Omniblog

Given some problems I have with ergonomics, and have had for quite some time, when it comes to replacing a mouse I have used for many many years, finding one that is the right fit for me without causing fatigue or other things with my arm, wrist, and hand is very challenging.

However, for once I think I have done it. I think I can finally move on to something completely new.

Behold, for today I give you the Logitech Performance Mouse MX

It’s not only very pretty to look at, but it’s really damn comfortable to use. I have been using it now at work for the past hour with no problems whatsoever. I can usually detect fatigue and other issues within 5-10 minutes.

I primarily bought it to use with my laptop, a MacBook Pro – but that’s another post, at home, but it seems the Logitech software and Mac OS X 10.5 don’t get along since the mouse seems to lose signal and lag a lot. (Logitech says the mouse is Mac OS X compatible.) So, I’ll throw on my other Logitech mouse instead and use this bad boy for my main computer at home.

This sucker comes with a little pseudo-leather pouch for the charging setup and the little bitty Unifying receiver. Oh the Unifying receiver, right. New feature from Logitech where up to 6 (I think) Logitech devices can run off the same receiver. It’s small, and only a few devices are supported thus far, but it has potential. (The keyboard that’s supported looks pretty nifty.) The mouse comes with an extender cable to help position the Unifying receiver in a better location if you are using it on a desktop.

The charging setup is pretty interesting. You can either a) plug a USB charging cable into your computer, and then plug it into the mouse and use it while it charges, or b) plug the USB charging cable into a wall plug and charge it that way. Oh, and you can still use the mouse. This is a departure from the classic Logitech charging stands that came with previous mice.

It also introduces a new tracking technology called Darkfield. It’s supposedly better than Microsoft’s Bluewhatever tracking. So far, it seems to work pretty well. I have a glass table at home, but I haven’t tried to use it on that yet.

It has lots of buttons that can be customized, like other Logitech mice, and runs with Logitech SetPoint 4.80. Oh, and that little lip on the left side for your thumb? Not as annoying as you might think. It’s actually quite nice and comfortable.

So, if you are a Logitech ho like me, and a hardware dork like me, or you just need a new mouse…

I highly recommend the Logitech Performance Mouse MX. The price is well worth it.

Edit: There’s also a random button in the middle of the mouse. This button switches the scroll wheel from free scroll to the typical “click” scroll that we are all used to on most wheel mice. That’s pretty cool.

PS: If you get it soonish, it might be on sale. I think I got mine for $79.99 or something instead of the retail $99.99.

PPS: The only drawback to this mouse is it is not Bluetooth for those systems that support Bluetooth. Eh, who cares. You can support 6 devices with the Unifying thingy. That’s good enough for me.

Tweakers Portable Speakers

3 months ago, I was looking for portable speakers for my newish laptop because I thought the Harmon Kardon speakers in it sucked. Well, 1) I was wrong and 2) see below.

So, I picked up some of these at Office Depot for $20. Charged them, plugged them into my laptop and oh God the ear bleeding crap that came from them. They were horrible.

Then a month later, I picked up a Sony eBook Reader PRS-700.

I love it, I have read most of Michael Crichton’s books on it since I’ve had it. I had not yet tried, of course, the music feature where you can load songs into the internal memory (or on a DUO or SD card, woot!) and listen and keep reading.

Last night was that time. I didn’t have any headphones readily available, so I decided to try the Tweakers again. Oh my God, it was like heaven. They sounded so awesome and rich when plugged into the eBook reader. It was a mini jam session in my office.

So, word to the wise: Don’t judge speakers based on one test. Try them in several devices first. The sound card drivers on the laptop were up to date. So, maybe the sound card blows (which is my guess). I’ll bet if I plugged them into my iPod or iPhone, they’d sound great there too.

I recommend them. They’re very portable and quite awesome.

7/25/2009 – Tickets purchased in May – Tori Amos on her latest tour – haven’t seen her since 2001 because I keep missing when she swings through

As you can tell by those phrases, I am not a rabid, crazy Tori fan. Tori Amos fans are a different breed in general, There are those that are just nuts for her (nicknamed EWF – Ears with Feet – no clue what the hell this means), and then there are those, like myself, that understand and know she’s pretty much a musical genius, and enjoy listening to her music and her magical fingers on a piano.

