May Contain Nuts

Will apparently come in eye-rupturing neon fuchsia.

Ow.

So Oscy is getting some long-overdue computer upgrades thanks to a fairly substantial surplus in our monthly budget. This is a good thing, because if I’m right, one of these upgrades (to an Athlon XP 2200 from an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz) will actually let her computer play nicely with PhysX and get us into Uru Live for the first time since December. We’ve also got another 512MB stick of RAM on the way for her, which will put the system up from 512 megs to a gig (name-brand 1GB PC2100 sticks are hard to come by and fairly pricey anywhere but eBay, which I honestly don’t trust for hardware).

We’re going to try and swing her a newer monitor next month… she’s had some bad luck with monitors in the past. Before she moved from Portland she had a somewhat fuzzy 15″ display (if that, it was tiny). When she was living with me in Kentucky she inherited my 19″ monstrosity that would only go as high as 1024×768 without getting blurry. When we moved to Spokane we left the monster behind, so she was jacking my Cinema Display for about a month before we tracked down a $20 hand-me-down from Craigslist. Unsurprisingly, it’s fuzzy as all hell too, even at 800×600 (she runs at 1024×768 anyway because it’s as low as you can go and still be able to do things these days :P).

So we’re looking at a decent little LCD display at Costco for about $180. It’s no Cinema Display, but it’ll last until she gets a laptop, and she can use it afterwards for desktop extension if she so chooses, so it’s still a good investment.

On the subject of money, though, we’re working hard to pay off what is pretty much exclusively my mountain of debt, educational and commercial. We should be able to get most of it paid off by the end of the year, which opens some doors for saving up for the future and also getting a few more pleasantries that we’ve been salivating over for a while now.

All in all, things seem to be going quite well for us at the moment, and I’m really happy about it. It’s nice when you strike out on your own and you manage to stand on your own two feet (well, four counting Oscy’s) rather than falling on your ass :P.

So I finally decided that I might as well throw in the towel on trying to clean my progressively degenerating Mighty Mouse scroll ball and took the thing to the local Apple reseller for a replacement (oh, to be closer than 8 hours from an actual Apple store…). Because it’s a reseller, and something of a hole-in-the-wall one at that, they don’t actually have any replacement MMs on hand, and they seem to be having difficulty figuring out how to validate my mouse’s 1 year warranty when the Mac it’s attached to has moved outside its warranty period (seriously, I bought the thing later, what part of that makes it hard?), I’m currently Mighty Mouse-less… and having left all of our spare mice in Kentucky when we moved, I was forced to forage for one at Best Buy to tide me over.

This has not panned out too well.

I’m not entirely sure when retailers stopped selling mice and resorted to selling nothing but MS and Logitech ergonomically optimized pieces of crap, interspersed with “notebook” mice that not only rival, but exceed the Puck Mouse in user interface violations per square inch (a challenge, since some of these are smaller than the Puck Mouse, but there’s some sort of inverse square property as UI relates to space below a certain threshold), but I wish to formally complain about the lack of any solid third-party mice available for purchase these days. I would also like to formally complain about the sheer dearth of wired mice available these days… I hate wireless mice; they’re jittery as hell and they eat batteries like they were going out of style.

So what I’m currently stuck with is some POS open-item Dynex 5-button mouse, only 3 buttons of which actually work on the Mac. It for some reason believes that it needs to move the cursor across the screen at superluminal speeds, and my efforts to restrain it have left me wishing there were one extra notch in the mouse speed preference pane, right between the first notch and the one immediately adjacent to it, where the damn thing is currently set. I’ve also been twiddling with the scroll speed, which is as inconsistent as ever when it comes to Safari… the more you scroll, the more Safari scrolls per click on the wheel… this is simply retarded, and that’s all I have to say about it. It also makes pinning down a decent scroll speed a real pain in the ass when your mouse is already as jumpy as a flea hopped up on Jolt.

For all of the problems I have with Apple making a mouse with a non-user-serviceable scroll ball after 30 years of industry experience has permanently removed the ball from the bottom of the mouse, at least the damn thing was consistent with every other mouse on the planet when it came to tracking and scrolling speeds. This thing is going to very quickly drive me bonkers.

And for the record, I know I’m probably WAY in the minority here, but I actually like the feel of Apple’s Pro-style mice, and bought the Mighty Mouse because I wanted a Pro-style mouse with more than one flippin’ button on it. I’ll probably use my replacement one until it wears out, and finally spring for a decent replacement, but if Apple revises the Mighty Mouse to use an optical scroll ball at any time in the near or distant future, I will be one of the first in line to buy it.

I’m an Apple whore. Shut up.

