Magic Mouse is none of that. It is a rather flimsy and decorative. It really looks nice next to my laptop, but it is in no way as sturdy and dependable as my trusty Sidewinder.

The Magic Mouse really looks nice next to a MBP

So why did I want one? Because it really does fit with my laptop. You see, my MBP is my untethered mobile workstation. When I’m at home and at my desk I usually work on my desktop because nothing beats the comfort of a 24″ monitor, a sidewinder mouse and the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. But when I want to work or browse the web while on the road, I want to travel light. I don’t want to be burdened by too many cords, USB dongles and other optional plug-in devices. Magic Mouse works on Bluetooth which makes it perfect fit.

Not only that, it is also a multi-touch device. One of the things I really enjoy while working under OSX are the built in touch-pad gestures. I love the two finger sideways swap that gets me to a clean workspace for example. These sort of things became part of my workflow on a Mac, but the touchpad only gets you so far. If you are working on a flat surface like a desk, it really helps to have a mouse handy – and I wanted a mouse that would let me preserve at least some of the gestures I have learned to love.

Hence, Magic Mouse – not something that I would normally buy, but something that did fit a specific set of mobility related needs. How do I like it so far? It’s not bad actually.

One thing that does bother me a bit is the lack of haptic feedback. The mouse does “click” as a mouse should – that’s not the problem. If you wanted to use it as a standard “Apple Mouse” that sports a single button, it would be perfect. But I’m a power user, and a single button is not enough for me. Fortunately, Apple knows that you can’t force people to work with single button devices – they will find ways around it. So in modern versions of OSX you can actually turn the second button click straight from System Preferences:

Apple knows that most people want two button mice these days.

This works very well. I’ve been using the mouse for several days now, and I have never had a mistaken click situation – left always registers as left, and right always registers as right. It just work. But, alas – I am lost without a middle button. Sadly, Apple has not acknowledged the existence or need for such an input methodology yet. Perhaps that feature will ship with Snow Lion, or whatever the next release of OSX will be called.

Sometimes I wonder how other mac users browse the web without a ubiquitous middle click? On the touch-pad I ended up installing a nifty app called Magic Prefs which allowed me to configure a three-finger-click as middle mouse. Since that app was already running on my machine, I used it to add a similar feature to my Magic Mouse:

How I add middle click to my Magic Mouse

I found that three-finger-click is not comfortable on the small frame of a Magic Mouse, so instead I opted for a gesture that can only be called a “long-finger-click”. I think the picture above explains it quite well – it involves laying down your finger along the vertical axis of the mouse – which I find is exactly what my hand wants to do when I decide to middle-click.

Unfortunately, the detection of this gesture is a bit iffy. Part of it might be the software implementation – if Apple acknowledged middle-click as a valid user need they could probably devise a very tight detection with wide margin of error for this gesture. Built in OS features tend to be much more streamlined and tested than third party apps. Still, the other part of the equation is the lack of aforementioned haptic feedback. On my Sidewinder the middle click is effortless because the mouse wheel is big, metallic and textured (for better grip). Magic mouse has a glassy surface, and you have to more or less guess where to place your finger. It is not a hardware problem – it is a design paradigm issue that he are yet to solve.

Would I recommend this mouse to someone else? It depends. If you have a MacBook, and you want a portable, wire/dongle free device that will just work and let you combine the touch gestures with a flexibility of a mouse then yeah – it is a good pick. If you are running Windows I’d probably stay clear. Multi-touch under Windows tends to be as wonky as Bluetooth mouse support.

Oh, and in case you don’t live in US, let me explain this joke by oversimplifying it. AT&T is known for having poor coverage in certain areas while Verizon is known for having better coverage but shittier non-GSM compatible network. So, you know – it’s a trade-off.

As you may or may not remember, I kinda liked my Blackberry Storm when I first got it. I don’t think I ever retracted the statements in that post, but my opinion about the phone changed quite drastically since then. The first generation Storm was very buggy. The phone would freeze up all the time (especially when USB cable or charger was connected), the text messaging system would glitch and refuse to scroll and show you the newest message or reply to it, the Blackberry App World (primary way of installing new apps on the phone) was so bloated that it would make the phone unresponsive for like a minute after every action, and the device usually took about 10 minutes to reboot itself. Oh, and the only way to recover from a freeze was to pull a battery – which I had to do 2-3 times whenever I wanted to charge the phone, which in turn made the battery loose and prone to falling out. It was essentially a train wreck of a phone, and the only reason why I kept it for so long, was that I did not want to pay a full price for a decent Android device.

