Logitech v500 Mouse & UltraX Keyboard

First of all, happy July 4^th, everybody! (even non-Americans have a 4^th of July.) I hope everyone is enjoying good time spent with family and friends.

I just got a couple interesting input devices from Logitech, and I wanted to take a moment to tell you all how cool they are.

First is the relatively new Logitech v500 wireless optical mouse intended for use with a notebook. This thing is quite small, but still manages to feel nice in my hand thanks to some quite impressive engineering. An easy-to-release latch on the bottom of the mouse releases the chassis. The bottom side of the mouse comes up to fit better into the palm of your hand. This also exposes the slot hidden in the now-exposed surface to store the micro receiver. It also has a 4-way scroll pad (not a wheel!) making this one badass little mouse.

The other big selling point for me is the new technology. This is one of the first mice to incorporate a scroll pad like this one. It’s also at least one of the first to use 2.4 GHz wireless technology to provide super-low latency transmissions and a completely reworked all-terrain optical engine. The two of these things together mean that this mouse will be very quick and error free on about any surface you can think of for up to 30 meters!

Now for the bad news. I didn’t even realize this until I got the mouse, but it doesn’t have the ability to send a signal for a middle click. I guess the pad is designed only to allow the swiping motions to signify scrolling, and can’t distinguish a simple tap. This is annoying, but using xorg’s emulate3buttons (both buttons at the same time for 3rd mouse click) isn’t as annoying as I thought it would be. I thought it was odd, though, that I read a couple reviews and nothing I read hinted the fact that this mouse is missing a third button as though it wasn’t even a consideration.

Anyway, this mouse is otherwise perfect. I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a sleek and tiny mouse to use with their laptop, doesn’t mind the lack of middle mouse button, and has the moolah. The SRP is about $70, but I found mine on Newegg for $53.

The keyboard I just picked up is a IBM-Compatible keyboards. I actually stole this keyboard idea from my friend Dan who picked it up a few months ago. Having proper, full-sized keys along with the familiar layout make it very comfortable to type on. The media keys up top are few, but few is more than enough for me. Also, with this wrist rest I use, the keyboard ends up being a bit too low when my hands come over the rest because this keyboard is so thin. So, I’ve put a couple jewel cases under it to elevate it a bit. This is an okay temporary solution, though the keyboard does tend to drift around a bit.

Skype as voIP Solution

I’ve tried Ventrilo (only for windows) and TeamSpeak (the advanced interface and actually having to connect to a particular server make it a bit tricky for newbies.) They’re both nice, but Skype seems even nicer.

Skype is a company that provides their client software for free, and without any malware even! This will allow you to connect with other users who have the Skype client software on their computer for free! The added bonus of this system is, if you want to drop some scrilla, you can call out to PSTN lines ($0.017 /min in US and a few other places), get your own phone number and take incoming phone calls (from PSTN), and/or use a voicemail service.

Anyway, the client application is very clean and easy to use. I would recommend it to anyone who needs the voIP services, or just wants to experiment with some cool things to do with your new fast wireless T1 connection you’ve got even though you live out in the middle of nowhere. Oh wait, that’s me. Nevermind…

Skype Me! I’m threadphone.

Secure Delete

So I’m selling off my old laptop to someone who found my listing on AllMSU, and so I decided to do a proper secure delete. After some quick research I found Secure Delete from The Hacker’s Choice. They’re some very flexible tools to delete files/partitions/etc so they can never be recovered. What I ended up doing in this case, though, is wiping the entire partiton clean off while booted from a Knoppix CD. This article shows how to use the “shred” tool.

# shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1

Which will overwrite every bit on the drive with random (or otherwise generated) 1’s and 0’s bits for TWO passes before going back over again on a THIRD pass to make everything 0 again. Needless to say, this is taking quite some time…

Paranoia? Perhaps… but any security savvy person would say it is generally good practice (that many still do not follow).

Wireless in Class

MSU has this wireless thing that is in “beta” where you log in with your msunet id before you access the internet through the wireless. It’s only offered in some of the buildings around campus right now like the business building that I’m in right now listening to my most uninteresting class—marketing. Anyway, I just felt like posting so I could say: (1) I’m trying to organize to have Scottfro come to my dorm room for a dnbradio broadcast some time next week, and (2) I just bought a bunch of IBM :)

New Dell Inspiron 700m

So I just got my new laptop the other day. It’s sooo sweet. This small & light Inspiron 700m has a Pentium M 725 1.6 GHz (faster than it sounds when compared to regular P4s), 512M ram, 40G hdd, cdrw/dvd combo drive, integrated intel 2200 wireless, 8 cell (~5 hr) battery, and 12.1” WXGA (1280×768) screen. After seeing the bundled winxp home start up with all its preinstalled systray/desktop icons, I immediately plopped in the Ubuntu Hoary CD and began peeling off the “powered by windoze” sticker. Ubuntu seems to be working quite nicely with the laptop as mostly everything was automatically configured. I did have to set it up to run this patch on bootup that somehow fixes my video driver so I actually get the right resolution. But as I read in some reviews, the glassy screen is very nice indeed.

