The Mouse is Dead. Long Live the Mouse.

John T Davis — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:21:10 +0000

After years of faithful service, my trusty Logitech MX Revolution (no longer made; replaced with the Logitech Performance Mouse MX) is finally going in the Great Peripheral Storage Closet in the Sky. The scroll-wheel has begun its death throes, sometimes scrolling up when I’m trying to scroll down, sometimes not scrolling at all, and so forth. Twice now I’ve inadvertently cranked the volume all the way up when trying to crank it down; I’m very lucky not to have blown my speakers out. The battery has also become anemic and unstable, sometimes outright refusing to charge for extended periods of time. Actually, I’ve decided to avoid wireless desktop input devices from here on. I’m not using my computer from across the room, so I don’t really need wireless, and batteries and charging are entirely too much of a hassle. One less wireless radio transceiver pair pouring radiation into the air won’t be a bad thing, either.

I can’t really complain about the hardware failing, as I’ve had this mouse at least four years now and used it for 8+ hours every day, but I thought this a good opportunity to try something new. I’ve read that trackballs are supposed to be more ergonomic, so I decided to try one. I went looking for four buttons (I’m a geek; two buttons is simply not enough) and a scrolling mechanism of some kind, and settled with the Kensington Expert Mouse, which has the most positive reviews of the models I looked at. One of my uncles actually had one of these when I was much, much younger (like, 12 or something), so there’s the added cachet of knowing I’m getting a very mature product. Another plus: trackballs don’t move. No more need for mousepad that takes up right half of my desk. Space!

Should be here Saturday. I’m excited. (Yes, you’re allowed to call me a dork for being excited about getting a mouse. I should put that on the About page.)

Edit (January 28, 2010, 2126 CDT): Edited some typos and added some clarification (and some missing words … oops).

Technorati Tags: amazon, kensington, Kensington Expert Mouse, Logitech, Logitech MX Revolution, Trackball

Twitter Weekly Updates for the Week of 2009-12-28

John T Davis — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Is it me, or does being on an EDGE network make #iPhone battery drain really fast? #
Just ordered myself a new #AppleTV. #Apple will now probably refresh the thing in a week. #
#iPhone battery life is abysmal. Can't even survive a 24 road trip. Really hope the next model fixes this. #
Watching Disney Christmas Parade. Most captivating thing is Kelly Ripa's way-buff arms. They're comic book superheroine arms. Wow. #
Feeding cardboard (e.g.: from a shipping box) through a paper shredder really cleans out the treads. Like fiber for office equipment. #
Hooking up new Apple TV. Just saw this electrical fire waiting to happen. I don't even know what that plug is. http://yfrog.com/3nqflhj #
Snag. I have no AV cables, & no Ethernet cable. Found two phone cords, a speaker set, playing cards, & a DSL modem. Also, a surge protector. #

Technorati Tags: AppleTV, Christmas, Disney, EDGE, Kelly Ripa, Paper Shredder, Parade

Twitter Weekly Updates for the Week of 2009-11-22

John T Davis — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:30:00 +0000

2L Class Registration in one minute… #
@fraserspeirs I've worn out height adjustor piston/cylinder bit in my chair. It randomly falls. I'm looking for a height lock design. in reply to fraserspeirs #

Technorati Tags: Class Registration

Snow Leopard: Notes on Software Readiness

John T Davis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:11:09 +0000

Hello, all. Much is going on with law school starting back up, and I hope to talk about it soon, but that will probably take a bit more brainpower than I honestly have at this moment. Suffice it for the moment to say things are going well, but they’re pretty intense.

As I previously mentioned when it became available for pre-order, the Snow Leopard is nearly upon us. Now, it’s been confirmed to be launching this Friday, September 28. Exciting!

… Well, I’m excited, at any rate.

Apple’s Knowledge Base has an article on known incompatible software that should be your first stop. They’ve also got a page on compatibility of printer and scanner software. A huge wealth of anecdotal compatibility information is available at the Snow Leopard Compatibility wiki on WikiDot, but it’s by no means complete. It doesn’t have DevonThink, for instance. Hopefully, if I have time this weekend I can help update it. Also, it looks to rely on user reports, whereas the list I’m compiling is based on official compatibility statements. Given that I need certain applications to work reliably and be supported, I find official statements much more useful than anecdotal reports, which may give a false sense of security. For sake of completeness, doesitworkonsnowleopard.com provides a similar service, with a much nicer UI, IMHO.

