I picked up the Microsoft Touch Mouse today. And first thing to comment about it the packaging, on the outside it looks like a normal box.

But even in retail display mode, the top of the box is actually a flip lid which you can raise to check out the mouse during display.

Then, when you buy it back home, all you have to do is remove 2 extremely sticky pieces of tape to be able to separate the top off the box from the bottom which holds the mouse

The mouse is attached to a plastic base which secures itself to the mouse via it’s battery compartment.

very ingenious design I must say, I had no trouble at all getting to the mouse. Except for ONE part, if you looked at the picture above it tells you to remove the mouse by tilting it off the plastic base. Problem is that the final small hook that latches on to the mouse was a bit tight and made a scary noise (you don’t want the owner of a new gadget to hear plastic snapping noises when they remove the item from the packaging) when I finally peeled it off the base.

Other than that, the packaging was a win in my books.

So, the packaging looks and works great, but how does the mouse work?

Based on looks, it’s your usual sleek, ambidextrous capable mouse. It feels more hefty than other wireless mouse I’ve been using, probably because of the extra electronics to support the capacitive touch functionality and also because the thing uses TWO AA batteries instead of the now common one AA battery.

You can find many reviews about how the touch surface on the Microsoft Touch Mouse work elsewhere on the Internet. But here, I’m gonna tell you what every other review I’ve seen failed to mention.

Why I WON’T Be Recommending The Microsoft Touch Mouse To My Peers

I was extremely reserved about the Microsoft Touch Mouse when it was first announced, my main fear was that I was afraid that there wouldn’t be any physical switches on the mouse and thus clicking the mouse buttons would be a very weird experience. But then after reading reviews and they mentioned that the mouse actually clicks with a physical action I was a bit relieved, it was also a nice plus that you can use your thumbs to swipe the side of the mouse for navigate back/forward in your browser. So the ONLY real problem for me would me dealing with the lost of the middle mouse button.

Or so I thought.

Remember how I mentioned that the mouse physically clicks? Yes, there is a physical button underneath the mouse. BUT… there’s only ONE BUTTON there! The Touch mouse detects right click via a little cheat, basically it’s a right click if there’s no finger contact on the LEFT HALF of the mouse and the button is clicked! I’ll emphasize this

YOU CAN’T REST A FINGER ON THE LEFT HALF OF THE MOUSE WHEN YOU CLICK IT IF YOU WANT A RIGHT CLICK!

I don’t know about you, but when I right click I rest my finger on the left half. So unless I’m in the minority group of how people use mice, it boggles my mind why the hardware engineer thought it was such a good idea to detect right clicks as such instead of using a rocking top shell with actual physical left and right switches? Maybe it was because a rocking shell would have made the capacitive area prone to breakdown?

This also means of course that you CAN’T PRESS BOTH BUTTONS DOWN AT THE SAME TIME!

Definitely a question I would like to ask the hardware engineer if possible. Here’s a video explaining the problem.

Because of this little caveat though, there’s on way I’m going to flat out recommend the Microsoft Touch Mouse to anyone. I mentioned the technical to my wife and she’s the type of person who leaves her finger on the left mouse when she right clicks, she also agreed that that’s a STUPID DECISION INDEED!

So… the Microsoft Touch Mouse FAILED THE WIFE ACCEPTANCE FACTOR!!!

I didn’t know that it was possible for a mouse to fail WAF other than because of it’s physical design!

This is a wireless network camera.

This is a BATTERY POWERED wireless network camera.

This is a RELATIVELY SMALL CR2 BATTERY POWERED wireless network camera.

You’ve just seen the Trek Ai Ball battery powered wireless network camera. It’s unique feature is that it is an honest to god WiFi Network camera in an extremely tight package and through the use of a battery means its can be truly wireless. All these features make for some very interesting applications.

The camera has very little physical features, the entire rear section after the blue divider line happens to be the battery compartment.

It’s design has an interesting purpose, more on that later. On the side you find the on off switch.

when you first turn it on the camera will establish a ad hoc network which you connect to using your web browser, then like any other network camera you will be able to view the feed from it. image quality is…. usable, but I guess I shouldn’t be expecting miracles from a 3V driven camera.

So… it runs off a pretty expensive little battery, the manual says it’ll run for about 90 mins on a fresh battery depending on how long you spend looking through it. The range of the wireless radio is about 2 rooms in doors I expect longer range reception when you have line of sight.

Now, they didn’t expect people to keep running the camera off batteries, so they sell a cradle accessory.

which, luckily for me was included in the old slightly trampled package. The cradle basically allows the camera to be powered through a USB connector, or what I’d like to call 5V of the gods! The socket sits at the back as you’d expect.

The entire front half of the cradle is actually a battery analog complete with the necessary contacts.

But the damn contacts on my cradle wasn’t high enough to reach the contacts in the camera, causing me a few moments of panic as I thought something was wrong with my set. An interesting thing to note is that the voltage coming off the contacts is 3V and not 5V, so there’s some sort of resistor dropping the voltage in the cradle.

So all you need to do is just snap the camera onto the cradle and you have your typical connected network camera.