Listening to her albums, getting to know her music, is nothing as compared to seeing her live.

Seeing her live – you are in for one hell of a fantastic show, and Saturday night was no exception. There was only one small issue with seeing her live this go round, last time I checked, when did people stand up during a Tori concert? When I saw her in 2001, no one did. Now, most of the center section did (I was in the center section). Is it the music, which I could understand, is it a change in fan base? I never figured it out, but I kinda went with it because, it’s a concert, stuff like this happens.

Then 3/4 of the way through the show, people starting walking from their seats to the aisles near the front. Never seen that before either at a Tori concert.

I could give a break down of each song, but I won’t because there are countless sites you can visit for that. My purpose is to just provide a brief overview of the concert.

One thing I will point out about the show: She did a freaking phenomenal cover of Don McLean’s “Vincent” and dedicated it to her brother who “never missed an Austin show”. It was awesome.

Click here for the set list for Saturday’s show.

So, yesterday in all my glorious geekiness, I thought I would wander into Fry’s and pick up some sort of USB Gigabit adapter in my quest for faster NAS access from my laptop.

Oh glory be, one exists! The Linksys Gigabit USB Adapter

(Author’s Note: I failed big time at this point. I did not read the box to check supported operating systems, seeing as Vista’s been out for quite some time, you’d think something like this would have drivers, right? I did do research for this particular product, and saw it was good, but failed to notice, even then, that Vista wasn’t supported.)

Get home, plug it up, hit the Linksys site (which half the time doesn’t come up) for newer drivers. Oh, there are drivers, from 2005. Yes, 2005, and no I am not kidding. Linksys apparently said they would have drivers sometime in 2008 after Vista’s been out for a while. Are there drivers now? No. Does the XP driver work? No. (Figured I’d at least try it.)

Moral of the story: Check the box and never assume things work with Vista. I will be taking the item back tomorrow to get my money back. The good part is it at least repackages really easy. There’s a reason I went to Netgear/D-Link and left Linksys in the dust. I checked other manufacturers for similar products but came up empty.

At this point, I will probably do all my RAW file photo editing on my main computer (quad-core, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800). My laptop’s pretty good (dual-core, 4GB RAM, 512MB dedicated ATI graphics), but even having the pictures on my C: drive lags a bit. I will then acquire some backup software, and do automated and maybe manual back ups of my pictures.

I have now had the D-Link network storage thingy for about 5 days? I have noticed a few things that are worth noting:

1. I can’t seem to find good, free backup software. I might try whatever’s built into Vista, but I’m afraid. Supposedly the software that came with the NAS isn’t worth using.
2. Editing pictures through it on my laptop which does not have a Gigabit network connection is horrible. I might fork out some extra cash for a Gigabit connection. I’ll have to look around.
3. This is more of a software thing, but Adobe Lightroom will not create catalogs on shared, removable, or network drives. Damn. I wanted it to do this. The pictures can reside on the network storage, but not the Lightroom catalog. Hmm, I might have to get creative with this if I want to edit pictures on both the laptop and my main computer.
4. Accessing mp3 files with Winamp through the shared drive for the NAS is quite awesome until the drives go to sleep for power saving. Then you must wake the drive back up by other means (i.e. accessing the shared drive within windows usually works). During the time that the drives are asleep, the mp3 file skips like a broken record.
5. The built in FTP server for external file access rocks; however, it does present a security risk, especially if you don’t have things set up correctly, and if your users’ passwords are weak and might be subject to an outright dictionary password attack.

On another note: The Twitter experiment I posted about several weeks ago, I have started. We shall see what happens over the next month.

Yesterday, I decided to invest about $15 in a Gigabit switch and some more cash into CAT 6 cables (why, because I can and because I’m a geek, dammit) for slightly faster connectivity into the D-Link DNS-321 I reviewed yesterday.

