Terminally Incoherent

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 don’t care who you are, or what do you do - if you use a desktop computer, you should have a UPS under your desk. And no, I don’t mean United Parcel Service. Although that would be kinda cool - whenever I would need something I would just drop it under my desk, and they would process it and ship it out immediately. We’d have to shrink them though, or use like gnomes or something… Do you think we could retrain Underpants Gnomes to work at UPS?

Anyway, I digress. What I meant is that you should have a Uninterruptible Power Supply underneath your desk. Why? Well, lets take today as an example. I was sitting at my desk, when all of a sudden I felt a great disturbance in the force as if dozens of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. These were the voices of desktop users in the office, and they synced up with a mild brownout. The lights dimmed and flickered only for a second or two, but it was enough for every single desktop not attached to a UPS on this floor to shut down hard.

Some people lost work, others got their Outlook PST file corrupted and few people could not even boot their machine afterwards. Fun times all around. If each of these people had even a $50 el cheepo UPS under their desk, none of this would happen. They would be happily chugging along just like all the laptop users who never even noticed the brownout.

Needless to say, after all the crying and moaning subsided I got the boss to agree to buy a batch of relatively cheep UPS devices to install for all the desktop workstations. We do get these kinds of power interruptions few times a month, and every single time it’s the same story. I have no clue why I didn’t think about this solution earlier.

And yes, even a really, really cheep UPS that is really just a glorified surge protector with 5 minutes worth of juice inside can save you a major headache, lost work and possible software and hardware damage caused by a hard reset. It’s not just for servers and critical machines. These of course deserve a really good UPS that costs a bundle and weighs a metric ton. You know what I mean, if you ever had to move one of those by yourself. But your regular office workstations, and you family PC at home also deserve some kind of protection. I really think that almost any device that doesn’t take kindly to hard resets, should have a ups of some sort attached to it. Hell, if you own a device and it would make you upset if it shut down unexpectedly while you were using it should probably have one. Not just computers - maybe your Xbox could use one too - this way you won’t loose progress - and hell, maybe you won’t even get disconnected from the multiplayer server. So go and get one or two UPS’s now, and thank me later. You will be grateful that you did next time you experience a brownout, or your power goes out.

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.