Christmas. Ever since I inherited Logitech VX Revolution at work I caught the fancy mouse bug. I figured that since I spend inordinate amounts of time at my computer, I might as well have high quality mouse and keyboard. So Sidewinder and Logitech G9 ended up on my list.

Sidewinder is a very nice mouse, but I have one small complaint. It’s a little bit to long. I don’t know - maybe I have small hands or perhaps I’m just used to smaller mice but something, but if I loosely grip it I can barely reach the scroll wheel and the thumb buttons. I never actually had this problem with any mouse before. In fact when I unpacked it at the Christmas table several people remarked that it was a little on the large side. So it’s not just me.

By my calculation, if they shaved off a half an inch it would be a perfect fit. I’m not saying it’s uncomfortable - it’s just that it gets some getting used to it - and I usually have to slightly shift my hand to go from using the scroll wheel to reach the thumb buttons unless I grip it just right.

First thing you notice when you get this mouse is the set of weights and spare sliders that come in the box with it. Sidewinder ships with three 10 gram weights and one 5 gram weight that you can use to give it just the right feel. You can easily add up to 30 grams of weight to the device just by pulling the snap in attachment and placing appropriate weights in the 3 available slots. I experimented with different setups and the max weight seemed a bit to much. I currently have 5 gram inside and it feels about right, but I’m still messing around with it. The difference is very subtle, but it’s nice to have that fine degree of control over the way your mouse glides. It almost makes up for the unusual length.

Another striking feature of this mouse is the LED which actually works. It usually displays your current sensitivity setting. By default you can switch between 2000 dpi, 800 dpi and 400 dpi settings using the 3 buttons on the top of the mouse. On the highest setting is perfect if you need to move your mouse from edge to edge in quick strokes. In this mode you hardly ever need to pick up the mouse but it’s easy to overshoot your targets. On the lowest setting you get slow deliberate movements. This mode is great for work requiring accuracy - for example retouching images pixel by pixel on high zoom setting.

I upped the middle mode up to 1000 dpi using the Intelisense software, and here is the kicker: the mouse detected that change and displays the correct dpi value as configured in software. Awesome!

The extra buttons are great. The dpi switches are easily accessible right below the scroll wheel. However, they are positioned in such a way that it is almost impossible to hit them by accident. The thumb buttons are perfect. I hardly ever use the thumb buttons on my VX Revolution because of the weird position. In Sidewinder they are easy to find even without looking, and they give you a pleasant click when you press them.

All the buttons are configurable with the Intelisense software which can be conveniently called up using the Sidewinder logo button located on the “butt” of the mouse. It’s funny, since your hand is usually resting on top of that button, but it is virtually impossible to depress it with your palm or ball of your hand. The configuration screen is very simple and intuitive:

You can reconfigure actions for all 5 standard buttons and the scroll wheel. The sensitivity switches and the logo button can’t be reset, but I don’t think I would want to do that anyway. There are plenty of presets to choose from - ranging from the usual back and forward browser keys to fancy built in features such as the Instant Viewer which is a poor man’s Expose clone:

If you don’t like any of the preset options you can us the macro feature which lets you bind a given button to a series of actions. You can essentially configure any chain of keystrokes, with pauses, modifiers and etc. The macro editor is pretty straightforward and user friendly:

What is even better is that you can configure buttons on a per-application basis. This is great news for me as a gamer since I can bind the thumb buttons to different key combinations for every game. In fact, the Sidewinder promo materials tout it as the ultimate gaming mouse and the brochure included in the box talks at length about the “Quick Turn” feature. Naturally it doesn’t work out of the box - you actually have to choose on the intelisense config screen before you start the game. Then, you have to configure it in the game by pressing and holding the bound button, and doing 360 degree turn. Once you do that and release the button a quick stroke will do a half turn which should swing you around 180 degrees. It’s a nice feature but nothing spectacular.

One thing that really seemed odd to me was that the drivers were not included in the box - I actually had to go and download them from the MS site. The mouse worked fine out of the box on WinXP but there was no way to really configure the extra buttons or change the dpi presets.

Here is a show stopper though - when my machine crashed and I booted Knoppix the sidewinder went completely dead. I had to switch back to my old Microsoft Optical USB Mouse to actually back up my data. Of course this was an older (last year or so) Knoppix release so maybe things have improved. I haven’t tried this mouse with Ubuntu or any recent live CD yet. But be warned - Sidewinder is not really a standard mouse and Linux support might be spotty. If you are a Linux user I would probably recommend one of the fancy Logitech mice that is supported by the Btnx package.

Would I recommend it? Yes, it’s a great mouse. If you have big hands, you are going to fucking love this one my friend. If not, you will still appreciate the slick design, the weight system, the dpi switching and the great tactile response you get from the thumb buttons and the scroll wheel. The size is really not a huge issue, and I hardly even notice it anymore. So yes, I think it’s money well spent - unless you are a linux user, a person with very small hands/short fingers or a lefty. It’s actually not the worst mouse to use left handed (it doesn’t have that heavy slant and profiled thumb groove like some other mice) but the thumb buttons are hard to press with your pinky.