And then, right when my contract came up for a renewal the Verizon iPhone hit the store shelves. Considering that everyone on the market is trying to imitate this device, buying it made a lot of sense to me. Droid phones are great, but in many ways they are still playing catch-up to Apple which is sort of the undisputed market leader.

My iPhone Home Page

Not that the iPhone is perfect. It is a closed platform that only runs code blessed by Apple and it currently can’t do flash due to the ongoing pissing match between Steve Jobs and Adobe. Not only that, but the device also does not have user-swappable battery which still kinda worries me. But I remind myself that I have actually never bought a replacement battery for any phone I have owned. I just never needed to do this. Not even for the shitty blackberry.

Obviously there are pros and cons of going with Apple. But I do not regret it so far. Switching from a Blackberry to an iPhone is like going from… Shit… I wanted to make a car analogy here but I don’t really know that much about cars. Hmmm… How are we going to do this. How about this:

Switching from a Blackberry to an iPhone is like going from $shitty_car to a $cool_car.

Now imagine that $shitty_car is a cheap, rickety and not very fast, and $cool_car is an awesome, sleek convertible model that gets you all the ladies. I guess my point is that the difference is like night and day. It actually makes me wonder if we should even classify Blackberries as smart phones. I rather call them smart-ish, because they are clearly not even in the same league as the iPhone, HTC Incredible or Droid X. Do you know what makes the difference? Performance. Blackberries just do not have the raw CPU power and memory to compete here.

Let me give you an example, when I tried to check my Twitter or Facebook feed on the Storm I could actually feel the device straining to download and render all that data. It would usually take the respective app about a minute to fully load an updated feed, along with it’s images. I always assumed that part of the problem was a slow network connection. Only after I got the iPhone I realized that it was not. I’m on the same 3G network, trying to fetch the same type of data and my phone is like “Pssshh, that’s it? Here you go – *PLOP*”.

In addition to being really fast (compared to my last phone at least) the iPhone is also very sleek and intuitive. When I first started the device a popup message decided to teach me how to rearrange the icons on my home screen, but I promptly closed it mumbling “fuck you phone, I don’t care….” 5 minutes later I realized that I did care, but I couldn’t figure out a way to bring that help box back. So I decided experimenting with the icons. I knew that tapping launched the apps, and that dragging was used for scrolling so I did the only other thing that I could think of: I held my finger on an icon for a few seconds. Suddenly all the icons un-hinged themselves from the home screen with a plopping sound, and became wobbly indicating they could now be dragged around the screen. Then I accidentally dragged one icon onto another only to realize that this created a “folder”. I don’t know about you but this seemed incredibly more intuitive and user friendly than the Blackberry way of choosing a move option from a menu, and then navigating a folder choosing dialog.

This is pretty much my impression of the iPhone right now. Very sleek, very intuitive and very fast. Granted, if you just want a decent smart phone, the droid devices are just as good. I was comparing phones with a friend who has the Incredible and they were actually very close feature and performance wise. The only difference is that droid phones sometimes has issues with resident apps running in the background, dragging the system down while the Apple specifically forbids this sort of behavior. But as long as you know about it, and you flush your memory every once in a while, it is not a problem. And you are using an open platform which is a plus.

I guess what I’m saying is: get off the Blackberry platform. No seriously, their time has passed. Modern smart phones such as the iPhone or most of the high end Android devices just leave them in the dust.

PROTIP: if you are a new Verizon iPhone user like me and you are trying to use the VZ Contact Transfer app to migrate your address book from an old phone make sure you disable Wifi before you do this. For some reason the app won’t send you a text message with the security code unless you are connected via 3G and only 3G.

Now, do we have any other iPhone users on here? Care to share your pro-tips? How about must-have apps? I already have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr add Reddit covered. I also downloaded a port of Nethack. What are your must have apps? :P

I loaded it up with bunch of books I thought he would like, and then I found out he was up till like 3am that night, finished a book and started another one. I believe that this present was a success. But we did hit a little snag at the beginning. When my dad unpacked it he thought that the font was a little bit to small for his liking, and asked me if it is possible to increase it. I said sure, took the device and spent like 15 minutes trying to make that happen.

I checked every single menu and settings page at least 5 times, and then I decided I am at a complete loss. Would Amazon leave out such an important usability feature? Would this device get such good reviews, and such a huge user base if it did not have such a fundamental function as changing the default font? It had to be there, but I just could not find it. So we passed the damn thing around the table and everyone took a crack at finding the elusive feature. We have failed to locate it.

