Terminally Incoherent

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.

After some deliberation, I decided to pick up a nicer keyboard to replace a very old Compaq piece of junk I was using as my external keyboard at work. That thing has been at the company longer than me, and likely changed hands several times before it became mine. It was time to retire it, so I picked up the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite.

Everyone keeps saying how awesome these things are so I decided to try one out. My first impression? Holy crap - this thing is really high. With the retractable legs up, the back of my keyboard lifts up about 2 inches from the surface of the table. That is really high for a keyboard. If you usually keep your keyboard under the desk on one of those retractable shelf things it might not fit! It really takes more space than a regular keyboard - especially since it has a big, built in palm rest that is not detachable. That said, once you get used to the height it’s actually quite comfortable.

Typing the first sentence on this keyboard was kinda odd, but by the third one I was going with my normal speed again. The split really doesn’t bother me at all now. What does bother me is the odd layout of the arrow keys and the block that holds Home, End, Delete and etc.. The arrow keys are arranged in a + sign formation instead of the normal inverted T. The keys are also smaller than regular ones which totally throws me off. I typically hit right arrow instead of down now. Why the hell would they do that:

The edit button block is also messed up. Instead of 3×2 formation they made it into 2×3 to save horizontal space. First column contains Home, End and Delete while the second one has Page Up, Page Down and Insert. It’s confusing since I’m very used to quickly hitting nearly all of these buttons (save for Insert). This will take some getting used to. In fact, these changes will be harder to get used to than the split.

Here is a tip for keyboard designers - do not change the relative position of any keys - even the purely functional ones. We know where they are supposed to be, and if you switch around the key order it messes us up.

The keyboard is PS/2 but it ships with a PS2 to USB converter. You don’t see many of those around these days. I keep seeing those little green USB to PS/2 plugs all over the place, but not the other way around. Despite not being native USB device Dapper flawlessly recognized it as soon as I plugged it into the USB hub.

All in all, it’s a good keyboard. Its big, and sturdy so I don’t see it breaking any time soon. And I don not have an urge to go back to the standard layout yet. I think I will stick with this one for a while. I mean, typing in the split layout is not some mind shattering experience or anything. Once you get used to the size and hight of this thing, it turns out to be very comfortable. Oh, and it looks cool on my desk. Too bad they decided to mess with the arrow keys and the home/delete block. If they left it alone, it would be almost perfect. Then again, this would actually make the already big and bulky keyboard one or two inches longer. I guess this design choice was somewhat justified but that doesn’t make it any less annoying or inconvenient.

If you look at all the mice and keyboards I owned over the years, you will see a trend: simplicity. All my keyboards are simple, generic 104 key devices that came with the machine. If I buy a mouse I usually get an optical, 2 button, scroll wheel, wired Logitech or Microsoft. I don’t think I ever bought a mouse that cost more than $30-35. The $20 mice I use work just fine, and they last forever.

But, there is a huge market for premium mice and keyboards so obviously some people out there buy them. Hell, some people swear by these things. But I always wonder: do I really need a $70 Sidewinder or a $90 G9? Does it really make that much difference?

I heard people claiming that accuracy, smoothness of the scroll wheel, reconfigurability and buttons are often well worth the higher price. But I’m not entirely convinced. So here is a question for you, the reader.

Do you use a fancy, expensive mouse? If you do, why? Do you feel it really makes the difference? What is your favorite mouse? Do you think that spending $100 on a mouse would change my life for the better? Same goes for the keyboard. I really want to know. Maybe I’m missing out, using low end products when I should really treat myself to something more luxurious. And I do spend most of my time in front of my computer. In fact, chances are that if I’m awake and not in the car there is either a desktop or a laptop somewhere within my reach. So if I was to invest something that would improve my everyday experience, I would be utilizing it to the fullest.

I went out and bought the shiny, sleek and sexy LG VX8700. I know, I was thinking about getting the enV - but in the end this seemed like a better choice. The enV just felt bulky and clumsy when I held it in my hand. On top of that, I don’t really text that much. Part of it is of course the fact that I can’t type on the damn phone keypad to save my life. But was it worth the extra money, and dealing with the size of that phone for added convenience?

On the other hand look at the 8700 - thin, sleek and with a hit of awesome:

This is kinda what Razr wanted to be but never was. My cousin got one some time ago, and so far she is happy with it. I also read several reviews of this phone, and they were mostly favorable. The the main complaints seem to be that the SD-card slot is hidden behind the battery (I don’t really care about that) and that it does not have any front side buttons to control music volume, and switch songs. Since I’m not really planning to use this phone for listening music, that didn’t really bother me either.

The software is a fairly standard, crappy verizon POS but it seems fairly responsive. It has a 2 megapixel camera, a loud speaker, and big and bright screen. The keyboard is very flat, so it’s not very easy to type by touch. But then again, the keys are big, and they light up very bright in the dark so it’s not such a big problem. The device is supposed to have a GPS unit, but apparently you need to purchase the GPS software via the GetItNow feature, and pay a monthly subscription fee. Meh… They can shove that fee up their ass. I don’t really need a GPS.

The best part here is that this phone is supported by BitPim. All I have to do to be able to transfer my pictures, address book and music is to buy the USB cable on ebay for around $10. Which is a bargain, considering that these fuckers charged me over $20 for a shitty plastic belt clip that goes with my phone. Total ripoff - I probably should have went for some 3rd party product, or hit up ebay for it…

So anyway, the phone looks and feels good. It’s very shiny and weighs almost nothing. I like it.

None of my readers fessed up to owning an iPhone yet. So what phones do you guys have? I have a Samsung SCH-A670 which kinda looks like this:

I had it for a while, and while it served me well, I’m getting sick of it. I need a new one. I was thinking about either the Samsung SCH-U740 or the LG enV. Both have a full qwerty keyboard which I like. The Samsung is a very thin flip phone, while the enV is a bulky brick that opens up in landscape mode to reveal a nice big screen. It also has a better camera, better keyboard layout, better speaker and generally gets better reviews. Initially I was leaning toward the Samsung because of the size, but after I held both of them in my had, and read more about them I think I like enV better. Here is how they look:

enV on the left, SCH-U740 on the right

I haven’t decided yet which one I want. Which one would you pick given a choice? Btw, I probably won’t buy the data plan - but I like to have a full keyboard for texting.

What kind of phones do you guys have?