Riding in style.
Spotted in Little Italy, San Francisco.
G1, kit lens @ 19mm, 1/1250, f/6.3.
Pampered
Yearly Archives: 2011
The Razer Death Adder 3500dpi mouse
I take a leaf from the gamers’ book.
My initial enthusiasm for the Apple Magic Mouse has cooled.
There are three reasons.
The first is that it frustratingly loses the Bluetooth connection now and then which simply drives me up the wall. It does this both with my HackPro and, far more often, with the MacMini I use to watch stored movies. You would think it would work better with Apple’s hardware, but no. And that’s from two MagicMice – so unlikely it’s a sample fault. Go figure.
The second is that the ergonomics are not right. Even though the device is gorgeous to behold, it’s too low and I am developing wrist pain after extended use. And whoever designed that sharp edge – on a device meant to be held in the hand – well, the less said the better.
The third, another cause of extreme frustration, is that I cannot consistently get to the desktop by touching a selected point on the surface no matter how hard I try, using the MagicPrefs application I mention in my earlier piece. The touch point seems to change at random, working when it wants to. Just beyond irritating and the reason that finally made me change.
I checked around and one photographer friend recommended a Logitech model (the MX900) but sadly that is discontinued here. Others prefer to use the multi-touch pad on the MacBook Pro or whatever. However, I need a mouse for business use and also find it the easiest way to outline areas in Photoshop where localized manipulation is required.
So as those in the farming community like to say, I got me to thinking. Who would know most about mice? Why, the gaming community of course. They use them all day long, use them hard and are very demanding when it comes to smooth and instantaneous response. So I checked reviews of gaming mice with the following dictates in mind:
- Must be wired. I am through with batteries, RF and Bluetooth.
- Must have outstanding ergonomic design.
- Must be programmable for use with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
- Must be super responsive.
- Has to have a scroll wheel.
I eventually settled on the fancifully named Razer Death Adder 3500dpi mouse, replete with glowing scroll wheel and adder design on the body. Mercifully, the glow can be switched off. On receipt, I downloaded the latest software from Razer’s site and read through the comprehensive instructions. The application runs as a stand alone program rather than installing as a System Preference pane. The Mouse pane in System Preferences continues to work so you can experiment between that and the settings in Razer’s application, though the latter has many more options.
The contrast in shape with the MagicMouse is clear from the picture:
Two side buttons circled. Illuminated scroll wheel and death adder (!) switched on for this picture.
The Death Adder is larger in all dimensions, maybe too large for small hands; most importantly it is far taller, meaning your palm rests lightly on it, which is impossible with the Magic Mouse. It’s some 1 3/4″ tall compared to 7/8″ for the Magic Mouse – that’s a big difference. The indented sides further aid comfort. The left and right buttons are discrete and a comfortable concave shape, unlike on the Magic Mouse which uses a contiguous convex surface and, although the Razer’s two programmable side buttons are on the left only, the mouse can be configured for left hand use. Nice. For serious lefties there’s a true left handed version with the buttons on the right. Every control surface can be programmed for any action and macro programming is also possible. I left dpi and polling at their maximum settings (only a slow CPU working near capacity would need these reduced) and simply programmed the side buttons for Desktop and Dashboard, respectively, and programmed a press on the scroll wheel for Exposé- all windows. I hop into the desktop and between apps often.
The dramatic height difference is clear.
Double click speed, scrolling sensitivity, cursor speed/acceleration are all adjustable. I have scrolling set to the lowest speed otherwise it’s crazy fast. It’s a fraction heavier than the Magic Mouse which means just right. There’s a satisfying heft to it. The cord provided is very long at 7 feet – no issues reaching the HackPro under my desk. When shipped the lower surface is protected with clear plastic; once removed the mouse is wonderfully smooth on a mouse pad, resting on three protruding nylon pads. The side buttons are responsive and you can even adjust the delay before they kick in. There is no ball, a laser beam being used for tracking. Tracking is very smooth – I can detect no jerkiness or ‘steps’ as the cursor is moved on screen. It’s as good as the Magic Mouse in that regard, meaning excellent.