Engadget has a review of the Zune’s glorious user experience (which, if you’re reading this through MystBlogs, Zib has already pointed out… thanks Zib for the link :)). I suddenly feel much better about the fact that my iPod Mini has gotten more difficult to use since the battery started going south… at least it doesn’t crash the app, and still gets properly recognized when I plug it in while the app is already running (although I do seem to have to charge it on a power adapter for several minutes before plugging it into the Mac, or it locks up… regardless of the battery life it says it has left on the screen).

I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks “Welcome to the social” is a retarded tag line, too. I was amused by this comment on the review: “Aside from making me throw up a little in my mouth, this catchphrase brings to mind little old ladies playing bingo. “

I’m even more amazed at the fact that MS put it in the software installer (along with “Release your inner dj…” what?), and the “hip” and “trendy” background images on the installer seem more than a little desperate (and occasionally gangsta, yo…).

Methinks I’ll be getting a video iPod when I finally get around to replacing my mini.

So I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s been so difficult lately to cram all of my music onto my iPod. I’ve got 1500 songs in my library, adding up to almost 6 gigs of music, which obviously isn’t going to fit on the iPod, but it seemed like a LOT of stuff hasn’t been fitting lately.

Well, in a fit of genius, I turned on the bit rate listing in iTunes and discovered a pretty sizable number of 320kbps files. Now, while the added audio quality is likely fantastic, I can’t tell the difference enough for it to matter to me whether it’s 320kbps or 128kbps, so I just converted the tracks to 128kbps and just one album’s conversion seems to have dropped my library size by a good 60 megs. I know the decision to add album artwork to virtually every album in my library probably hasn’t helped the file size issue, but generally speaking, the 320kbps files are probably a more serious chunk of hard drive change.

I picked up a Mighty Mouse today because I’ve been getting less and less tolerant of the one-button Pro Mouse I’ve been relegated to using while Ash’s mouse is on the fritz (I let her use my Logitech mouse in the meantime), partly because it only has one button, but mostly because it has no scroll wheel. The Mighty Mouse fixed both problems at once, and unlike some, I have no problem with it not being wireless (I really dislike wireless mice after being less than satisfied with the one I had a few years ago).

I love the scroll wheel, though the speed at which you scroll seems to be dependent upon the size ratio between the scroll bar and its track (the smaller the scroll distance, the smaller the scroll increment seems to get), and the click action is much quieter than the Pro mouse, which is good for late-night coding sessions when I’m trying not to wake up Ash…

The only real problem is that, because it’s so similar to the Pro mouse in shape, I keep forgetting I’m now in possession of a two-button mouse, and continue to control-click or click-and-hold on things rather than just using the extra button. D’oh!

So lately (like, for the past month) I’ve been immersing myself in copious amounts of Douglas Adams. It started out as reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ash because she’s never read it before, and I found this to be a situation that I could not allow to continue. Then I dug out my copy of The Salmon of Doubt and read the vast majority of it, and have also recently been reading through The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, the second of Adams’ Dirk Gently novels. The result, aside from my tendency to speak in *much* longer sentences of late and an increased penchant for obscure and amusing similes, is that I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about user interfaces, inspired by one of the blurbs Adams wrote that found its way into Salmon of Doubt. In it, Adams discussed the challenges involved in writing with a qwerty keyboard on something the size of a pocket calculator, the general inanity of the concept behind qwerty (originally devised to help prevent typists from jamming typewriters, it now largely serves as an impediment and annoyance to most people trying to type these days), and the difficulties in writing on small objects in general.

I generally agree with Adams about qwerty being a bit of an odd system, and unfortunately, I agree that it’s probably too late to change the standard that has now developed around it. I also find myself agreeing that there are certain ways that keyboard inputs should not be laid out, among which is the idea to lay a keyboard out abcdetc. Along these lines, I feel like there’s something that would have annoyed Adams even more than a PDA with an alphabetical keyboard: cell phones.

There are a growing number of problems with cell phones and their almost universally inadequate interface. This wasn’t originally the case, of course… it used to be that the only thing you could use your cell phone for was - *gasp!* - calling people. Of course, then the idea of a personal “phone book” listing of frequently-dialed contacts came into the picture, and things have sort of slid downhill from there. The contacts list required the ability to type names into the phone. Of course, all phones already have all 26 letters of the alphabet on them, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to devise the now-common method of typing words by hitting 9 buttons multiple times each to achieve the desired result. When this was just for contacts, that was fine. Then the notion of text messaging appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and now cell phones were expected to behave like regular keyboards, only they didn’t modify the keys to reflect this new requirement… so people are still hammering out increasingly-stilted sentences with 9 keys and a lot of thumb work (and people think the iPod wheel will give you carpal tunnel… oy).

