maniacal rage

I've written about my obsession with finding the perfect mouse before. I've had so many mice the past few years and I've still yet to find the right one.

For the last 16 months or so I've been using an extremely cheap but surprisingly good Logitech LX7 USB cordless mouse. I say surprisingly good because at under $40, I expected it to be a total piece of garbage. It works well, however, ignoring the fact that it has a huge dongle and loses its connection all the time. It's also completely hand-neutral, so it's comfortable with my left hand. In fact, if it weren't for the disconnections, occasional skipping and such, I'd be perfectly happy with it.

But I want the perfect mouse. I want something that works well all the time, is comfortable, and never makes me think about the fact that I'm using it. So I'm always looking.

People always tell me the wireless Mighty Mouse is great. I know people who are huge fans of it. They say that it's much better than the wired version and that it works really well. They're liars.

I bought the original wireless Mighty Mouse and declared it shit immediately. One year later now, I've just purchased the newer model (which I was hoping had some improved internals rather than just changing the color of the side buttons to white) and I'm declaring it equally as shitty.

Quite frankly, the Mighty Mouse is one of the worst things Apple has ever designed. Wired or wireless.

For starters, the wireless version is laggy. It's not smooth at all. The default tracking speed when you pair it for the first time is insultingly slow. No one on earth would want it at this speed. Cranking it all the way up will give you a normal tracking speed, but don't attempt to move the mouse slowly and deliberately, because it's total crap on that level. It's imprecise, jittery, and, well, not to sound like a broken record or anything, total shit.

I noticed the wired Mighty Mouse that came with Katia's new iMac was better about click-detection (you know, the whole problem where the mouse requires you not touch one side when clicking the other for it to properly register a click), but the wireless model is not at all. Same stupid problem. If you finger is even one millimeter over the line of the side button, your clicks drop into a black hole. How the hell does anyone use this piece of shit?

Quickly, now, since I'm screaming out loud and losing my mind: The scrolling ball is a horrible design decision, it doesn't work that well and it gets too dirty too quickly.

Seriously. Apple. Change this. If anyone on earth could build the perfect mouse, I thought it would be you. But this isn't it.

I'm sure there would be many more options open to me if I wasn't left handed, but such is life. In the mean time, I'm going back to my LX7 for now. I'll just occasionally yell when it loses its connection. At least when its connected it works well.

I've been playing Bioshock a lot. It's a really fun game. Too bad my XBOX 360 just died. Again. Well, not again, since this one was a replacement. That's two dead XBOXes in three months. What. The. Fuck.

What sucks is that the games are so good, and the software is so good, but the main system hardware is total crap. It's loud, it breaks easily, it overheats, it's FUCKING LOUD, it's just frustrating. I was right in the middle of Bioshock, really enjoying myself and now I have to wait four to six weeks again. Sons of bitches.

When I went to the Apple Store today, I planned to pick up the new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a new keyboard. For the past year I have been using (and loving) the Macally iceKey—with its laptop-depth keys it reduces strain on my fingers and I've never been more comfortable typing in years, but its non-Apple-standard key sizes and one blank key¹ drive me nuts on a regular basis. So when I heard Apple was releasing a laptop-depth keyboard I was thrilled.

Turns out they didn't have them in stock today in stores. But I did get to play with one, and I found some very strange things.

First, Apple has decided that the wired version of the keyboard should be full size, but the Bluetooth version isn't. It's missing the delete, insert, home, et cetera island, and the number pad. In fact, the Bluetooth version looks exactly like the MacBook keyboard, but with aluminum backing. The wired version has the whole keyboard layout. I'm not sure why they decided on this, and I don't think I agree with it. Sure, making the BT version smaller makes it more portable, but I don't think people are moving them around quite enough that it's worth shorting them the ability to input numbers conveniently.

Second, and far stranger, is the new layout of function (or F) keys. The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which has nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even stranger:

The F3 key's special function is Expose: All windows. F3? Are they serious? F4 is Dashboard. Since when are F3 and F4 easy to hit keys? They're in no-man's land up there. And are we just supposed to stop using any other Expose functionality? There are no keys with the other two functions. And, while we're at it, I should mention that the volume controls have been changed, order-wise, from the usual desktop keyboard layout. It used to be volume down, volume up, mute. Now it matches the laptop arrangement, which swaps mute to the left instead of the right.