So I turned to the internet for help. It turns out that we were not the only confused users out there. Google gave me dozens of results for phrases like “how to change font size in Kindle” or “Kindle default font size”. It wasn’t that difficult to locate the answer. It was this:

Kindle font option button

There is a tiny little button to the right of space, which looks exactly like a second Alt button. But it is not. It opens a little menu that lets you change the font size, default line spacing, screen orientation and etc. It is actually very customizable device, and I was able to tweak it to my dad’s liking in just a matter of seconds. The problem was finding the button. Let me try to enumerate the ways in which this is bad interface design:

1. The font key does not look like a function key

   If you look at Kindle’s keyboard, all regular keys are small and round. This includes characters, numbers and common modifier keys such as shift, alt and etc. All the keys that are not actually used in active typing, but have some other function (like calling up menus or navigation) have distinct elongated shape. They also all spell out their function (home, back, menu, etc..) The tiny Aa key is not used for typing – it calls up a menu, but it looks just like a modifier key which is why I never actually looked at it when searching for the feature.

2. The font changing key can be easily mistaken for another key

   The key looks like the right Alt. on most keyboards Alt keys are mirrored on both sides of the space bar. So the placement, and the label (which starts with capital A) were very unfortunate.

3. The font menu is not in the intuitive location

   I was actually watching other people try to search for this function, and everyone did the same thing. They went to the menu first. I seemed logical, no? Where do you change configuration settings for this device? Probably in the main menu somewhere. It never actually occurred to me that there could be a dedicated button for this particular set of features.

   Not that such a button is a bad idea. You probably will be changing the font size and screen orientation more often than any other feature of your device, so reserving an easy to access button for it is definitely a good idea. It is just that the button was very well hidden.

I’m not sure how people haven’t noticed it in testing. Granted, I probably would not notice this flaw at all if my dad did not bring the issue up. For me the font was just the right size. So I guess I can kinda see it slipping through the cracks.

Other than this little quirk (which is not an impediment at all once you know about it) the device is very cool. It is tiny, light, comfortable to hold and the distinctive display is really easy on the eyes. It does look like paper, and it has none of the glare of an LCD screen so you can comfortably read it outside on a sunny day for example.

If you think you could use an ebook reader, I highly recommend it – especially since the Wifi-only version is dirt cheap nowadays. And trust me, you don’t really need 3G for this device. The built in web browser is actually pretty cool, but these days you can probably get same (or better) results on your smart phone.

I will leave you with an interesting observation: every single person who was checking out my dad’s Kindle for the first time did the same thing. They all started to swipe their fingers across the screen in an attempt to scroll around or advance a page. Then they looked confused when it did not work. I can’t believe how quickly have we gotten used to the ubiquitous touch screen. We truly are living in the future. It is like that common movie trope where a time traveler from the future can’t figure out how to use a 20th century computer because it does not have a touch screen and it does not react to voice commands.

Storm - the poor mans iPhone knock off

I’ve been eying Blackberry Storm which has been hailed as low quality, poor man’s iPhone ripoff. But the damn thing has been attracting negative reviews the way a turd attracts flies. I watched some video reviews and saw it was incredibly sluggish – the reviewer actually had to cut away because the device simply wouldn’t flip back to the vertical mode which sort of made me reconsider buying it. Then again, supposedly a lot of these early bugs were fixed by the recent firmware upgrade.

I had a chance to play with it the other day and I actually didn’t find it so bad. Changing the orientation worked fine (not like in the video), and the typing was ok. Granted, the click screen is a little wonky but it didn’t seem like a deal breaker. I think I could live with it – it actually felt like a step up from trying to type on my non-qwerty LG phone. It seems that Storms touch screen gets slammed the most by people who switched over from other Blackberry models and felt that it was throttling their typing speed by not allowing to press 2 or more buttons at once. I’d have to agree that a physical keyboard and iPhones multi-touch interface are probably superior. But I didn’t hate it.

The browser was fine too. I went to my company website and it looked great. I didn’t try Terminally Incoherent cause I was at work, and… It would take a lot of typing. Yes, I am aware my url is pretty difficult to type and remember. I just can’t figure out how to shorten it and I’m pretty sure that Texas Instruments won’t let me have ti.com domain.

The Storm user who allowed me to play with her phone confirmed that the device sometimes does lock up. She said it happened to her only twice since she purchased it. She didn’t have any other complaints – and said she was pleased with the purchase. Unfortunately she couldn’t really tell me how is it on the application side. How much software and support is there for the Storm. I mean, I know I’m not going to get iPhone like variety of apps but I’d like to know that I’m not investing in a prematurely dead platform that no one is developing for anymore due to the bad press.

Any Storm users around here? How is that phone treating you? Is it worth investing into? And if not, what else is out there. Should I look at Blackberries at all? Curve maybe?