Then the concept of convergence arrived, and suddenly there was a push to integrate every conceivable feature into a cell phone, whether it actually made sense for a phone to have it or not. Now you can text, IM (using AIM, ICQ, MSN or Y!IM), “chirp” (whoever invented that sound and the related slang for “walkie-talkie” should be shot), browse the web, send/receive email, take photos, watch videos, record videos, play mp3s… and if you want to be truly arcane, you can even call someone.

I will be the first to say that convergence isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are devices that have done it rather well, and I would go so far as to say that the Sony PSP is one of the better ones, as far as the concept and hardware are concerned (the DRM and reliance on WMA/WMV for it is a bit tedious though… and the concept of the PSP-exclusive “Universal” Media Disc is a bit of a joke, if you ask me). This device enables you to browse the internet, listen to music, watch videos, and play games. That’s pretty damn cool, and the screen/interface are of decent enough size/design to make such concepts actually useable without going mad. If I may parrot a bit, the iPod’s expansion from an mp3 player into an mp3/video/photo/slideshow player with a few games, a calendar viewer, and a contact viewer built into it has been a pretty graceful one. Everything that’s been added has been done with a keen sense that it would actually be easy to do with the provided UI: a wheel and five buttons. This is not the case with the cell phone. The cell phone has been experiencing feature creep for the past five plus years with no efforts being made to simplify or improve the actual hardware interface. Instead, software has been developed to try and predict what someone will attempt to write in a text message word by word to try and increase the speed with which it can be done. If I may, the point at which you need to develop software stop-gaps to improve hardware UI efficiency is the point at which your hardware UI needs to be seriously overhauled.

I don’t have a problem with a device capable of doing all of the things cell phones can do… I just don’t think cell phones should be the things doing them. Cell phones should be phones first, and anything else a well-implemented second. As a result, unless you plan on re-designing the cell phone to be a bit larger (blasphemy!) and include more than 21 buttons (12 on the keypad, plus the 9 above for menu navigation and such), I would be strongly in favor of ditching most of the cell’s features and revering it to a more simple device whose primary function is actually calling people. Put together a new type of device, maybe a low-end PDA-type thing, if you want to have web browsing, email, photos, video, mp3 playing, and the like (heck, they’ll all benefit from the larger, higher-res screen…). I continue to be wary of notion that the concept of a miniaturized keyboard - regardless of its design/layout - is a good or useful one, but hopefully as things progress, the push towards super-miniaturization will die down a bit and we’ll return to a class of devices that are actually big enough to be used by adult human beings without extreme difficulty. I don’t think there will ever be a truly perfect miniaturized converged device that does everything you want and provides you with a way to generate text input on-screen (keyboards are too small to be truly useful, handwriting recognition is dodgy at times, and voice recognition would a) make the planet a noisy place, and b) probably collapse under the impact of the newfound levels of white noise it brought about).

I don’t have anything even remotely approaching a workable solution to these hardware issues I’ve brought up… like Adams, I’m more of a “this is broken, this is why, somebody fix it” man than a “this is exactly how it should be fixed, in detail” man. More succinctly, I’m an idea man. However, I do think that we’ve been presented with two opportunities to create useful and efficient interfaces for translating language into text: one with the advent of the original keyboard, and again with the advent of the mobile interface, and in both instances we seem to have failed on at least one count of the charge. The first effort gave us the qwerty interface (and I must once again note my agreement with Adams… qwerty is a weird word to type), and the second, even more regrettably, gave us the cell phone. Given Adams’ optimism about developing a new mobile UI at the time he wrote the article in 1998 - before the coming of the cell phone revolution - I can’t help but think he’d be disappointed at the current end result.

Sony lays down the gauntlet…

Honestly, I am sufficiently underwhelmed. $500 for the cheapest version, which is apparently a severely stripped-down system lacking a few major features, like Wi-Fi, Memory Stick/SD/Compact Flash reading, and HDMI output. It also carries a 20GB hard drive versus the 60GB version on the $599 model. I’m sure the devs are loving this…

Oh, they also took the shock out of the DualShock in favor of a tilt sensor, which was also apparently an incredibly last-minute decision (and the rumble feature had to be removed because it interfered with the tilt sensor). Should they perhaps call it the DualTilt now?

Seriously, that’s more than a little absurd. The price alone is a serious issue for a lot of people, and given the tendency for companies to equate Dollars, Euros, and Pounds on a 1:1 basis, it’ll probably carry an identical price tag (namely, 499 and 599) in Europe.

My favorite part, though, is a quote from SCEA president and CEO Kaz Hirai:

“The next generation doesn’t start until we say it does,” said Hirai.

Indeed.

When all is said and done, I do believe I’m going to end up with a Wii and nothing else for this round of the console war. It’ll undoubtedly be cheaper, the controller and its capabilities sound incredibly interesting, and the games will likely cost less too. Nintendo seems to be the only company out of the three contenders who remembers that a lot of gamers don’t actually have $600+ to blow on systems and games in a single shot :P.

