James's Weblog

I recently bought an IOGear GKM571R mini keyboard. Copied and pasted from my Amazon review:

I really like this keyboard for HTPC use. I also have the Lenovo N5901 multimedia remote/keyboard, and while the IOGear GKM571 is quite a bit more expensive, it’s also much better.

Things that I like:

• It’s backlit. This is the single biggest flaw in the Lenovo N5901.
• It has a scroll wheel. Scrolling without one is a chore because it’s not easy to accurately grab and move a scrollbar thumb with a mini-trackball, and it’s not easy to press arrow keys on a small keyboard by touch alone.
• It uses standard batteries. Li-ion batteries have a higher charge density, but like all batteries, they eventually wear out, and replacing them is usually a pain. I much prefer replaceable, standard batteries (especially low-self-discharge NiMH ones).
• It’s the right size. It’s larger than the Lenovo N5901, but it’s still compact. The larger size allows it to have more spacing between the keys, so it’s easier to type without accidentally pressing adjacent keys.
• It has a full set of keys, including F1-F12.
• Its power switch is intuitive. It turns on when you open the lid and off when you close it.
• It’s easy to set up (at least on Windows). It was instantly recognized when I plugged it in, and no configuration was necessary.

Things that I don’t like:

• It occasionally drops out. This might be because I plugged the RF dongle into a rear USB port, but I didn’t encounter any such issues with the Lenovo one.
• The keys are mushy. Unlike with the Lenovo one, there is no distinctive click when the key registers.
• There are no dedicated arrow keys or escape key. They require using the Fn modifier key.
• I’m not sure how I’ll clean the trackball if it gets gummed up.
• The scroll wheel can’t be pressed, so there’s no native middle-click.
• I wish it used Bluetooth instead of requiring its own RF dongle. Oh well. The RF dongle is unobtrusive, at least, and RF contributes to the ease of setup.
• I’ve occasionally had a little bit of trouble reading some of the keys when lit. Maybe it’d be better if IOGear used a green or red backlight instead of blue; humans have poor visual acuity for blue.

Things that I’m (mostly) neutral about:

• The Lenovo N5901 trackball can be used with one hand (although dragging requires two hands and then becomes awkward) whereas the IOGear one is designed for two-handed use. I prefer the two-handed design though; if I’m going to type anything, I need two hands anyway.

Another year, another movie outing with my (mostly) teenage cousins on New Year’s Eve. This time we saw Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D, even though none of my cousins had seen the original Tron or were even aware that the new film was a sequel. My impressions:

• It was visually awesome.
• Daft Punk’s soundtrack was great. It was a bit overpowering, but…
• … I wonder if the film wouldn’t have been better as a feature-length music video with no dialogue, letting the audience piece together their own plot (a la Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555). The actual plot was ridiculous.
• I think it would have been better as a reboot instead of as a sequel. You can’t build a solid story on top of an awful foundation. The first Tron film is almost 30 years old, so most people probably don’t remember it very well anyway, especially since its plot is best left forgotten. A reboot also would have provided an opportunity to give the “Tron” name to the world instead of to a character. (It’s a little telling when the film’s titular character isn’t even significant to the story. I don’t remember if Tron: Legacy even explained who Tron was.)

I finally got around to watching the Watchmen movie. (Yeah, I know I’m late to the party. I meant to watch it in theaters, but my plans fell through, and by then everyone else had seen it already.) I have to agree with Ben’s remarks: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

Even in the director’s cut, a lot of things from the comics were omitted, but that’s to be expected. I was a bit disappointed that some things were left out (mostly involving Rorschach’s origin). I was skeptical that Watchmen would work as a film—a lot of what makes Watchmen great is how it takes advantage of the comics medium. The movie adapts it as well as probably can be expected; it does an admirable job, but by itself I think it falls a bit flat. It’s too late to be groundbreaking, and I think familiarity with the comics is necessary to appreciate the movie.

(Spoilers below.)

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I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year’s Eve with a bunch of my cousins. Impressions (spoilers ahead):

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After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

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I really liked The Bourne Identity. I thought The Bourne Supremacy was not as good. I had heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was better and was looking forward to it, but after watching the DVD this past weekend, I think it’s the worst of the bunch. Some spoilers follow.

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I swear, someone on NBC’s Heroes must have the power to make everyone stupid.

(Some spoilers are below.)

The season had some hints of grand designs, but unfortunately the writers’ strike obviously made the later episodes rushed and a bit incohesive and made the finale totally anticlimactic. It was missing much of the excitement from the first season, I guess partly because there weren’t any compelling villains: Adam just didn’t seem very threatening, Sylar was impotent, the Nightmare Man was a big loser, and the Company was in shambles. One would think that Adam would have accumulated at least as much power, knowledge, and influence as Linderman over the years.