What’s not good? Vertical scrolling is stepped rather than smooth, something that only Apple seems to do right. The scroll wheel does not tilt sideways for horizontal scrolling, though it’s not a feature I miss. Let’s hope that the eventual ingress of dirt through the scrolling wheel will not wreck the mouse in the way the Magic Mouse’s predecessor, the Mighty Mouse, would fail. The Lazer’s body is sealed, so it’s not like you can clean it.
Other than that, the Razer Death Adder seems like a winner, at under $50. I had $20 left over after unloading both my (not so) MightyMice for $35 each. Good riddance. The only thing that ‘Just Works’ here is eBay.
The current issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece by experienced technical writer Malcolm Gladwell about how a young Steve Jobs saw a prototype of the original mouse at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. He had his engineers make it mass produced and cheap. Too bad Apple has forgotten how to design a good mouse. Like its iMac, the Magic Mouse is a triumph of form over function, looks trumping all else in the design brief.
Fuji X100 – deeply flawed
DP Review confirms my worst suspicions.
DP Review, a subsidiary of Amazon, publishes the best equipment reviews on the web. OK, second best. If you want no punches pulled, tell it like it is, I-paid-for-the-hardware-with-my-own-money-and-accept-no-advertising real world use tests, you come here. And though you may not call DP Review’s photography memorable that hardly matters, for they know how to test gear. Thus DP Review will do, as you sure as heck will not be seeing a review of the X100 here.
So when they published their Fuji X100 review yesterday, my worst suspicions were confirmed. Here are their conclusions:
Click above to go to the DP Review of the Fuji X100
This is somewhat cold comfort for me, as I bought, and resold for a profit my X100 in its unopened box, after growing concern that the thing was deeply flawed, especially in the one area of most vital need for a street snapper. Fast focus. And DP review confirms that it is not good in that regard. For “…. mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras” in the ‘Cons’ above, you can read “…. the Panasonic G1”. And for “Autofocus not quite as fast as ….” you can read “It sucks compared to ….”.
Stated differently, this appears to be a camera with an excellent lens and sensor which is so flawed elsewhere as to be virtually unusable. Quite how something so unfinished ever made it past quality control and acceptance testing beats me. Fuji’s early web site attempts for this much hyped camera suggest that they need some photographers on staff. How else could this alpha test model ever have seen the light of day?
I’ll put my profit toward the price of the Panasonic G3 which I have on order.
Oops, I almost forgot. Yes, the X100 is ‘pretty’. That will really improve the pictures it takes while you wait the seven seconds for it to write your last snap to the card. How could I have overlooked that? It’s generally not fair to judge gear based on someone else’s review, but when the review source is credible and the review stinks, it makes sense to do so.
CrashPlan – Part I
A third line of defense.
When I recently wrote about CarBak, the backup portable hard drive with all my pictures on it which I keep in my car, it was not lost on me that the Big One (I live in Northern California, surrounded by major geological fault lines) would take care of the home and car in one mighty outpouring of energy.
The Hayward Fault …. and me!
Further, for terrorists there are only a few high value targets in the US. These include famous structures such as The Brooklyn Bridge, The White House and Congress in DC, Sears Tower in Chicago, The Transamerica Building and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. All simply fabulous, though for me the Brooklyn Bridge is #1 by a fair margin for its sheer beauty, comparable to anything, anywhere. So living near one of those is probably not a great idea if you want to keep local data safe.
At the time I added CarBak I had also determined to go with a cloud storage back-up plan but could not get comfortable with anything out there.
However, when Adam Pash at Lifehacker talks up anything I listen hard. You see, Mr. Pash was the person who inspired me to build the HackPro to replace Apple’s awful desktop hardware which had been nothing but a story of mechanical failure for this user for many years. That proves to have been the single best computer thing I have ever done, so call me a Pash Groupie. The cloud storage service Pash speaks about is named CrashPlan and I just signed up for a 30 day free trial.