And here's where it gets fun: you can, much like on a laptop, disable the special functionality of the keys and switch to regular function key use using System Preferences, after which you can assign things to the keys you wish. That is, except the volume keys. Because when you turn off the special functions, there is no way to bind the volume keys to, say, the F16-18 keys which are useless on the keyboard otherwise. So if you want to use the keyboard the way you're used to, you won't be able to control volume without holding the "fn" key, which allows you to use the special functions temporarily when they're disabled.

So why did Apple make all of these random changes? Truthfully, I'm not sure. The new keyboard looks like it was meant to be a laptop keyboard (it functions nearly identically to the current MB and MBP boards), which doesn't make much sense. How frequently are people adjusting brightness (dedicated special function keys F1 and F2) on a desktop? I'd guess very rarely.

All this aside, the keys are really quite nice to type on and I still plan to order one for the sake of my fingers. But I'm going to have to figure out a way to bind the keys the way I want them—that is, to have them work the way the desktop keyboards have worked for years.

Let's say I wanted to get a VESA mounting arm for my 23-inch Cinema Display. Would anyone have a recommendation for me? Here are the only two important features I'm looking for:

• Attaches by clamping onto a desk that's 0.75 inches thick
• Allows me to rotate the display from landscape to portrait

That and it needs to support the weight of the display itself. Of course, it would be a bonus if the arm were silver or white, but I'm not too picky.

If you have any suggestions, send them to garrett at maniacalrage dot net. Thanks!

Now that I'm working from home, I figured I post a picture of my home office. I haven't shown a recent photo of my computer setup either, so this is a two birds sort of thing. I'll never get tired of looking at other peoples' setups, so I take feel no shame in posting my own. If you're into that sort of thing, give it a look.

My new Airport Extreme Base Station arrived earlier this week and I finally got a chance to set it up last night. After some initial frustration caused by my VoIP phone router, which I eventually solved, I had the AEBS in place where a LinkSys 802.11G WiFi router used to be.

Previously, I had flashed said LinkSys router with the open-source DD-WRT firmware to add features LinkSys leaves out of its stock firmware and administration software—namely, the ability to reserve IP addresses for clients who regularly connect to the network and boost transmitter power.

Why are those two features important? The network setup in our apartment is all wireless and pretty continuous, so I'd rather every device that's normally connected always use the same IP (this makes it easier to open ports for various things like the XBOX 360). One side effect to having an all-wireless network in our apartment is the living room and office are separated by a few walls, one of which is filled with brick and plaster (an old fireplace chimney hiding behind a wall), absolutely murdering signal strength. The default LinkSys firmware's transmitter only uses 19mW (or ~13dBm) of power, which is considered very low. Using DD-WRT, you can safely up your transmission power to increase signal strength and this worked wonders in our apartment, giving the farthest item (the XBOX 360) a 75% signal instead of the 25% it had before the firmware change.

Everything worked really well—I only had to reboot the router once in over a year (compared to somewhat regular reboots with the default firmware), signal was strong, things were good. So why change to the Aiport Extreme Base Station? Two reasons: Airport Disk and wireless printer sharing.

Airport Disk could really be considered the reason I made the change, but wireless printing is great too. Before the AEBS, I had a little D-Link ethernet print server in my network, allowing me to share the USB printer with anyone on the network. This worked fine but it was an extra device, more power, more configuration to worry about. The AEBS has standard support for USB printer sharing, so I was able to get rid of this extra network device.

In fact, the great thing about the new AEBS is the ability to plug a USB hub in and connect both a printer and multiple disks, all of which work immediately. Within two seconds, I had my printer shared via Bonjour and my disks mounted over wireless on both of our computers. Airport Disk has all the functionality you would expect—it allows disks to sleep when not in use and wakes them up when you access them and it automatically mounts them when they become available on the network, if you wish. From the Airport Utility you can unmount drives from users as well.

The whole point of the Aiport Disk technology for me is simple: I want to move my music and pictures to a central network location that I can access from any computer. I want this because I want to save hard drive space on my MacBook Pro, and because I want Katia to be able to play all of our music as well (previously, she'd have to open my laptop and then browse my shared library in iTunes). Between the 40GB of photos and 20GB of music I've got, my 100GB MBP hard drive was filling up quickly. Back ups were slower. And it just didn't make sense to carry all that stuff around.