I wonder how long they’re going to milk the “I went to the future and saw the apocalypse, now we need to stop it” pattern.

For the Christmas before my dad passed away, I bought him a Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Palm OS version of TomTom Navigator for him to use with his Treo 650. I’ve started using it myself on my Treo during the past few weeks.

Things I don’t like:

• TomTom’s restrictive copy “protection” scheme. Had I realized how draconian it is, I probably would never have bought their software. They require software activation, and the software can be activated at most twice. To show just how ridiculous their policies are, from their “I am having trouble activating a second hand TomTom Navigator” knowledge base article:

  Second hand TomTom Navigator products are likely to have already been activated once or more by the first buyer and the product code may therefore no longer be valid. For this reason we advise our customers not to purchase TomTom Navigator second hand. If you have already purchased a second hand TomTom Navigator product and cannot activate the software, we suggest you return it to the seller.

  In other words, they’re unwilling to help you, and you’re screwed. I’m somewhat tempted to call them to complain that the previous owner was my dad and that they’re a bunch of insensitive jerks.

  I downloaded a crack off the Internet instead.

• Doesn’t automatically switch between day and night colors. The day colors are too bright at night, and the subdued day colors are too hard to see in the sunlight. At least hitting the “C” key quickly and easily switches between the two.

• No verbosity control. The thing is a chatterbox sometimes, saying things such as, “Turn right, then turn left. Left turn ahead. Turn left.” within the span of seconds.

• Some of its directions are misleading. TomTom often gives verbal directions like “turn right, then turn left” even though the left turn is a half mile away. I’d rather it didn’t mention the second turn at all until getting closer to it or if it said, “turn right, then stay in the left lane.”

• Menus are permanently cluttered with buttons that require paid service. I have no intention of ever paying for traffic or weather service, but they’re always listed in the menu choices, and I’m forced to wade through them. Reducing options in a software application that might be used while driving (despite their warnings against it) would be good.

• It uses strange defaults when restarted. When the software starts up and tires to retrieve the current location from the GPS receiver, it initially displays the “Home” location rather than from the last known location. It’s disorienting and weird. And once it does obtain the current location, TomTom Navigator always wastes time attempting to navigate to the last destination, even if you previously cleared the route or even if you already arrived there.

• It doesn’t tell you the name of the street you’re currently on. Admittedly that’s not so important if you’re just blindly following the navigation directions, but it’s something I’d like to know.

• It formats addresses as “Fake Street 123” instead of as “123 Fake Street”. There’s an option in the preferences to put house numbers first, but I can’t tell what it affects.

• You can save addresses to a special “Favorites” list and give them meaningful names. For example, you can save “742 Evergreen Terrace” (er, “Evergreen Terrace 742”) as “The Simpsons’ house”. However, once aliased, you can’t retrieve the actual address. Want to tell someone else where “The Simpsons’ house” is? Too bad.

• Incapable of learning. There’s no way to teach it about roads it’s not aware of, and worse, there’s no way to teach it about permanently blocked roads. Consequently, it will forever get the directions to my house wrong, because I live in a gated community, and TomTom (like most online mapping services) thinks there’s an accessible entrance into it where there isn’t.

• Inconsistent time formats. When showing the amount of time to the next turn, sometimes it says “0:15 hrs” to mean 15 minutes. Sometimes it shows “9.50 min” to mean 9 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, I told it to use U.S. formats.

• Blinking speed indicator. If you choose to show your current speed, when the software thinks you’re speeding, it displays your speed in blinking red text. This is annoying because the speed limit can be higher than it thinks it is, the blinking red text is annoying and distracting, and because it’s blinking, by the time I look at it, the text is often gone.

• Its “point-of-interest” system is hard to use. If you search for nearby businesses, the list of search results shows you how far away they are but not where they are. Selecting an item from the list automatically navigates to it rather than giving you more information first, and if the selected item turns out not to be the one you wanted, you need to perform the search all over again. Oh, and there is no point-of-interest category for supermarket/market/groceries.

That said, the TomTom Navigator software does look very nice and have a good feature-set, though I wish its features were more easily accessible.

VMware took us all to see Revenge of the Sith on opening day last week. Woo! Overall I thought it was okay; it was way better than The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, and it could have been a lot worse.

Impressions (spoilers ahead):

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On the other side of the movie spectrum, I watched the rather disappointing Cube last night.

I try not to write about the nitpicks I have with movies, especially with non-mainstream movies like Cube, because who really wants to read someone complaining? But I just can’t help myself.

The bad math soured a lot of the experience. For example (spoilers ahead):

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