The appeals of CrashPlan include:
- Unlimited volumes of data for $5/month
- Incremental timed back-ups
- 448-bit encryption of your data – you lose your password and you are dead meat as they do not know it
- Servers not located on the Hayward Fault, best as I can tell
While you can elect timed backups throughout the day and can even allocate the CPU percentage usage to the task, I cannot afford hardware bottlenecks during my working day. As my local, incremental, daily Carbon Copy Cloner backup (thank you Mr. Bombich) runs at midnight, and takes a few minutes, I set CrashPlan to run from 1am to 6am. Lower broadband traffic at that time helps, given the awful state of US broadband which is, for the most part, an order of magnitude slower than that in South Korea. Or even France! And because my provider – AT&T – is still running copper cable which was likely installed when Alexander Graham Bell was still having his nappies changed, I cannot get anything faster. They tried and my speed actually fell. Yup, that’s The Phone Company for you. America’s future.
So my backup plan now looks like this:
The only part of CrashPlan inside the HackPro’s case is their software. Search me where the data reside.
I have started with CrashPlan just backing up my User (login) and Pictures folders, the latter containing my Lightroom library where all my ‘serious’ snaps reside. (The family goo-goo stuff is in iPhoto), which figures as follows:
The eight days shown assumes full time availability. As I have gone to 1am-6am, that means it will likely take some 38 days for a first complete backup, meaning my 30 day trial will have expired. No matter. I’ll buy one month for $5 to finish and test the result.
CrashPlan prices.
CrashPlan also offers a free option which allows you to store data on a friend’s computer using their software. This is an idea comparable in stupidity to, say, the US invading China (comparable, but hardly impossible), and I can think of several million reasons not to do this. If your data is not worth $60 a year to you then it’s not worth anything.
Or, stated differently, the only viable approach to backup is to totally distrust everyone, especially yourself. If it can go wrong, it will. Did I ever tell you about the IT geek who worked for me whom I fired in a moment of righteous (self) anger? The son of an unmarried mother swore up and down we were doing daily backups. I checked the logs and they said we were. Then one day we had a server crash and had to do a restore. The backups were useless. They had never been tested …. he was lucky the windows did not open when I fired him. My anger was misdirected, of course. I had made the mistake of trusting him. The fault was mine.
Ever since then I test my backups monthly, making it a point to boot from the backup HDD in the HackPro and restoring a file or two from the Time Machine and CarBak backups. Once you make it a routine, it’s a few minutes and no big deal.
Finally, if you are in a big hurry to get your local data uploaded, CrashPlan will send you a hard drive for your copy and you mail it back. If you have no backup at all, this is the way to go. Hurry!
Making a cloud storage vendor your primary backup plan is back with the China invasion scenario for smarts. You cannot check financial stability (remember how safe Enron was? Can you spell AIG now in for $187bn of your money?) any more than professional auditors can. You will never know where the servers are located, the vendor using the shield of secrecy to refuse disclosure (for all I know they are in downtown Pyongyang) and there’s no one on earth you can believe about their security or the integrity of their employees. Statistically, some are likely to have criminal records/DUIs/spousal abuse/whatever on their copy sheet.
So forget about due diligence. A time sink.
And finally, the cloud is a fragile beast. Remember Bell and his nappies and the Telco’s wiring? How do you know the cloud will be available when you need it? The Big One will take out all broadband in your area if the terrorists don’t get there first. And it doesn’t have to be a terrorist. When I was working in San Mateo at the peak of the Internet bubble, a construction worker busy expanding the San Mateo Bridge in time for the bursting of that bubble managed to cut a huge bundle of optical fibers nearby and it took fully six months to reconstruct them. Broadband speeds plummeted, all because of one Joe Six Pack.
But as a third line of defense (OK, fourth line in my case) $60 or so a year per computer does at least compare to the vitamin you fool yourself will stave off next winter’s cold. It probably does nothing, but you feel good about it.
I’ll report back when I have uploaded all and tested a download, which will be in several weeks time.
Meanwhile I hope the Big One can wait until Day 39 hence, when all my snaps are on CrashPlan’s servers.
The New Yorker
A veritable treasure trove.