I looked through the reviews of Verizon smart phones on CNET and it seems that not a single one of them was really rated positively. The reviewers could not say enough good things about AT&T’s Blackberry Bold and of course the iPhone (apparently both can cure cancer, and iPhone even has a free app for ending the world hunger but no one has ever bothered to download it) but they pretty much trashed every single Verizon device.

Basically I just need a phone that would let me get email, browse the web and have some applications for stuff like Twitter, Facebook and maybe let me upload pictures to Flickr. I was looking at storm because I do have an iPhone envy – so I naturally went for the cheep knock-off. But I’m willing to consider alternatives. What should I get?

Would you switch providers in my situation to get the iPhone?

The damn thing simply stopped charging one day. Either the AC adapter gave way or the internal power supply went to the big data center in the sky. Either way, the battery juice ran out and the laptop is now just a paperweight. I could buy a new power supply, but frankly, I don’t think it’s worth it. The machine was ancient and in a less than perfect condition (cracks, scratches, dead pixels, etc…). There is just no point in investing any money into it.

The good news is that I found an even older, and slower computer to replace it – a Texas Instruments Extensa Scholar ESS2:

Next to this baby, the Compaq looks like a speed demon. The Extensa is equipped with 133 MHz CPU, sports a whopping 16 MB RAM and has an impressive 1.3 GB hard drive. This thing is ancient beyond words! It is also in much worse condition than the Compaq. Both batteries on this system are dead. The main battery is the size of a a small club, and I’m pretty sure it could be used as a deadly bashing weapon in a pinch. But I’m not worried about that – I can just keep it plugged into AC at all times. What is worse is that the CMOS battery is fried as well. This means I can’t change any BIOS settings such as, for example, the boot order. Or rather, I can change them but they don’t stick.

This effectively means I can’t boot the machine from a CD to install linux. Fortunately the laptop came with an external floppy disk that is the first boot device. So I could use a floppy boot loader of some sort that would punt me off to the CD drive and allow for CD based installation. Slackware ships with the right tool for this. It’s called sbootmgr.dsk. Just create a bootable floppy with that image with RAWRITE, pop it into the drive and you will be presented with a nifty boot menu. The only problem is that I no longer own a computer with an operational floppy drive. The Compaq had one, but it is dead. I actually had to locate an old computer at work, and create this boot disk there.

The question now, is what to do with this machine? I want to install linux on it, but I’m not sure if Ubuntu will actually run on this thing. Any recommendations for super-light linux distros that would be good for this machine? I will probably run it X-less, or with a very light window manager such as ratpoison.

Here are few caveats:

1. The laptop does not have any USB ports
2. It has no network card of any kind
3. It does have a PCIMCIA, but…
4. I do not have any PCIMCIA ethernet cards at home
5. I only have the Linksys WPC54G ver 1.2 Wifi card
6. My Wifi is WPA encrypted

No matter which distro I choose, I will need to figure out how to get that damn Linksys card working. Some distros make it easier than others. I believe newer releases of Ubuntu might actually support it out of the box. In the past however I always had to use nidswrapper for it.

Perhaps I should get myself one of those more widely supported wifi cards for my experiments with these ancient machines. Anyway, what OS would you put on it given the above parameters. Keep in mind that the machine only has 16MB of RAM and 1 GB of HD to work with.

All in all, it served me well for over a year. Lately though I started having problems with it. It would just stop working for me in the middle of the class forcing me to use the keyboard to advance slides. Students were slowly getting accustomed to the 5 minutes of extra time at the start of the lecture as I tinkered with the damn contraption. Sometimes I was able to coerce it to work. Other times, I had to stop messing with it and start the class.

Eventually I figured out what was wrong with it. The spring that holds the single AAA battery in place lost some of it’s “springiness”. It became less “springy”. It “de-springified” itself, so to say. As a result and the battery gained unexpected freedom of choice. It could choose to stay in place or slide slightly out of position. The battery cover was not designed support it, and it did not hold it in place. Instead it gave it just enough space to slip off the connector, but not enough space to rattle around. So you wouldn’t know the battery was lose, until you popped the cover up, and pushed it back in.

Any sudden movement had the potential of shaking the battery out of alignment again, forcing you to pop the cover again to restore power to the device. It’s actually very distracting when you are trying to teach something.

So I decided it is time for a new “clicker”. I also decided I’m not going to go for the cheapest thing available this time around. I believe that the Targus was pretty much the crappiest model available, and I’m actually amazed it lasted that long. It was sort of an experiment – I actually didn’t know I would use it so much. I ended up liking it, and now I consider the clicker/laser pointer combo to be an indispensable tool.