My cousin got herself a nice HD TV, and I think she is giving me subtle hints that might want some kind of HD media player to go with it for Christmas. And when I say subtle hints I mean, she flat out told me. Unfortunately there are currently two formats on the market and neither one of them wants to die. Best idea would probably be to hold off and see which one becomes a standard. But, if you had to buy one before the end of the year, which would it be?

I’m leaning towards HD DVD because both the players and the media are cheaper, and it doesn’t involve Sony - the most evil company of the years. But then again, I could buy her a PS3 which is more of an entertainment system rather than just a pure game console anyway, and then “borrow it” from time to time . Especially since I desperately want to play Assassins Creed and it definitely won’t run on my computer. Heh…

Given a choice, which one would you pick?

Note that there is no “none of the above” option cause I kinda want to see which one is more popular. So even if you are not planing to buy one, which one do you think is going to win the format war? Which one would you like to win?

Lastly, does anyone here own a HD player? Which one did you buy? What brand? Are you happy with it? Do you have any suggestions for someone shopping around for a HD player?

I just inherited a Logitech VX Revolution mouse - one of those high end mice that I could not bring myself to buy. And by inherited I mean someone who was leaving dropped off their company laptop with all the peripherals and I was lucky enough to call dibs on the mouse. Now I have it sitting on my desk, replacing a much less expensive wired Logitech mouse. It seems barely used, and the wirelessness is a really nice feature for my cluttered desk. I no longer have that mouse cord getting in the way.

The mouse is nice, but not all that special. It seems a bit more accurate, and it is comfortable but I’m not entirely sure if I would buy one. It’s a notebook mouse so it’s slightly smaller than my old mouse, but I guess thats not a bad thing, considering that my new humongous keyboard takes like half my desk. The middle mouse button is a bit stiff and takes considerably more force to push down than on most regular mice. The zoom bar is located in a really weird, out of the way place that kinda makes it a bit useless. Still, it’s a very nice mouse so I’m not going to complain. I just need to remember to switch it off when I leave for home to conserve the battery.

Now the task at hand was to get the damn thing working under Dapper. By default my Kubuntu completely ignored the zoom bar, site tilts of the scroll-wheel and the little button above it. The side buttons were detected as right and middle mouse buttons. So the mouse was functional, but not fully.

I found this lovely thread on Ubuntu forums with a solution. There is an app out there called btnx designed with the Logitech Revolution and MX high end mice in mind. It let’s you configure all the nifty additional buttons. The newest version has a very nice GTK GUI that let’s you detect and configure all the buttons using an easy to use wizard. Unfortunately I couldn’t use that version because it requires GTK 2.10.x and I’m on Dapper. The most recent version in the dapper repos is 2.8.x. I didn’t feel like compiling GTK from source just to get a damn configuration wizard working.

Since the VX Revolution is one of the mice fully supported by btnx out of the box, I opted to install the old 0.2.14 version with a text based config and no GUI. The process was very simple:

wget http://www.ollisalonen.com/btnx-0.2.14.tar.gz
tar -xzvf btnx-0.2.14.tar.gz
cr btnx-0.2.14
make
make install

At this point I got a weird error message. Here is the output of the last command:

root@inuyasha:~/btnx-0.3.2/btnx-0.2.14 # make install
chmod a+rx ./scripts/install.sh
./scripts/install.sh
Installing...........
btnx successfully installed. Starting btnx.
/etc/init.d/btnx: line 34: /lib/init/vars.sh: No such file or directory
make: *** [install] Error 1

People in the Ubuntu forums say this is a non-issue. So I went into /etc/init.d/btnx and commented the line that refers to vars.sh (line 34 I think). Then I did:

/etc/init.d/btnx stop
/etc/init.d/btnx start

This restarted the daemon and plopped btnx_config file in my /etc/btnx. This is where all the keys are configured. The side buttons are mapped to key combo that changes tabs in most applications. It works in Firefox as well as Komodo Edit so I’m relatively happy with it. The little button above the scroll wheel refreshes the page in FF which is also a nice touch. I think I’ll keep that. The zoom bar was configured to do Ctrl+Alt+Left and Ctrl+Alt+Right which switches virtual desktops in Gnome. I reconfigured it to Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab for equivalent action in KDE but the key repeats very fast making it a bit difficult to control. To switch desktops one at a time you kinda have to quickly tug at the button instead of holding it. I may change this to something else.

Finally tilting scroll wheel invokes back and forward browser commands by default. I don’t particularly like this option because it seems like it can cause trouble. I can see myself tilting by accident and backing out of a half, written blog post. So I will probably change that also. Then again this haven’t happened yet so go figure.

I might actually swap the functionality between the side buttons and scroll wheel tilting. Use scroll wheel to control tabs, and side buttons to go back and forward. This way there is less risk of accidentally leaving the page while scrolling inside a text box.

My only issue is that one of the side buttons is still sometimes detected as RMB. It’s like a little lottery - I never know what it will do. There might be a way to override it. If I find it, I’ll post it here.