I soon forgot then remembered that my laptop, which has the external hard drive where the majority of the data is, does not have a Gigabit NIC. However, just plugging in a Gigabit switch did help with the speed to the DNS-321. (In hindsight, the cables probably didn’t help much since it’s a 100MB connection, but eh, they were cheap.) Things definitely seemed to upload faster.

So, naturally I tried it on my main CPU, which does have a Gigabit NIC. Did it help much? Kind of, but not enough to warrant taking up my main CPU to transfer files. I tried both FTP and using the mapped drive. So, popping in a Gigabit switch did help and is well worth it. I got a D-Link 5 port Gigabit switch for $14.99 at Fry’s.

File access:

File access through the switch/home network is pretty good. I played mp3s from the DNS-321 on my laptop with Winamp with one incident of lag in a 2 hour time span. Picture access from my laptop with Photoshop to the DNS-321 was pretty good too (using the the mapped, shared drive).

All in all, I am still very impressed for what I paid and what I got.

Yesterday I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy a network storage device of some sort. My brand choices were:

• Linksys
• D-Link
• Netgear

Research:

Linksys and Netgear both had awful  reviews, ok all of them had bad reviews of varying types, but, the D-Link seemed to be the best. So, I wandered into Fry’s wanting the D-Link DNS-323. Yea, they didn’t have it.

So, off to the iPhone I went looking to see how well the DNS-321 is, hm, just as good as the 323, cheaper, and no internal print server (already have one of those), wait, the only reason for the price difference ($129 vs $219) might be because of the print server, oh what the hell am I thinking. So, I got it and 2 Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drives (each were $94, limit 1 per customer, but they let me have 2 because they had a lot).

Setup:

After getting everything home, I opened up the DNS-321 and then opened the hard drives. The nice thing about the hard drives is they are sold as a kit, so I have extra SATA cables now should I need them for my main CPU. Anyway, the initial setup was a breeze:

1. Open boxes.
2. Pop open front of DNS-321.
3. Pop in hard drives.
4. Close front.
5. Plug everything in.
6. Pop in CD and run a utility to find the DNS-321 on my network.
7. Configure it using the web interface, static IP, etc.
8. Setup and format hard drives with RAID 1.
9. Create User and group.
10. Fire up FTP on the DNS-321 for easier/quicker file transfer.
11. Done.

Total time: 30 minutes or so. The hard drive formatting took the longest. Now, on to the part that’s the worst.

Moving data:

The DNS-321 has the capability for either 100MB or Gigabit ethernet; however, I have AT&T U-Verse and their little router thingy does not have Gigabit. You have to be @$%ing kidding me.

The utility that comes with the DNS-321 to find it also lets you configure a shared drive mount for it using the user you created. That part works flawlessly. Using this to copy over gigabytes of data, not so much.

As well all know Windows file/folder sharing is great, works as it should, but when you copy large amounts of data, it just blows. FTP to the rescue, maybe. The DNS-321 comes with a built in FTP server mainly for use outside of  your home network. I am using it to transfer files to the DNS-321 beacuse it’s faster than using the shared drive. Now, remember my statement about the AT&T U-Verse router not having Gigabit, yes, this is a major problem and it really sucks doing the initial upload of all of the data I want to the NAS. Since I only have to do this once, I can live.

Access performance:

Right now, I am not sure how well this works and how fast it is, but initial testing seems to be fine. I can play mp3s just fine, and access and edit pictures just fine.

Overall:

For $129, this little NAS is worth it. The RAID configuration is nice, and the web interface is easy to navigate.

Final Grade: A

If you own an iPHone or an iPod Touch, and you like doing Sudoku puzzles, then y0u must have:

Sudoku Grab

For only $0.99, you can get the coolest, and best, app I have seen yet.

What does it do? Easy:

1. Find a sudoku puzzle online, in a newspaper, etc.
2. Open Sudoku Grab.
3. Take a picture of the puzzle (Yes! A picture! Even take a picture of a puzzle from a computer screen.)
4. Let the program figure out where the puzzle is located in the picture.
5. Fix the numbers in the puzzle if necessary.
6. Save it.