I believe that if you are going to be using something a lot, then it’s probably a good idea to invest a little bit of money into it. For example, I spend most of the hours in my day typing on a keyboard and using a mouse. I go to work, and I type and mouse around for about 8 hours. Then I go back home only to type and mouse around some more.

It is in my best interest to ensure that the keyboard and the mouse I use so much are of decent quality. That’s why I’m using the Sidewinder mouse and the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Both are high end items that I paid premium for, but hey – it was worth it. You can save on other things, but these two items are essential tools that I use both for work an for play.

Same goes for the “clicker”. I teach once or twice a week, and I sometimes do get to present in front of people for other purposes. It is not an essential tool for my job, but it helps. So I picked the Logitech Cordless 2.4 GHz Presenter which was one of the higher end toys. I don’t think it’s top of the line, but it seemed like a good investment. Besides, I never really had a bad experience with Logitech products – their mice and keyboards are usually very dependable. So I was hoping they use the same quality control for their “clicker” things. Here is a picture for you:

Yes, it does look a little bit like an electric shaver/hair trimmer from afar. It’s smaller than that though. It is much smaller than that. Something that big would be impractical. Here is another picture, this time with someones hand so that you can see the scale of this thing:

As you can see, it’s quite handy. It fits well in your hand, and is larger than the Targus model, which is actually a good thing. You can get a better grip on it, and the sleek elongated shape makes it easier to hold while you are pointing at things. The USB connector slides right into the unit which means I won’t loose it or forget it as easily. It always annoyed me that the Targus model did not provide this feature.

One of the very crucial things with these presentation tools is that they absolutely need to work out of the box. I need to be able to walk into a classroom, plug it in and go. Installing drivers is out of the question since the school machines are pretty tightly locked down. I’m happy to report that this model worked flawlessly under Windows XP. I haven’t tested it under Vista yet, but I assume it won’t be much different.

And yes, it has an LCD screen. Why would it have and LCD screen? Well, it’s a timer which is what really sold me on this model. You see, keeping track of time has always been an issue for me. When I do presentations, I’m in full screen mode which means I don’t see the clock on the screen. So if I need to check the time, I have to look at my watch… Which is my cellphone. Yeah, I actually don’t own any wrist mounted watches that work – the batteries run out in all of them, and I have been to lazy to go see a clock-master-repairman-guy to perform the sacred ritual of battery replacement.

Yeah, I did replace my watch batteries once or twice but half of the time the operation involved me putting dents and scratches into the back panel, loosing the rubber insulation parts and not sealing the thing properly. So I’d rather give the nicer, more expensive watches to a professional. But I’m kindoff scared – there is an off-chance that I do in fact have latent superpowers (something that I have always suspected) and the watch-guy may turn out to by Sylar and he will remove my brain or something.

Ok, that was a Heroes Season 1 reference if you haven’t caught it. I haven’t really watched the show since then – I will need to catch up one day. The first few episodes of season 2 failed to capture my attention. But I digress..

Back to presentations, and checking time. Looking at my cell phone is probably not the best time keeping solution. It’s hard to do it discretely. I would sometimes take it out, and put it on the desk for easy access, but most of the time I forget and leave it on my belt clip. So if I need to check the time, I have to reach for my belt, un-clip the phone and push a button so that the front LCD display lights up. The Logitech Presenter tool has a built in timer that you can set yourself. It’s actually very easy one-button set up. Each time you press the “timer” button you add 5 minutes to the counter and it starts counting down back to zero. At any time you can glance at the display to see how much time you have left. When the countdown reaches 5 minutes it will alert you with a slight vibration. It will do it again at the 2 minute mark to let you know it’s time to wrap up. The signal is inaudible when you hold it in your hand. It can also be a bit startling at first. I knew it was coming, but it sort of surprised me during my first lecture. You get used to it though, and it is a very helpful.

This particular “clicker” comes with a nice little protective case you can slide it into so that it doesn’t get too bumped up in your backpack. The button locations are pretty good, and the laser pointer is bright and… Pointy?

I only used it couple of times, but so far it has been performing flawlessly. I must say I’m happy with the purchase, and I recommend it to anyone searching for a good presentation tool. The timer is a life saver, and it is worth getting it fro that feature alone.

I also bought the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite which I use at the office. At home I was still using an old Dell keyboard that originally came with my computer. I didn’t mind it, because it was simple and functional. I was considering buying a split keyboard for myself, but since Christmas was coming I simply put that on my gift list. :)

My cousin was nice enough to get me the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 this year. It is actually the high end cousin of the Elite keyboard with the standard inverted T and normal Home/End/Insert key block.

