Review: Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan
In November 2009, my USB Logitech Optical MouseMan died a cruel death. I had been using this particular trackball for a number of years. In fact, I liked it so much that I bought two more, one for the desk at home and one for use on the road with the laptop.
As I contemplated going out to OfficeMax to buy yet another one, I realized that it might be time to upgrade, at least a little bit. While I was very fond of the existing device, there were a few features that I was lacking that had been added to the newer models over the years:
- cordless operation to make desk arrangement less cumbersome
- scroll wheel
- extra buttons for things like forward and back in a browser
- third button for use in X11
After realizing that I needed an upgrade I decided to dig into some research on the possibilities. Now I must confess that I am a completely unrepentant trackball user. I had been using trackballs for my computers for at least the last 20 years. I did occasionally use a mouse, because sometimes they are better tools, but for the most part I used trackballs exclusively. One of my favorites over the years has been the original Kensington Turbo Mouse. It had a great big trackball and four large, easy to hit, buttons. One of the great things about this particular trackball was the fact that you could swap out the trackball with a standard billiard ball and it would fit perfectly.
After some research I decided to go with the cordless version of the same trackball that I was replacing. I purchased the Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman at Fry’s in Atlanta.
Initial Impressions
One of the first things that I noticed about the new trackball was that it was tremendously stiff. I didn’t remember this being the case with my older models. The cursor movement was also very jerky. Over the first day of use, however, the movement and tracking of the ball improved. My guess is that part of the stiffness was caused by some sort of film that was on the ball from the manufacturing process. One user in a forum posted that his was vastly improved by cleaning the entire ball with rubbing alcohol. Not having any of this on hand, I hoped that the film would gradually be removed with use. Thankfully this was the case.
Usage
I did notice a “learning curve” when it came to getting used to the style of the design and placement of the trackball. The ball is placed off-center on the right-hand side of the casing. I was used to having my hand completely flat in orientation with respect to the wrist rest and the trackball from the older models. After some use I found the new orientation to feel more natural.
As with many users, I have found that you will need to spend some time tweaking the Logitech multiplier and tracking speeds in the Logitech control panel as well as the OS X mouse preference pane. It took me sometime to get the settings just so. This was not really the case with the USB model, however with the older model you didn’t have a multiplier available in the Logitech software package. After quite a bit of back and forth with the settings, I finally got it to a useable setting.
Software
The Logitech software gives you the expected settings for the various buttons, scrolling speed as well as the multiplier to apply to the tracking and cursor movement. Interestingly enough, the software installer can’t figure out that you don’t have a Logitech keyboard installed, just pick one and move on. Due to the three kexts (kernel extensions) that are installed, the software requires you to restart, even though you can dynamically load a kext without rebooting.
In my particular installation, the registration application that starts after installation never completely loaded.
I did find some interesting points while tweaking the software settings:
- The scroll speed in the Logitech panel doesn’t appear to actually have an effect on the speed of the scroll wheel. This will need to be controlled in the standard OS mouse preference pane.
- The tracking multiplier can have a huge effect on the jerkiness of the cursor. My best results were achieved when leaving the multiplier set on 1 and controlling the tracking speed with the standard OS mouse pane.
- The battery life indicator in the Logitech panel is nice, however it would be great if there was a menubar indicator or a LED indicator on the device itself.
Overall, I am quite pleased with the new trackball. In fact, I have become so used to having the extra buttons and the scroll wheel that I find myself trying to use them when I am at home with my older, USB model. Looks like I need to add another item to my shopping list.
New Year’s Resolutions 2010
I didn’t really make any true resolutions for 2009, but this year I have decided to jump on the I’m gonna do something this year bandwagon. Maybe I didn’t accomplish as much because I didn’t set any clear goals, and maybe it was because I was being too lackadaisical about it. Regardless, this year I am going to mark out some clear goals and work towards achieving them.
With that in mind, here are my targets for 2010:
- Read 10,000 pages. At first I was thinking I would restrict this to a particular type of reading material, but then I decided that doing so would be a hinderance to achieving the goal. The only restriction is that the pages must be bound into a book.
- Improve my health. This one is much more amorphous than the reading goal. The top three candidates in this goal are:
- Diet. I eat way too much processed sugar and fat in my daily diet. I am going to add more fruits and vegetables.
- Sleep schedule. On of the ways to improve your overall health is to have a regular sleep schedule.
- Kick some bad habits. There are a couple of seriously detrimental habits that I have that I am resolving to end.
- Regular maintenance. If you have health insurance that provides for regular maintenance, why not use it?
- Put at least 1000 miles on my bicycle. While this goal would easily fit in the previous resolution, I feel it is important enough to merit it’s own spot in the list. I have some friends that want to do a serious ride next year, and if I am going to be in shape to do it, then I need to get on the road some.
- Broaden my work knowledge. There are a couple of things I have been toying with achieving at work that will seriously broaden my knowledge:
- Buy a house. This one is by far my most interesting goal. There are so many things that I would like to do that are hard, if not impossible, to accomplish when all you have is an apartment with no garage or yard.
There are so many more things that I could add to the list, but these were the biggest items. I should travel more, I have friends and relatives that I haven’t seen much this last year. Take more pictures and cook more, also figure large on the list.
Here’s hoping for a bumper crop on the resolutions for 2010!
Making Simple Tags work with Wordpress 2.9
For some of you that have just upgraded to the shiny new Wordpress 2.9 release, you may have noticed a nasty little message that states that Simple Tags won’t work with the version of Wordpress that you now have installed.
The issue at hand here is that the code for the plug-in contains a hard-coded check for the version number to ensure compatibility. It doesn’t appear on the surface that there will be any issues with this plug-in and the new WP code.
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Google breaks the best search engine in town
In the old days of the Internet search engine business you had a vast multitude of places to visit. There was Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and many others. You had the search engine aggregators, such as Dogpile and HotBot.
What you didn’t have was a single source to use to search the whole of the web. When Google came along they created a way to analyze the relationships between pages to produce more useful results. The search results were no longer just a mishmash based on how many times a word existed in a page, now the results had a certain relevancy.
Then Google added advertising into the mix, providing users with a way to find products or vendors that had some correlation with the keywords entered. This was a great tool for the layperson and researcher alike. Along the way Google has added shopping results, images, news, videos, and maps. However they seem to have forgotten their core product: a clean, easy-to-use, clutter-free search engine.
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File upload hang in Safari 4
While working on a method to allow the VSU Communications Unit to add or change the stories in the rotation on the main VSU webpage, I ran into a problem that involved a known Safari issue involving file uploads.
I don’t regularly create forms that allow for an upload of a file, however I don’t like to store binary data in the MySQL database either. Allowing the files to be uploaded makes creating pages that use them a whole lot easier, since I don’t have to “create” the image from the binary data, just pass off a file location and let the browser do the rest.
The symptoms exhibited were that when submitting the form, Safari would hang about 30-40% of the time. No error messages or timeout messages were displayed. Zip, zilch, nada!
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