That brings me to my current point. Whenever a major new OS gets released from Apple, or Microsoft, or anywhere else, as much fun as it’d be just to go buy the thing and slap it on your PC and get all the newest bling, a certain amount of caution must be taken in making sure the software and hardware you need to actually use your computer to, you know, do things, will still work. To that end, I’m going to use this post as running tally of what I know about my production-critical stuff. Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone else besides me.

I’m certainly not the only one doing this.

These are presented in no particular order. Bold items are fully compatible. If Anyone reading this knows the compatibility status of an item I’m currently listing as “unknown,” please let me know. Thanks!

I’ve placed the table under the following cut. Also, for reasons beyond me, the table wrecks the layout of the blog. I’ll try to fix this this weekend, if I can. The table is still perfectly legible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Changelog
Edit: Added XSlimmer info.
Edit (27 August 2009 1028 CDT): Added (1) DevonThink Pro Office info, (2) stub for OfficeJet D135 multifunction office bonanza (doesn’t that sound more fun than printer/scanner/fax/copier?).
Edit (27 August 2009 1255 CDT): Added Mail Attachments Iconizer stub.

Edit (27 August 2009 2250 CDT): (1) Added information about the Snow Leopard wiki at Wikidot and Apple’s incompatibility KB articles; (2) added info about Pixma iP5200R; (3) updated info about Epson Perfection 4490 Office; (4) added info for Things.

Edit (28 August 2009 1025 CDT): Added info for HP OfficeJet D135.
Edit (28 August 2009 1031 CDT): (1) Added info for Newsfire; (2) moved Changelog above cut.
Edit (28 August 2009 1734 CDT): (1) Added updated info on Office 2008 compatibility; (2) changed link for VMWare Fusion to Team Fusion blogpost; (3) added info for Mail Attachments Iconizer; (4) info added for SuperDuper!; (5) fixed table width.
Edit (9 September 2009 1034 CDT): Canon Pixma iP5200R information updated (new drivers available!).
Edit (10 September 2009 2222 CDT): (1) On the Job information added; (2) doesitworkonsnowleopard.com link added; (3) HP OfficeJet D135 info updated; (4) Carbonite information updated; (5) updated to account for 10.6.1’s release.

Item	Compatibility Status
DevonThink Pro Office	Partially Compatible: Some known minor glitches in current version, but nothing making the app unusable. New SL-compatible version expected in September. Link goes to a post from Devon Technologies with more details about what does and doesn’t work. As a side-note, a bit of love for Twitter. I couldn’t find this information on their website, I guess because I was failing at Google, but a quick @reply to the President of DT got me a quick response with a link to the information I was looking for. Awesome.
Microsoft Office 2008	Fully Compatible Interestingly, MS is also claiming to have finally fixed “most” of the lingering, maddening bugs some of experience when trying to use Office 2008 with the Spaces virtual desktop feature built into Mac OS. I find it interesting that they say they had/needed Apple’s collaboration to finally fix this. I can’t quite understand what made Office so special that it couldn’t be made to work with a standard system feature that hundreds (thousands?) of other applications work with just fine. Strange.
Epson Perfection 4490 Office (Scanner)	Official Epson Statement: Partially Compatible: Rosetta Required. Click Here to check Epson’s site for 10.6 compatibility for all its products. For the Perfection 4490 Office, they’re not fully compatible yet, but say they’re working on it, and kindly suggest installing Rosetta and their Rosetta driver in the meantime, as detailed here. Personally, I’m gonna try to wait, if I can. I’d rather not have to install Rosetta if I can avoid it. I fear I’m not going to be able to hold out, as I’ve come to rely on it for my (ever more) paperless office. Drat. Apple KB Statement: Drivers included; feature completeness of drivers unknown. So, Epson says it only works under Rosetta emulation (ick) with drivers you need to download from them, but Apple seems to think it’s got working drivers included. That’s … not confusing at all. Either Apple’s KB article assumes you install Rosetta to get the “included drivers” or something else strange is going on here. At any rate, still not feeling very comfortable about my scanner under 10.6.
Canon Pixma IP5200R (Printer)	Driver software included with Snow Leopard. Though this is excellent news and means the printer will at least work (theoretically), I’m waiting to see how feature-complete these drivers are before saying the OS is fully compatible out of the box. Compatible Drivers Available on Canon’s Website HP just posted new drivers on September 7 2009. Looking at the release notes, Bluetooth printing is not supported (I didn’t even know this printer did that), and using ColorSync for color matching doesn’t seem to work yet. Interesting. At least it’ll print. Still not ready to mark this one as fully compatible. Sigh.
MarsEdit	Fully Compatible
VMWare Fusion	Version 2.0.5 (Current): Experimental Support only. For the moment, they provide only experimental support for hosting images off a 10.6 install, or running 10.6 as a guest virtual machine. For those who rely on being able to virtualize another OS, I’d see this as a major showstopper, unless booting into that OS via BootCamp is acceptable.
Samsung MagicTune	Unknown
Carbonite Online Backup	Support scheduled for October.
SuperDuper! Backup	Fully Compatible
Things (Task Manager)	Fully Compatible
NewsFire	Fully Compatible
~~HP OfficeJet D135~~	Gutenprint Drivers Included with 10.6 (Printer Support Only); no official support.
XSlimmer	Fully Compatible
Mail Attachments Iconizer	Compatibility update pending.
On the Job	Fully Compatible. as of version 3.0.2.