It has all the features I look for in a keyboard these days, namely:

1. Pronounced and raised wrist rest
2. Keyboard split in two blocks
3. Standard inverted T block for arrow keys
4. Insert, Delete, Home, End keys being in predictable places

I especially like the wrist support section. It is nice and wide allowing you to rest your wrists as you type but unlike Elite it is actually soft to touch. I think it has some sort of jelly inside, but unlike many of the wrist support thingymabobs you can buy it has a slick leather like finish to it which it will be easy to keep clean and should be less prone to wear and tear. I found that the cloth finishes on things like that tend to thin out, lose color and start to look filthy after a while.

The keyboard itself seems a bit bigger than the elite. It is actually wider, and the keys seem to be more spaced out. The numeric pad is like 5 miles away from the home row for example. But it also might be an illusion caused by the curvature of this keyboard. All ergonomic keyboards tend to have this hump toward the middle (which culminates where the keys are being split) and the sides taper of at an angle. This is actually by design, and it helps you to keep your hands at a more natural position. As you can see on the image above the 4000 has a very pronounced hump where the designers placed the fairly useless zoom bar. At least useless to me, because I hardly ever use any zoom features for anything, and I have yet to figure out how to re-bind that thing. Needless to say, by being there it actually forces the split key blocks to be farther apart than in the elite. Which is probably why the whole thing seems so wide.

The keyboard has few dozen additional keys all over the place. There are actually 14 special buttons above the function key row, and additional parentheses , equals and backspace above the numpad. Fortunately you can re-bind nearly all of them using the InteliType software that shifts with the keyboard. Yeah, I really hate the fact that I must install a driver to actually use the full functionality of my keyboard but eh… You either do that, or you are left with bunch of dead keys.

5 out of the 13 special keys are so called “Favorites Buttons” which have no built in function. You are actually supposed to bind them yourself to commonly used programs:

This is neat, until you realize that there is actually no way of reaching these keys from above the home row, without lifting your hand. This severely limits their usefulness, and relegates them to the realm of novelty feature. Next to these you have your volume control, calculator button (which I immediately rebound to use the XP Power Toy calc), and the Web, Search and Mail buttons which I will probably use for something else.

Strangely enough, the keyboard only has one Windows key (on the left) and one Menu Key (on the right). Most keyboards have them mirrored on both sides just like Alt keys. Then again, Elite also had one of each so I guess this is a design choice MS made for all of their ergonomic keyboards.

I have only one gripe with this keyboard. It is a minor annoyance, which I wouldn’t even mention if this was not a $60 keyboard. When I pay that much for a keyboard, I expect quality. Sadly, there seems to be a little play in the space bar. It seems to be a little loose on the left side. As if there was a few millimeter gap somewhere allowing the key to move up and down slightly without being depressed. It feels perfectly fine on the right, but when you hit it with your left thumb (as I commonly do) it makes an unusual “clunk” sound as it drops down a millimeter or two and the right side rises slightly in a sea-saw effect of sorts. At first I thought that this was simply a flawed keyboard, but I noticed that I was not the only person with this issues. Quite a few people are complaining of the same exact problem in Amazon comments and product forums and elsewhere online.

I believe that this is an inherent design flaw caused by the sheer size and curvature of the key. The space bar is actually bent and extends the whole length of the hump. This curvature combined with it’s length and would require some stabilization and support, which is likely missing here. Thus, it introduces the slight play which is detectable and a bit annoying. It is not a deal breaker though – I think I can live with it. I also heard you can correct this by taking off the key, and slightly bending the support bar inside of it. I might try that at some point if it keeps annoying me.

Here is a tip for Microsoft design team – in the next model, just split the damn space bar in two. Most ergonomic keyboard manufacturers do that these days, probably to avoid precisely this sort of issue from surfacing. Either that, or put the Windows key on both sides of the split, making the space bar smaller. A $60 keyboard should not have a clunky space bar!

Other than that, it is a fine piece of hardware. I’ve been using it for 3 days now and I think it is very comfortable. I’d recommend it whole heatedly if it wasn’t for the space bar issue. For some people it might be a deal breaker. If you are easily annoyed with that stuff you’d probably be better off with the Elite. But then you’d have to deal with the non-standard arrow key block, which may be even more annoying. :P

I have not tested this keyboard under Linux, and probably won’t for some time because the box I hooked it up to is currently running single boot WinXP. At some point I’ll try to hook it up to my Ubuntu box and see how it works, but I don’t feel like crawling underneath my desk and untangling cables again. Considering this is a Microsoft product, I’d expect half-assed Linux support. But, we shall see…

Every once in a while (read every hour on the hour) some user calls or walks over to the help desk and cries that his or her computer is slow. It is usually true because spyware and aware tends to be quite resource intensive, and our users are hell bent on installing all of it. And by that I mean they go out of the way to collect new spyware and trojans they don’t have yet. If they find a new piece on the interwebs they go “Oh! I don’t have this one yet!” and they install it. Reimaging their drives is just a temporary measure. Once they are handed in a clean computer, they go straight back to collecting malware with doubled efforts – as if they were trying to rebuild their lost collections.