… I’m talking about a laptop, you sickos

So Apple just announced the 17″ MacBook Pro today. I did a quick check, and after configuring the system to be functionally equivalent in specs to the 15.4″ laptop I’d configured the other week (in everything except the screen size and processor speed, obviously), the system checks in at a little more than $100 more expensive than the 15.4″ model I set up, with the added bonus of a rockingly huge widescreen display, a better resolution than the baseline 17″ Alienware, a dual-layer DVD burner (and a faster one at that), and more USB/FireWire ports than the 15.4″ model. Oh, and the faster processor, not like I imagine going from 1.83GHz to 2.16 will generate THAT much of a noticeable improvement to performance…

All that, and it’s still cheaper than the high-end Alienware I configured. The Alienware rang up at $2,952 plus tax, while the 17″ MacBook rings up at $2,776, including the cost of iWork (but excluding an AppleCare plan… factoring that in, the two systems are nearly matched for price, but then the MacBook has a better/longer support plan, so…). I took a small hit and dropped the system to 2×512MB RAM sticks rather than a 1×1024 stick, in an effort to save $100 (but the very fact that the system cannot be equipped with less than 1GB of RAM is shiny), and gave up 20GB of storage in favor of a faster RPM on the hard drive (which can be quite important… especially when it comes to Uru) for no change in the price.

I seriously want one of these things…

I hate the thought that I’m probably going to need a new laptop soon… I really have no way of affording such an expense right now, and laptops are always expensive. However, due to the fact that I am currently the proud owner of nothing but a PowerMac G5 and an ancient Dell laptop, my ability to work on things like 3DS MAX unimpeded by the need to steal someone else’s computer is rather limited. My ability to verify the rendering of websites I work on in multiple browsers - including Windows ones - is also a necessity, and one which would be greatly hindered by the loss of my sole remaining Windows PC (as I really hate stealing Oscy’s to do work).

Sadly, though, my Dell laptop is about 2 inches from death’s door. It’s an aging Intel Celeron processor with only 348MB of RAM (you’d never know this thing was as fast as it’s supposed to be…), and without even an Intel Extreme graphics chipset (alas, I’m restricted to an Intel graphics controller which consumes 12MB of system RAM to survive). It’s got a finicky network port, no built-in WiFi capabilities, USB 1.0, and the power cord has begun to fray near the laptop connector end. Considering it also has a 100% dead battery, this makes using the thing a true experience.

So, I decided, just for the hell of it, to research laptop prices tonight. Given that this machine would be functioning as my primary gaming platform as a Windows system, it needs to have some serious beef to it. It also needs to be able to handle modeling, texturing, and rendering in 3DS MAX, as well as Photoshop for texture painting, so there’s more reason to give it all I can. Given my rather less than stellar experiences with both Dell and Gateway, my reticence to attempt the purchase of an HP, Toshiba, Sony, or (god forbid) eMachines system, and the good rep that Alienware has accumulated for itself, I decided to do a little compare and contrast between an Alienware Aurora laptop, an Alienware Area-51 laptop, and a high-end MacBook Pro. What follows is the comparison chart. Green items are best in its class, red are worst, and black, well, it doesn’t matter. I left a couple things black that I don’t have the wizardry to figure out the better of, and probably should have done so with the processors, but that doesn’t change the results that much anyway, so whatever.

I feel I should mention that for the Area-51 laptop, just to be fair, I calculated out the price of the system including XP Media Center Edition and remote, but in all honesty, I have no intention of ever using it. A co-worker recently got a new laptop from Dell that had MCE installed on it, and honestly, the thing was perhaps the most infuriatingly obtuse piece of software I’ve ever seen. It has no “off” button, no way to shut the service down, and by default has decreed that it and it alone shall be used to play DVDs and music. Unfortunately, the damn thing is such a system hog that it caused the DVD playback to shudder and skip. Brilliant. In true MS fashion it took me, the co-worker, and my manager, Pat, 15 minutes to figure out how to eliminate its presence from the system, and even then, all we did was remove any and all shortcuts to it and make sure no removable media would prompt its activation, as like IE and WMP before it, you cannot remove it from your system once it’s there. To my knowledge (and someone correct me if I’m wrong), Apple’s Front Row software is at least polite enough to not activate unless you tell it to using the Apple Remote, so you could conceivably use the computer indefinitely without activating their “digital livingroom” software.

Comparison Chart

The MBP is a bit slower in the front-side bus category, requires a USB card reader attachment, and has a smaller screen. However, the Aurora has slower RAM, additional cost for WiFi, no webcam or mic, less software included, and can only boot to 1 OS (and don’t give me any Linux crap, because I don’t use it). All things considered, the MacBook looks like a better option, even if it will basically require an external mouse when running Windows (though I prefer a mouse anyway when doing stuff like MAX).