When Apple originated ‘in app purchasing’ a while back, I confess I was troubled by the concept. The idea is that you download an app – a game or a magazine – and can then purchase content from within that app on your iDevice. The charge would hit your iTunes account and all you need do is input your password at the point of purchase. The good thing is that, so far, Apple has kept subscriber information to itself, unlike the company which does evil for a living. The bad news is that it smacks of abuse of monopoly power. The iPad/iPhone duo represents something approaching a monopoly for mobile smart devices and a publisher in the app store has to pay 30% of his selling price to Apple. Sure, he can simply sell his app from his own web site and keep the lot, but then he loses the publicity and search visibility afforded by the AppStore. A 30% listing fee sounds horribly greedy and unfair to me.
The other frustrating thing about the iPad is how slow publishers have been in rolling out subscription priced magazines. There have been a few single issue releases at ridiculous prices or you could use the Zinio app which is OK, even if some of the more popular magazines are missing and little use is made of touch functionality.
But things seem to be changing. This week Condé Nast bit the bullet and released its The New Yorker app in the AppStore. You can buy 4 issues for $6 or 52 for $60. I downloaded the free app and bought 4, my iTunes account being billed for the cost.
Why would photographers care about a magazine whose primary claim to fame is that it features some of the best writing in the English language? Simple. A significant portion of that writing is about great photographers. And while readers mostly think of The New Yorker as a repository of prose, poetry and superb cartoons, there are more photographs by great photographers than you might think.
The very best thing about a subscription, even the four week one, is that it grants you access to the full archive of issues back to the first in December 1925. These are scanned and so-so navigable on an iPad. Better to go to your big screen desktop, login there (your iPad subscription works equally well at www.newyorker.com). The scans are high quality and in color, so you get yellowed page edges and all. You also get all the ads from that issue which is actually a fascinating thing to behold. By contrast, current issues are well formatted for reading on an iPad and navigation is well done.
The first thing I did was to use the free text search function to dial in ‘Cartier-Bresson’ and in seconds I was reading Dan Hofstadter’s riveting two part piece from October, 1989, chronicling the many hours the author had spent with the single greatest street photographer there ever was. Don’t worry, you can enlarge the original:
The search function on an iPad is very slow compared to the same on your desktop; the app is all of a few days old so I’m sure the kinks will be worked out soon. Search is ‘free text search’ – right now there is no contextual or topic menu. Let’s hope they fix that – you know – politics, economics, arts, etc.
This is simply a fabulous piece of writing, and includes substantive focus on HC-B’s years in Asia. There is a gripping description of how he came to take his famous picture ‘The Last Days of the Kuomintang’ with depositors jostling outside a bank trying to convert their currency before the murderous Chairman Mao took over. Few pictures show more energy and tension:
There are no fewer than 64 hits for my search:
Next I dialed in another all time favorite, Irving Penn and, lo and behold, there was a show stopper picture from 1948 of one god taken by another:
Immediately memories of a concert I was lucky to attend at Carnegie Hall in the early-1980s came flooding back, Lenny theatrically conducting Mahler’s Fourth with no less than the Vienna Philharmonic and its Boys’ Choir doing the choral bits, complete with boy soprano and all! Bernstein only had two energy levels – full and dead. My apartment at 310 West 56th Street was a three minute walk from Carnegie Hall which I could see from the window, notably the apartments atop which used to be rented to struggling musicians like Bernstein. There he conceived West Side Story and there he met an unknown young librettist named Stephen Sondheim …. talent attracts talent. I used to gaze fondly at that location, imagining the meeting of these two giants of the music world.
As for the cartoons, well they alone are reason enough to subscribe:
You don’t have to be a New Yorker to like The New Yorker. But if you are interested in great photography and unmatched writing about photographers, it’s a bargain. There’s just one ‘gotcha’ – renewal of your subscription is automatic when it expires so watch out and be sure to change that. Sneaky and not what I would expect of a class publisher.
Seems you can cancel by phone:
Just think. One day Condé Nast will upload all of the issues of Vogue and Vanity Fair for on line viewing. I will be first in line.
Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this cover from December 4, 1937 and then click the picture to subscribe:
Constanin Alajalov imagines the opening night in 1937.