The only other thing we can do to fix the “my computer is slow” whines is add more memory. It is a simple procedure, and memory is relatively cheap so we often put in extra RAM chips into the computers we reimage so that the users can have more resources to run their mallware. Today someone dropped off a Latitude D520 which according to the specs (and by specs I mean the Dell website) is supposed to be upgradable to 4GB of RAM and has 2 DIMM sockets. Only they couldn’t find the second socket. We had like people standing around and staring at this machine with dumbfounded looks on their faces. I walk over and they show me: the DIMM A socket is not there.

Normally these Dell machines have a little hatch on the back. You loosen up one screw, pop it open and it gives you access to the memory. This machine was a bit different, in that only a single socket labeled DIMM B was present. I even snapped a picture of it with my phone:

I flipped the machine over, booted it up and checked amount of installed memory. It said 1GB and the chip sitting in that exposed DIMM was a 512MB one. CPU-Z confirmed that the mobo had exactly 2 memory slots. Something was amiss here. For a second I wondered if the remaining 512MB is not by some chance soldered into mobo but CPU-Z said that was not the case, so I was relieved. I suggested that maybe the DIMM fell out when they were moving the machine, and sent my minions to check underneath the desks and in the hallway while I worked.

The DIMM socket had to be somewhere on the motherboard. The question was, where exactly was it located. I studied the machine from all sides looking for other access points but found none. It seemed that I will need to take it apart to find out. So I started breaking it down. I snapped off the hinge guard, unscrewed the keyboard, moved it aside and… PEKABOO! I found it:

Do you see it? It is right there, underneath the keyboard. Very odd place to put memory if you ask me. Let me give you a closer look:

Case solved! I’m not sure if this design is present in all Latitude laptops or only in D5xx line. I have a D830 on my desk so I might check if I have the same odd mobo layout. Most of the other machines in the office are Inspirons and a few new Vostros floating around (yeah, the powers that be like Dell a lot) and they all seem to have their both DIMM sockets located on the back, side by side. Which IMHO is the right way to do it. For the D520 replacing both DIMM’s is a two step process that involves removing and re-attaching the keyboard.

Anyways, I figured I’ll share a heart warming story about loosing and finding a DIMM socket.

So you can probably see why we are researching alternative phone system. Someone recommended Packet8 to us and we decided to give it a whirl – especially since they give you a free 30 day trial of their service. I was actually quite surprised how easy it was to deploy. You just take out the phone from the box, plug it in, activate it by typing in the MAC address in Packet8’s online control panel, pick a number and you are ready to go. You can set up a fully functional PBX in less than 20 minutes – that is, if you don’t mind using VoIP and having the servers located offsite and managed by a 3^rd party.

We are using the Packet8 6755i phones which are actually very nice:

There is only one problem I have with them: they are not wireless. There is nothing wrong with that per se. In fact, I anticipated that. Still this is an issue since our office is pretty much all wireless. We actually do not own the building and we have no cat 5 running through the walls. Or rather there is but it is not ours and we can’t really use it. In effect our setup looks roughly like this:

I’m omitting bunch of people with laptops who migrate from cube to cube on any given day and I might be missing a workstation or two in there. But roughly this is the network – everything except the servers, and 1 or 2 workstations that are located close to the switch is wireless. The little hub where we have a piece of Ethernet heaven is divided from the rest of the workstations by an area with a rather heavy foot traffic. No way to pull cables there. Shit has to be bridged.

I needed a network bridge device of some sort, which would pick up the Wifi signals from across the hall and allow me to plug in bunch of phones or a switch into it using a regular cat 5 cable. I needed a Wifi to Ethernet bridge. Fortunately these things are not so hard to find.

Initially I was hoping to just use the hardware which I had in the office. There was an old Linksys WRT54G router lying around somewhere. Naturally it did not have a network bridge functionality – that would be way to convenient. I knew that it should be capable of it though – it’s just that Linksys firmware is crippled by default. I figured I would flash it and with the open source, linux based alternative firmware known as dd-wrt. It can make your average chepo router into a high end piece of hardware with more options you could think of. Unfortunately it turned out that I have one of the “netutered”, easily brickable boxes. It had half the memory that was needed for running dd-wrt and required a whole slew of extra preparatory steps to be made to flash it with the stripped down version of the firmware. There is a big warning on the wiki that the chance of bricking the device is actually much higher than the chance of actually flashing it. They advise against even trying and recommend investing in a version of the router which is not crippled.