Oh, and I’m too lazy to take a bunch of pictures of it, so I’ll just rely on other people.

Update: Wow this was so cool I had to post it. gtkwifi allows me to configure my wireless card for different networks with the convenience of a gnome panel applet. I even discovered 4 different wireless networks from my dorm room!

The Scary Future of DRM

I’ve been reading startling stories about DRM, or Digital Rights Management, for quite some time now, but it hasn’t been until recently that the major PC makers (Dell, HP, IBM) started putting these TC chips into new computers. TC stands for Treacherous Computing, or as the imposing companies like to call “Trusted Computing.” This could be the seed to a much larger ploy the Corporations have to control consumers and take away their rights. I just read This very interesting BBC article that explains the current state of affairs much better than I’m going to here. A quote from the article that I must put here:

Ho man they nailed it there, didn’t they…

Lite-On Optical Drives Flawed

I guess they’re not as flawless as I thought. Just the other night, my good friend (who also owns the same DVD burner as me) let me know that he resolved a freezing/skipping issue on burned discs that I’ve also been encounting sparatically by flashing his ROM in his drive, upgrading it to SOHW-1633S. I didn’t even recognize the problem because it doesn’t cause all DVD’s to skip. Here’s the broken, IE-only website: Lite-On Firmware Upgrades.

Wow, that really would have sucked if I had actually burned those 150+ DVD’s already…. sigh

UPDATE: Actually, many/most of the dics I had burned seem to play back fine. Only a couple that I can think of actually skipped with ogle (froze, never to return) and mplayer (froze for some seconds, then skipped ahead a bit and resumed) on my mythtv box, and at least one of them seemed to play back fine on my suitemate’s set-top DVD player.

Enjoying Break; Gentoo Fails

So I’m a week into my break, and it’s Christmas Eve! I’ve been mostly offline for the last few days as I’ve been trying to load Gentoo onto our server (from the flakey Fedora). Working with speeds literally around 800 b/s, I finally managed to get all the packages I wanted installed. (All the big stuff was downloaded elsewhere with broadband connections.) Weird stuff was going on with the nat firewall, though. I could ftp and ssh through the gateway just fine, but web requests (while they DO establish a tcp connection with the server) never received any response. And trying to get on the AIM network with Gaim caused it to hang and eventually time out when it says “Password sent.”

I tried kernels 2.6.9-gentoo-r10, 2.6.8.1, 2.6.6, and even 2.4.28… probably overkill, but I knew pretty much for sure it wasn’t the kernel at that point. I also tried FireHOL to test the workiness of my favorite projectfiles.com firewall script (which has worked every time in the past).

So anyway, after rebuilding the bare bones of Gentoo (from stage3) from scratch, and observing the same behavior, I gave up. Now, I’ve got Ubuntu Linux on there, and it’s working great. Ubuntu has recently become my second favorite distribution for being so damn simple in nature. GUI package managers and configurator dealios coupled with a solid Debian foundation and great autodetection etc etc… make Ubuntu one sweet distro. I was trying to go for a minimalist server with my Gentoo approach, but I guess my dad doesn’t mind a friendly Gnome desktop with lots of GUI tools.

Gearing Up

Although I haven’t mentioned anything about it yet, I’ve been experimenting with Propellerheads Reason 2.5. While I’ve only produced a couple of short and pretty simple tracks, I am in the process of becoming more serious with it. Up until now, I’ve only been using my sub-par 700MHz laptop with no proper midi controller. In the next day or two, I will clear up enough space so I can partition off something like 10 Gb for windoze and get to work with an Evolution MK-425C that is due to arrive on Thursday. But for now, I have to go write a paper. Oh, and you can click that picture for a (much) larger one.

Last Day at the 2004 ACM Conference

Today, we heard a talk from Stephen Thaler of Imagination Engines, Inc. He talked about his many years of research he has conducted in the area of AI, or as he calls them, creative machines (CM). His research has led him to apply notions of neural networks to develop “embarrassingly simple” algorithms to allow the software to “learn” from its own mistakes. Essentially, the program is given an objective, a definition of a “good” outcome, and a definition of a “bad” outcome. From this simple information, the program can work towards the objective, and learn from its mistakes.

He showed us demonstration after demonstration. One program invented new English words by recognizing trends in a giant inputted list of preexisting words. Another one recognized objects in 3D space. Another could tell the user what expression they were giving to the camera (happy, sad, surprised, etc). Still another one was fed a large collection of songs, and it was able to compose/invent thousands of completely original songs based off of them. That last one completely blew my mind. He even sampled one for us, and it really didn’t sound half bad. So I guess this guy is doing lots of work for the government and raking in the cash.

Last night there was an “unofficial” (as in keg-equipped) ACM house party where they spun techno breaks. It was a good amount of fun.

Oh, and here are the pictures that I took.