When I'm away from home, if I want to hear music I use my iPod. I don't need to carry my entire music library with me on two drives. And when I'm at home, I want to be able to hear my music no matter which computer I might be using (or over the stereo using Airport Express). Airport Disk allows you to do that.

The process for moving my music and photo libraries was a little nerve-wracking. After making a full back-up of my MBP, I copied all the media over to the external drive and hooked it up to the AEBS. To update iTunes, I did the following:

1. With iTunes not open, I copied the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file to the desktop.
2. Opened iTunes, changed the "iTunes Music folder location" to the network drive music folder. Quit iTunes.
3. Deleted all the music from my local machine, including the iTunes folder.
4. Opened the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in TextMate and did some find/replace¹ on the paths.
5. Opened iTunes and ran File, Import... and chose the XML file I had just edited.
6. Waited about 30 minutes while iTunes looked at every file on the network.
7. Waited nearly three hours while iTunes determined gapless playback for all tracks again.

Why the gapless playback determination took so long, I don't know. In total time spent (including waiting), this was a long process, but it was worth it. Now when I open iTunes I can play all my music from my laptop without wasting space. Tonight I'm going to set up Katia the same way.

I've yet to handle the iPhoto library stuff, once I do that I'll report on how it goes.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the AEBS so far. Its stronger transmitter (100mW or 20dBm) is sending 98% signal to the XBOX 360, which is a near 25% improvement, even though I have it set to G/B compatible mode. It also allows for IP reservation. Granted, this is all making me yearn for an N card in my laptops, but in the mean time things are good and I've finally got hard drive space again.

This might never end, you know, these posts about the Wii. Alright, maybe they'll end at some point in the future, but not yet:

I've spent about 7 hours in Zelda now on the Wii, and I regret complaining about the graphics before. Granted, they are much lower quality than, say, the XBOX 360, but the more I play (and especially once I got into twilight), the better it looks to me. I think it suffers from the fact that the first area of the game isn't well designed and so it gives a bad first impression. But it gets much better.

Gameplay-wise, Zelda is a crapload of fun. There are so many facets to the game so far and, at the risk of giving even the slightest detail away, you end up playing as a wolf, as a human (Link), riding a horse and more. The Wiimote control does feel a little tacked on, at least at first, but you get used to it and then it's fun.

I can't get enough Wii Sports Tennis. The more you play, the better the AI is against you, so matches last longer and are more challenging. I'm up to skill level somewhere around 340 and games are now much more challenging and enjoyable.

I just noticed the Wii Sports Fitness test, where you play various challenges and then your fitness "age" is determined from your scores. I just did it for the first time and I'm apparently 56. The Wii says I should take this test every day to improve.

For all the marketing done with the Wii's disc slot being lit up blue (even the box shows it this way), the slot never actually glows unless you have a message. Kind of weird for them to have used the lit up shot for everything when that happens very rarely. Not that I necessarily want it to be on. When I got a message just now it was pulsing and it was hard to focus on playing a game with that thing pulsing really brightly. I've switched it back to dim but haven't gotten another message yet so I don't know if the dim setting pulses. Still seems weird for them to have always shown the Wii with it lit up.

It's very comfortable to have the two controllers split. Having the nunchuck in one hand and the Wiimote in the other and being able to rest them in different places is surprisingly comfortable for the hands. Playing XBOX last night afterward wasn't a problem, per se, but I did realize that not being able to have my hands wherever I wanted them was a little constricting. It's not that I play with my hands all over the place, but being able to have your hands a foot or two apart causes less strain on my wrists. Granted, when I'm swinging my hands all the time to hit baddies with my sword that can't really be good for the joints, but still.

Second day with the Wii, more random thoughts and such:

It sucks that adding friends to your address book has to be two-way. It means you can't just message someone who doesn't have you in their address book as well—they have to first enter your Wii Number. You should be able to message someone if you know their Wii Number even if you're not in their address book. Or, at least, there should be an option to make yourself publicly message-able that way.