So I gave up the WRT54G and decided to pick up something that would work out of the box without additional labor. Enter Linksys WET200:

It is actually a designated bridge which was pretty much designed and built for providing Wifi to Ethernet interface that I needed. Setting it up was a cinch – I simply needed to plug it into a spare laptop, set it up with a static IP and point my the browser at 192.168.1.226. You can actually change that once you log in for the first time and put the thing in the correct subnet. Setting up the bridge took literally seconds – all I had to do was to click on Site Survey, pick my SSID from the list, and type in the WPA encryption key. That was it! I was able to just plop it on the other side of the office, and plug 4 of the VoIP phones into it like this:

Packet8 doesn’t really support this sort of thing. They actually warned me that this may not work, but so far we haven’t had any trouble with reception or lag. If things hold up and the phones work fine across the wireless bridge we will likely switch over to the VoIP system over the next month or two. The quality of service over Wifi will be our deciding factor.

If you need a Wifi to Ethernet bridge WET200 is a really decent investment. It is a no frill’s device, aimed at business networks so setup is clean and without any user-friendly bullshit. It works with both B and G networks and does WEP, WPA and WPA2. You have 4 general purpose ports on the back and 1 special purpose port you can use for powering the device if you have PoE setup in your office. I don’t, and I actually never seen it used – fortunately the bridge comes with a regular power adapter that you can plug into the wall as well. It will cost you a little over $100 at most retailers so it is a bit more expensive than your average lower end router (like the WRT54G). But it works out of the box and you are not voiding the warranty by flashing it with 3rd party firmware which should be more than enough to justify the purchase to your boss.

They are just sitting there and not doing anything constructive, so I started thinking about putting them to a good use. There is another problem I often face – lack of spare monitors. Every time someone brings in a desktop for service we have to go an pull a monitor from one of the currently unused machines available in the office. Which is not the end of the world, since I usually have some flat surface available to set it all up.

Sometimes however a friend or relative brings their machine to my house asking for help. This is where the fun begins. I do have a spare CRT up in the attic that I keep for just hat occasion. What I don’t have is space. When I’m fixing someone’s computer you will usually see a scene of pure mayhem on the floor of my room:

I’m usually forced to squeeze the old CRT, the desktop, the keyboard and mouse in the tiny little amount of free space between the bed and the TV, and essentially sit with my back wedged against my desk, occasionally turning around to Google something on my desktop in the back. I could buy a LCD screen, but even a tiny 15″ cheepo sells for almost $200 at neweg – which seems a bit high for something that I would use twice a year, and then stash in the attic or at the bottom of some closet.

This is where the two needs begin to merge: my need to do something useful with the spare laptop LCD’s and my need for ultra-small portable LCD screen. I figured that if I could find an Laptop LCD to VGA adapter I would be all set. Or not…

It turns out that I’m not the only person who had this brilliant idea. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is not as easy as one might think. The laptop LCD has a digital output that is designed to pin into a controller circuit which in turn talks to the video card. These things are mostly proprietary, not standardized and not widely available. The difficult part is figuring out exactly what kind of controller circuit do you need, then locating and ordering one. It’s definitely possible though.

For example, I have found this blog describing the process. Unfortunately it is very light on technical details to the point of being relatively useless. It’s more or less photographic proof that it is possible, but not much more:

The last entry is particularly discouraging – apparently the merchant who was supplying the circuits used in the example no longer produces them, and is currently out of stock. :(

A slightly more informative but less complete post can be found on the mp3car forum. They actually post a link to a vendor who seems to have quite a few different models for sale. There are two caveats though – the vendor seems to be located in Europe, and they only sell in bulk (100 units of more) which makes them useless as a resource. I found few others but none of them was really selling anything online.

Then I remembered a piece of old internet wisdom – if it exist, someone is probably selling it on ebay. Believe it or not, I found some interesting looking kits for sale. Here is a closeup pic of one of them:

It is a TFT LCD controller with a back light inverter, which seems to be exactly what I would need. It also looks astonishingly simillar to what the dude in the first blog I linked to was using. Good news is they seem to be selling for $35 + shipping and handling (which will probably be another $30 or more knowing these types of ebay stores). So I’m tempted. It could work, provided that my LCD is one of the models supported by this device and that there are no funky drivers required to actually run this thing.

Anyone ever did something like that? Should I do it? It could make for a nice, space saving, ultra portable monitor, provided that I could find a semi-decent frame to mount the circuit and LCD…

[tags]laptop lcd, tft lcd, laptop lcd vga, monitor, controller, hardware[/tags]