My little corner of this place called the World Wide Web
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I noticed something today in the new iTunes Store interface. When you hover over a song in the store you are presented with a nifty play icon that replaces the track number in the album listing. This is quite similar to the iTunes Store interface functionality on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS. Clicking on the play […]
Apple, iTunes
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AWStats is a great open-source stats analyzation program.
In the process of setting up a replacement webserver at VSU I was investigating the replacement of analog, another nice open-source stats program.
The problem with analog is that the people requesting stats were confused by the technical output. These people aren’t computer folks, they just want to know who or what or when the pages they maintain are being visited.
The default setup of AWStats is fairly easy to accomplish, but if you want to generate separated stats on individual directories off the web root, then it takes a little know how.
AWStats
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So this morning, during a momentary lull in my workday, I was perusing my huge and unorganized list of bookmarks when I ran across a bookmark to the Burma Shave section of The Fifties Web.
For those of you, like myself actually, who are to young to have witnessed them yourself, Burma Shave used to put […]
Culture, Rhyme, Sayings
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Another day, another off the wall saying.
So my father used to use the phrase “You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd” all the time when I was growing up. Until recently I never really cared what the origin was, I used the phrase and went on.
Recently, however, the subject of my unusual phrases came up at a luncheon for one of my student assistants that had just gotten a new job as a full time staff member in another department.
Sayings
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Every now and then I will utter a saying that I grew hearing or using that makes my assistants wonder.
Today I happened to use the saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride in reference to one of my assistants wish that the timesheet process here was all done electronically instead of the paper system that we have.
She wondered where I get these things from. I thought it was a pretty common saying, but I had never actually investigated where it originated, so I went googling.
Sayings
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Sungevity is a company that does residential solar panel installations. They have this cool web app that lets you enter you address and then determines how much energy you will need. They use satellite imagery to help design the system.
When you’re ready to see how much solar your home needs, Sungevity makes it […]
Alternative Energy, Web Apps
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:
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:
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.
Computers
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One Response to “Review: Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan”
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At work I am in charge of running our Macromedia Adobe Contribute Publishing Server. Since I like to duplicate my work environment on my laptop for local development, I needed to install JBoss 4.0.5.GA. I won’t go into why we are running such an old version, that’s all Adobe’s fault.
Installing JBoss
Download the JEMS installer for 4.0.5.GA […]
Mac OS X 10.5, jboss
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Today while perusing the forums on the Plex website, I noticed someone inquiring as to how they would go about changing the file paths in Plex for one of the video sources without removing the source and adding it back from the new location.
The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that your […]
Computers
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So several months ago I was in Atlanta visiting some friends (Hi, Justin!) and got hooked on his hackintosh Plex box. Now, I wanted to run it on a Mac Mini, instead of a hackintosh, but the application was great. Since then I have purchased the Mini and had a blast getting Plex working and […]
Computers
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This weekend I spent a large chunk of time setting up Plex Media Center for OS X on my shiny new Mac Mini. When I left for work this morning, after two weeks off, I expected to get to the office and fire up iTunes to listen to my music from home using Simplify Media […]
Computers
1
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 […]
Computers
0
One of the standard methods of configuring Mac OS X in the enterprise has become known as the magic triangle or golden triangle. This is generally described as a setup involving Active Directory (AD) for authentication of the clients and services and Open Directory (OD) for managing the client preferences. The triangle comes from the […]
Computers, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 10.5