I've started to play Zelda. First thought: The graphics are piss poor. At first glance, Zelda looks worse than a Gamecube game to me. Granted, there are a few factors at work here: First, this is (or at least was originally) a Gamecube game and wasn't designed from the ground up for the (slightly) better hardware. Wii Sports looks better than Zelda in places. Second, the last time I played a Gamecube game it was on an old tube television and that helps a lot. Seeing Zelda in HD right now doesn't help it out at all. The textures are muddy and the poly count is very low. All that being said, the first few minutes of gameplay were fun. I'm sure the graphics thing will fade away in my brain. I bet going back to Gears of War after this will look photo-realistic in comparison (not that it's far from that anyway).

When you push the power button on a Wiimote to turn the Wii on, it turns the system on but the remote stays off. You have to push the button again (or another button) to turn the Wiimote on. That seems silly. If it knows to turn the system on, you'd think it would also check quickly to see if the system is now on and, if so, turn itself on. It's a tiny annoyance, but still.

There's no start button on the Wiimote. I think Nintendo was the first company to create a controller with a start button and this is the first one I've seen since without it. Because there's no start button, nearly all of the things I've played have you pressing A+B. That's so strange. It's fine, but weird.

Just got into combat for the first time in Zelda. Took a little getting used to, but it's kind of fun! Also, the more I play, the less the graphics bother me, although I still wish it was done in the style of Wind Waker (which I still think is one of the best looking games ever released).

Random collection of thoughts and experiences from the first day of playing with the Nintendo Wii:

The slot-loading drive is extremely smooth. Made me wish my Apple laptops had a smoother insertion. On my MacBook Pro, you push until it's almost in and then the drive snaps it up and makes all sorts of sounds, but the Wii takes the disc almost immediately with no force and smoothly accepts it quietly.

I had to update the Wii software twice. Then I went into a channel and it told me I needed to update again before viewing it, so I hit update and then it told me no updates were available. I still cannot view the news or weather channels because they say they require updates that I don't need. Boo. (Oh, okay—I just went to Wii.com and found out these channels won't be available until later.)

They aren't kidding when they say to put the sensor a little over the edge of the TV. Mine was flush with the TV's black bezel and my Wiimote was going nuts. Hanging it over by 3mm seemed to fix this issue for a while, but then it was back. I think the gist of it is that if the sensor has to go near solid black, it's gonna be a bit of an issue. I used the included stand and ended up putting the sensor on the sensor stand under the TV where it's not as near to black. This really fixed all issues, although I still have the problem where my hands are a little shaky and I can see it when I'm trying to be still with the mote. Guess that's what you get for having smoked those six years, eh?

The Wiimote is comfortable in the hand. It has nice weight and it fits my hand size pretty well (I wonder about smaller hands... guess we'll see when I convince Katia to play). It's still a little difficult for me to use the Wiimote as a pointer. I think it will just take time. Zelda should help me out in that regard.

When you're using the Wiimote as a pointer you get force feedback (vibration) every time you "mouse over" an item on the screen. This is great because it makes moving the cursor much easier for your brain. If there were no vibrations when moving it would be much harder for me.

The "Mii" channel is where you create your own little avatar, and I created one that looked pretty close to me (if you were to make me a two-dimensional cartoon character with a low poly count) and it was kind of fun. The only slightly confusing thing is the whole "mingle" and "parade" feature, which basically seems to mean that your avatar will travel around on the internet appearing on other peoples' Wiis. Kind of cool. I turned my Miis onto migrate and checked my parade but no one is there yet.

I keep seeing references to the Wii message board, but I don't know where that is. I looked on Wii.com and on Nintendo.com but didn't find it. They make reference to it as if it's part of the Wii channel system but I don't see it.

The shop channel works but it's pretty barebones right now. I guess they'll update this with more content as time goes by. Not that I'm all that interested in paying for old NES games, but you never know. Especially since there are other systems (SNES, N64, Genesis(!)) available as well.

Okay, so I load up Wii Sports. Right, let's try tennis. Play for a little while and all of a sudden I'm having fun. Serious fun. Let's try bowling. Simple mechanics, repetitive and yet—yes, oh my, I'm really enjoying it. I shout out "Yes!" when I get a double strike. Baseball is fun but not as much because it's kind of slow. Golf was okay but man oh man, tennis and bowling are fun! I find myself playing tennis very seriously and really enjoying it. Katia might like this, even.

