René Rebe

The Apple Mac OS mouse cursor speed is one of those “love it, or hate it” domains. Personally I find the default speed already way too slow, always falling asleep on a fresh Mac install, or at the login window.

The max used to be barely endurable, so far, e.g. with the Mighty Mouse - until I got the Magic Mouse the other day. Directly compared the Magic Mouse moves way slower with at the same setting. No idea how Apple got this inconsistency in their own, few products. I also have no idea why mouse pointer movements can possibly be that slow. Not only the default, but also the maximal configuration value, …

Fortunately there is no limit behind the back, so you can tune it with:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 8

The 10.6.2 maximal UI value appears to be 3, …

Update: Some more review: The slowness aside, the Magic Mouse is pretty decent. The biggest improvement over the Mighty Mouse is the touch sensitive cover. The former microscopic scroll ball was prone to accumulate dirt inside and near to impossible to clean. (To really clean and remove dust and dirt from the ball axes one hat to cut(!!!) the glued mouse housing and disassemble it fully, …). So from this usability standpoint it’s a great improvement. The major downside is, that only a Bluetooth version is available. I personally find the weight of the two AA batteries too hefty - that was also already a problem with the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. For my excessive workdays I would prefer a lighter, cabled version to reduce the wrist stress, …

However, while the “magic” features do not appear to work (out of the box) under 10.5, the pointer tracking appears to be way faster – 10.6 might artificially slow the magic mouse tracking down, … ?!

Yep, I just downloaded the Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0 for Leopard and the Magic Mouse becomes as slow as under Snow Leopard, 10.6. Expands the Preferences, brings battery level indicator to the menu extra. Actually some 30MB download, unpacks to nearly 100MB. Just for a mouse driver! Well, the useless tutorial videos blow it up significantly, … Wished OS X would stay as lean and clean as it was in the beginning.

Update 2: Under normal, office-use conditions, the battery life with the shipped alkaline battery is just about a month. To safe the environment I always only use rechargeable batteries in any device after the first batch of shipped batteries died out. On an mid-quality (2400mHh NiMh Ansmann “Photo”) batteries I already had in the shelf it lasts way less, 1-2 weeks of busy office use :-( Guess I need to get a pair of higher capacity, quality, more expensive NiMH or even check out those new kinds of NiZN batteries. Hopefully those do not burn out the Magic Mouse :-)

Update 3: As the Ansmann 2400 mAh “Photo” NiMH batteries drained out so quickly, I got a pair of Ansmann 2850 mAh NiMH. However, I was surprised the Magic Mouse did not turn on at all!!! After a quick investigation it turned out that the surrounding plastic of the holder where the batterie +pole goes in is a little fat. The hole is simply too tiny for that pair of batteries!!! Who would have believed that, …

To: Apple Inc.: In the future please but a little more thinking into your basic, plastic structure. This is so unnecessary incompatible, most other equipment has just a rectangular area with a metal latch not posing exactly such problems, …

To compensate I placed a shim into the hole:

Attention: Due to the holes in the plastic foundation the shim can easily slip into the mouse, and you need to be pretty patient to shuffle it out again! My tip: By applying some magic -gravity-, holding the mouse up, into the air, with the bottom to the ground let’s the gravity magically support your shuffle game, …

To avoid exactly this in the future, I simply put adhesive foil (sticky tape) over the holes. In case you need a similar mod, maybe a good idea for you to do upfront to avoid slipping something into the mouse case in the first place.

Well, these days most news sites just publish the press releases of product announcements. Or re-tweet news from other sites. Personally I find really authentic, journalistic work such as the recent Tom’s Hardware video driver, 2D blitting vs. Windows 7 review particularly outstanding. Heck, they even wrote their own performance metric test utility for it!

ExactCODE just released another major ExactScan product family update: the new version 2.9 brings vast improvements all over the App. Most notably are excessive image processing performance improvements. For weeks we did nothing else but revisit our algorithms and fine tuned line of code that stood out.

With years of solid foundation code at ExactCODE, ExactScan already was pretty solid. However, even we received reports about issues. So likewise, for months, we where tracking every single stability issue brought to our attention. All of this contributes to making the version 2.9 the most performing and stable release, ever.

It even comes with new, built-in scanner drivers. For example the new Avision D2 models are now all supported, e.g. the AV220D2+, AV320D2+, and various other (yet unreleased) models, even various other vendors.

Of course work continues on the next planed updated, 2.10. For this next, of course free, update we even have another major surprise for you. Stay tuned, it’s just some weeks of QA away.

Read more: ExactScan homepage

I only say: Subsidized, or near no margin for a “gold rush” thru content, App sales.

Well, the iSlate name rumor sounded really strange. iTablet? Oh well. iPad indeed makes a little more sense.

However, honestly, the “iPad” is not really what I’ve been waiting for. Having one device for a job is so from the 90th - where several manufactures wanted to sell a device per job: one for calculation, one for phoning, one for your music, etc. pp. Obviously that did not turn out to be accepted too well. The iPhone was such as success because it combine so many required things in one device: phone, email, photo, web, music.

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So some time ago Intel released some new Atoms, and at first they might have left a slightly positive impression in my weblog due to the reduced chips (3 down to 2), and finally enabled AMD64 (Intel EM64T) 64bit extension. However, I had to find out how unnecessarily (from the technical standpoint, probably necessary to drive Intels revenue) limited they are:

• no FSB, no NVidia Ion (only as add-on PCIe chip to the 2 platform chips)
• LVDS limited to 1366×768
• nothing prepared for TMDS, e.g. no SDVO, so no: DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort et al.
• PCIe lanes reduced to just 4

Honestly I saw a lot coming, but not Asus actually, finally switching to something more useful than the serve limited Intel Atom any time soon.

The Eee PC 1201T apparently comes with all the goods the AMD platform brings:

• a little more performance (the Neo X2 would bring way more)
• reasonable graphic performance
• digital video, HDMI, output
• higher resolution screen (1366 x 768), compared the standard NetBook one where not even all Windows dialogs fit onto (1024 x 600)

Let’s praise Asus for this move, and recommend it to all your Netbook-longing aunt Tillis and neighbor’s kids around!

So I got a Star Trek 11 Blue Ray Sunday. It already came with a strange “package insert”, indicating that if the disc was manufactured after the purchase of the Blue-ray player, a firmware “configuration update” may be required. Of course it was on my only Blue-ray player, which happens to be a Sony PlayStation 3. So normally I try to avoid firmware updates on the PS3, in order to use as much “out-of-spec” features under (T2) Linux, such as GPU access, as possible. However, well, now I had to bite that bitter pill.

Also very interesting how the parties speak about “configuration” instead of cryptographic key update, …

Fortunately others are currently hacking into the hypervisor for all the goods of it.

Let’s hope this also brings Linux onto the Slim :-)

Not too many noticed, but after going all digital with the analog TV (now being broadcasted via DVB-T only for some time here in Germany), your loved UKW radio is next on the list. I personally hope we can stick to the schedule of 2012 to 1025 and use the frequencies more efficently.

Hint: Don’t invest in analog radio (e.g. alarm clock, car radio, etc.) anymore, :-)