Voila, instant Sudoku puzzle. The whole process takes maybe a minute. It has a lot of cool features once you get the puzzle into the program and start working on it. I have not yet gotten that far into using these features. One thing is for sure, it will buzz at you when you enter a number in the wrong spot.

Well worth the $0.99.

You can read more about it here: http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/2009/03/getting-started-with-version-11.html

Now go get it, and happy Sudokuing.

Yes, I did it, I cheated on World of Warcraft, again. But not with just any MMO, no sir. I cheated on WoW with the graddaddy of them all – EQ 2.

Yes, an abbreviation that I never thought I would type, EQ. For the love of gaming, why on Earth would I cheat on WoW for the game that was once, and probably still is, dubbed EverCrack? I’ll tell you why, goddammit I was curious! (How many times have you said that, whether it’s related to gaming or not? Hello college!)

With it’s plethora of races and classes to play, what’s not to be curious about. It has its share of classes that are good and evil, and it even has races that are neutral that you can choose to be good or evil with based on what city you start from, plus there are some classes that are not available if you are good, and vice versa for evil. Interesting, but not a new, concept. WoW had this, until it let Horde be Paladins, and Alliance be Shamans. If they had kept it that way, I’d have a priest or druid healer instead of a shaman, but I digress..

The skinny – once I got the graphics setup right for my widescreen monitor and my nVidia 9800 GT, it looks very pretty. The controls are good. I’ve only tried 2-3 classes, and I’m not sure what I will play, if I continue playing. The sounds and soundtrack are top notch too. The playstyle is pretty cool. I mainly play casters as I suck at melee pew pew. I did tinker with a paladin for 10 minutes, and it looks interesting.

EQ 2 vs Age of Conan – EQ 2 hands down because the end game is there, and a new expansion which introduces new content for players 50-80, and the controls are a bit better.

Everything vs WoW – To me this is not a fair comparison to make yet. I have played WoW for over 3-4 years (however long it’s been out minus 6 months as I started late.) I have played others for a weekend.

Stay tuned. I will probably cancel my Conan account soon, but keep my EQ 2 active even after the free month. I am pretty much over Conan. I don’t see why I should continue with it knowing what I do about the end game.

Now that I have a new computer, I decided to give an MMO a shot that I’ve been curious about: Age of Conan.

I decided to buy it online for $20 and download it, I even get a free mammoth mount. I would advise if you do this, do it at night and let the download go overnight. It’s a 15GB download which with a 15MB/sec download connection will take 5-7 hours if the download server maintains the proper speed. Since this is not a perfect world, I varied bewteen 300K and 1.4 MB a second.

Then, upon installation, I had to upgrade to a patched version of DirectX 9 and new video drivers. No problems there and this would be expected.

Then I ran the game and it downloaded about 3 (or was it 5) GB of patches. There’s another 1.5 hours. Back to bed I went. Oh, I should mention when you buy the game online it sends you a verfication code through text message. It was really cool and a very neat idea. That worked without issue.

After all was said and done I watched all the opening stuff, as I do with any new game, and the graphics were amazing, definitely on par with World of Warcraft. Then, character creation….

12 classes to choose from, each from one of 4 archetypes (mage, warrior, priest and rogue). I picked a Demonologist at first (similar to a warlock in WoW). Fun to play but I died a lot.

I then tried a Necromancer. Oh yes, lots of pew pew and minions, and the number of minons you can have, and type, grows with level. I’m now a level 20 and I can summon 8 minions. Mmm. By far, this is a fun caster class. They even have mixed classes. Check out the Age of Conan website for more details.

As I am not wanting to get into a lot of detail, I will just start summing stuff up:

- Graphics: Awesome!
- Gameplay: Pretty good once you get the hang of it.
- Quests: Plenty to start. I’ve read they dwindle around 35-40. We shall see.
- Soundtrack: Awesome

Pretty good so far. A more detailed review at a much later date once I’ve had time to play more. Probably not until I’m 30-40.