There is a message system on the Wii and by default it sends you one message each day (that it updates automatically throughout the day) that contains your total activities by time. How many minutes you spent doing each thing. I feel like this is more for parents, but I thought it was cute. I just wish it didn't light up the new messages indicator on the Wii dashboard. I keep seeing "1" or "2" and thinking, "Oooh! Message!" but then it's the Wii telling me I just spent six minutes playing Wii Sports or something.

Oh, I just noticed I can add people to my address book and send message from the Wii. Cool. If you want to exchange messages, my Wii Number is 7439 2260 2806 8401. Feel free to send me yours, I'd love to try it out.

I haven't had a chance to even crack Zelda open yet tonight. But I did shoot a few quick photos of the unboxing and unit in place. I'll play with it more tomorrow.

A few quick thoughts on the Wireless Mighty Mouse:

• Buy it if you don't care about your mouse cursor moving smoothly.
• Buy it if you don't care that they still force you to lift your left finger off the mouse when right clicking.
• Buy it if you don't mind paying $70 for it.
• Buy it if you don't mind paying at least $12 more for better mouse driver software to at least make it a little smoother (I've linked to SteerMouse because USB Overdrive, which I prefer, doesn't yet support the Wireless Mighty Mouse).

Or, if you're like me, buy it because you're on an endless quest to find the "perfect mouse." Then, after a few hours of trying to force yourself to like it, realize that that $30 Logitech wireless mouse you bought is actually pretty great, aside from the fact that it has a USB dongle with 2.4GHz wireless instead of Bluetooth. But then realize that it actually works, and it's smooth, and it's half the price.

I wanted the Wireless Mighty Mouse to be good. I really did.

One of the toys I ordered after the sale of my Quad arrived this week, but, unfortunately, it arrived broken.

The white 2GHz MacBook, customized with a 100GB hard drive, is a replacement for our older PowerBook, which we sold to a friend. The MB will be our living-room machine and Katia's primary computer. With my luck, it showed up early but broken. Well, not "broken," really, but not flawless.

The machine vibrates like crazy. Like, not good, what the hell, it's hurting my hands vibrating. All the time, non-stop, fun, fun, fun. Oh, and there's a dead pixel in the center of the display. Not good. I've had plenty of Apple portables, and none of them vibrated so, after a call to Apple, it's being replaced. The only problem is, of course, I have to send this one back. So now we're waiting again, without a computer at home.

Aside from the issues with the computer, I will say that the MacBook is truly impressive—I instantly fell in love with it. I'm excited for it to return.

Now, hopefully, the other toys will all be flawless when they arrive next week.

Update: Sold!

I'm selling my Power Mac G5 Quad. I don't use it nearly enough to justify keeping it. This is the ultimate studio machine or application server, and I just don't need the speed or beastly power. Don't get me wrong—I love it. I've just realized in the past few months that I use the laptop much more and I don't want to be tethered to a room anymore.

The beast is as follows:

• Two dual-core 2.5GHz G5 processors
• 4.5GB of RAM
• 410GB of hard drive space (a 250GB drive and a 160GB drive)
• Airport Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Dual Gigabit ethernet
• nVidia GeForce 6600 with 256MB of GDDR SDRAM
• 16x SuperDrive (double-layer)

You can see a few photos of the machine in my Quad set on Flickr. It's covered under AppleCare until December 28, 2008.

Also included with the machine:

• Apple Pro Keyboard
• Mighty Mouse
• Mac OS X Tiger
• iLife '06
• DVI to VGA adapter

What this package is worth:

• Quad: $3,399
• RAM: $500
• Extra HDD: $100
• AppleCare: $349
• Total: $4,348 (not including $375 in taxes I paid)

What I'm selling it for, excluding shipping:

$3,299, which is $349 cheaper than a standard Quad with AppleCare would cost you from Apple (even more savings if you consider tax). Sold!

You save over a thousand dollars on this package.

I would love to sell this to someone local to NYC, but I'm willing to ship it if necessary. I estimate shipping will cost around $150 in the US, I'm not sure about shipping to a foreign country but will consider it.