So, yeah. My scanner is a problem, but I kinda suspected it might be once I realized how old it was. Bother. And I’ve got enough stuff loaded into DT that no longer exists on paper that having it be not-completely-SL-ready means I would be wise to wait on it as well.

I’m not really surprised that the OfficeJet isn’t supported. It’s tres old at this point, and I lucked out getting it to run under Leopard, as it wasn’t officially supported under that OS, either. At least by the time I can finally update (I don’t expect Epson to have new scanner drivers anytime soon, so it might be a while), ~~10.6.1~~ 10.6.2 might be out, with ~~most~~ even more of the most glaring bugs crushed.

I’ll add new items to this list as they occur to me, and update the compatibility statuses as I have the time/figure out what each product’s compatibility is.

Peace out.

Technorati Tags: Canon Pixma iP5200R, Carbonite Online Backup, Cultured Code, devonthink pro office, Epson, epson perfection 4490, Gutenprint, HP OfficeJet D135, Mac OS, MarsEdit, Microsoft Office, NewsFire, On the Job, Samsung 2243BWT, Samsung MagicTune, SuperDuper!, Things, VMWare Fusion, XSlimmer

Twitter Weekly Updates for the Week of 2009-08-16

John T Davis — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:30:00 +0000

This is cool: Dogs as Intelligent as 2 Year Old Children: http://tr.im/wbs3. I love this kind of research. Brings respect for fellow beings. #
The http://tr.im URL shortening service is dead, and will offline by year end. At some point I need to salvage all my Twitter links. #
Protip: Putting ™ in your username on Twitter is a sure way to make me almost instantly want to block you. #
#Mac #Microsoft Office 2008 users: "Critical" software update out from MS today. Check your Office Update thingie. #
Digitizing a bunch of paper documents laying around my office. Been putting this cleanup off for months. Scanner making troublesome noises. #
@Ihnatko I'm probably missing something obvious, but why do you need to disable wake on lid open? in reply to Ihnatko #
Microsoft Word Track Changes feature + footnote/endnote autonumbering feature = massive fail. #
Make your Studying More Tech Friendly (Part I in a Series) – http://bit.ly/2kAve (via @legalgeekery) #
Regulators shut Colonial BancGroup http://bit.ly/19PyEO #
@cwgabriel is the new basestation running at the same speed (e.g.: N only) at the same frequency (e.g.: 5 GHz? Mismatch slows the network. in reply to cwgabriel #
Monitor shopping. Anyone got any feedback on the Samsung 2243BWT (http://is.gd/2kntv) for heavy business use (8+ hours/daily)? #lazytweet #

Technorati Tags: Colonial BancGroup, Dogs, Intelligence, Microsoft Office, microsoft word, Samsung 2243BWT, WiFi

Twitter Updates for 2009-07-04

John T Davis — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:30:00 +0000

@kodra22 You planning to replace it with another MX, or something else? in reply to kodra22 #
Stapler stupendously jammed again. I'm very good at rendering simple machines inoperable. Think I've got at least five staples stuck in it. #
There is a place called Montage, Beverly Hills, California. Sometimes, the world is awesome. MONTAGE! #
From my back deck, I can see a fireworks display at a nearby country club. Super awesome. Also, freaking hot. #

Technorati Tags: Fireworks, Independence Day, Logitech, Logitech MX Revolution, Montage, Stapler

Twitter Updates for 2009-05-14

John T Davis — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Reading the comments about #twitterfail/#fixreplies on TechCrunch, here: http://tr.im/ll2w. Some of the comments are good, too. #
Just got DevonThink Pro Office (my document manager) to talk to my scanner. Bit finicky. It scans in and creates searchable PDFs on the fly. #
And now DevonThink has decided it can’t talk to the scanner again, and has taken the scanner software down with it. Great. #
Fellow law students, be sure to make sure you sign up for Lexis summer access if you need it. #
Must conclude that DevonThink + My Scanner == massively unstable. The software crashes, which hangs the scanner, which means a reset. Grrr. #
Watching _Love Actually_ on #Lifetime. Can’t believe I’m watching Lifetime, and kind of embarrassed to admit it. Great movie, though. #
My scanner fu grows. Why must OCR make things look crappier? Cranked the DPI to 600. Should I be using Grayscale instead of b/w? #

Technorati Tags: devonthink pro office, epson perfection 4490, lifetime, love actually, ocr, pdf, scanner, techcrunch

Twitter Updates for 2009-05-13

John T Davis — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

I’ve found most of the people I follow BECAUSE of random replies. [...] Why take away that option? #fixreplies (via @patricknorton) #
Just discovered @NASA. It’s giving live updates on the Hubble mission via Twitter. Some days I love the Internet. #
New Epson Perfection 4490 Office is here and set up. Trying a scan-to-PDF now. Paperless office, here I come! Liking this too much, I fear. #
Have figured out how to make searchable PDFs from scans. Epic. Operation Paperless can begin. #

Technorati Tags: epson perfection 4490, hubble, NASA, pdf, scanner

Twitter Updates for 2009-05-10

John T Davis — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Headed home. Location unknown. Going west. #
Hearing great things about new Star Trek. Can’t wait to see. 3G back. Tyler, Texas signal good but AT&T voice & data abysmal further east. #
Back in Dallas. Gonna veg for a bit then try to clean up my office. It’s currently suffering from exam induced explosion. #
To anyone who’s tried to call/text me, my phone is currently w/o charger and low on battery, so I’ve got it off. Sorry. #

Technorati Tags: at&t, star trek

New Scanner: Epson Perfection 4490

John T Davis — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:06:23 +0000

Just bought one of these yesterday, using the Amazon iPhone app. A very nicely done little program: speedy even over EDGE (faster than using the full website would be) and full-featured (includes access to wish lists, account information, etc.). It’s even got this feature where you take a picture of something you’re interested in buying (say you’re in the subway and see a book someone’s reading), and Amazon will figure out what it is by having other people look at it, then report back to the iPhone/the Amazon webpage. I could see this being pretty useful for things that aren’t clearly labeled. But the app still scares me a little because it just shouldn’t be that easy to buy something from Amazon on impulse. At least before, I had to get to a computer, and that took time and gave me a chance to think about what I was doing.

As for the scanner, I’m excited. I’ve been wanting one for a while, as my life has begun to generate even more paper than it used to, and I finally saved up enough money, and the one I wanted finally went on sale. I really like this one (the “Office” variant of the 4490) because of the 30-sheet auto document feeder: a must have for scanning lots of documents that isn’t typically present on flatbed scanners that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Once I get it (probably Tuesday or Wednesday) and get it set up, I’ll post back with first impressions.

…Need to see the new Star Trek movie as soon as possible. Everyone around me’s seen it and avoiding spoilers is becoming exponentially more difficult as time passes. I already know more than I’d like going in.