Snap is the right word to use, because there’s a horrible crunching noise of weak plastic whenever you insert or remove it, wonder how long it’ll last if you keep moving it from the cradle.

So, while the cradle grants the ability to use 5V to power the camera, the stand gets in the way, luckily it is easily removed by unscrewing it from the side.

So now I have a more compact camera, now all I need is a source of power to make it mobile again, and a way to secure said power supply to the camera. I believe I have the parts.

And here’s what I ended up with.

Why is it that all user hacks end up looking like IEDs? But aside from that it is now a slimmer package which can be concealed easier, also the fatter battery should provide a longer runtime than the single battery.

Why should you get it?

It’s a pretty darn small battery operated network wireless camera, yes it broadcasts it’s SSID out in the open and there doesn’t seem to be any advanced settings available to turn that off. But still if a light bulb went on in your head when you heard the product description you know you want it!

Why SHOULDN’T you get it?

There’s no onboard recording medium, you’ll need a Java capable web browser to record streams. Or… you could just BUY their iOS recording applications, I understand that the apps would most likely be generic enough to work with any MJPEG source, but seriously? I bought your hardware and you couldn’t even give me the software for it? Not even just the ability to ONLY VIEW the streams? (granted, if all you wanted to do was view the camera, browsing to it using most modern mobile browsers would work)

Another downgrade of the Ai-Ball’s appeal is that the build quality just doesn’t feel too good! inserting the cradle feels like it’s gonna snap the hooks, the battery door feels thin and flimsy, the power switch feels flimsly. You get the picture?

If you DO intend to pick it up, do realize that there are TWO hardware revisions out there, v3.0 and BEFORE V3.0, from the pictures I see on the web seems like v3.0 has some new management functions in admin mode for dealing with the wireless settings. I got a PRE v3.0 model, guess that’s why they were bundled it along with the cradle.

And so... another year, another attempt to get the ultimate meeting Tablet PC. The Asus T101MT generally worked well but with palm rejection mode on, writing on the screen had some irritating problems every now and then, but since I had no other choice at the time I lived with it. And of course, now I've find a replacement. The Fujitsu T580

Once again I've gone with the convertible form factor.

The Fujitsu T580 again falls under the portable notebook category with it's 10" screen, for general tech specs you can refer to the Fujitsu Product information site. So what made me decide to get the T580?

Hybrid Digtizer

The NUMBER ONE reason is that the T580 has a hybrid digitizer, so not only does it have a 4 point capacitive multi touch screen, it has a honest to god DIGITIZER, which means writing on the screen with the digitizer pen is FANTASTIC.... Except for 2 problems.

The first problem is that I can't figure out how the digitizer works, wheter it's magnetic reasonance (inference.. or whatever) like a Wacom pen or ultra sound like this pen I once had. Why am I even interested in how it works? Because sometimes the pen goes crazy (once so far) and acts like I never lifted it up from the screen, and this was exactly how crazy the old ultrasound pen would get when it had too much interference. Some people attribute it to N-Trig's (the OEM provider for the pen) QA problems with manufacturing the pens but I'm not too sure about that.

The second problem is that the pen is powered, while don't mind having a powered pen. The problem is that the power source that the pen uses is a AAAA battery, no I didn't spell it wrongly, I DID say A A A A. Here's how it looks sitting next to a AAA.

Yes, I also didn't know AAAA batteries existed till when the Tablet PC was first launched and the Compaq models used them. It seems like they decided to go with AAAA because of it's slimmer profile in order to be able to make it small enough to fit inside the pen silo

Having the pen kept inside the device is always a good thing no matter what Steve Jobs said. That said, I do have one worry about the T580's pen silo, it seems to hold the pen via friction instead of any lock mechanism so I do wonder how long would it last.

So where do you BUY AAAA batteries? Well, I've found ONE shop in Malaysia that actually stocks them... I should go buy a pack for emergencies even though they mentioned one battery last a year.

The other method of getting AAAA like batteries is to butcher a 9V battery.

A 9V battery consists of 6 1.5V cells that are slightly shorter than a AAAA battery, the polarity points are usually reversed, not ALL of them salvaged this way can be used in the pen but at least I have a way to get some in a pinch.

Power in a tiny package

Even though it has the tiny footprint of a 10" notebook, the T580 comes equipped with a Intel Core i5 1.3Ghz, which can turbo boost to 2.0Ghz under load. That's enough to do pretty much any work I have for it! While the powerful processor might turn out to be a power hog and shorten battery life, I created a special power profile which I use during meetings which puts the maximum processor performance at 45% and STILL it runs OneNote pretty well and have about 3.5 hours of battery life.

One interesting added advantage about all that power is that the integrated Intel HD graphics GPU is DirectX 10 compliant (compliant, doesn't mean it has great performance) And therefore the system is more than capable of running the Windows Phone 7 emulator, that coupled with the availability of a multitouch capable touchscreen means the T580 is an ideal Windows Phone 7 development machine, because with a multitouch device you can debug multitouch code on the Windows Phone 7 emulator itself without the need for an actual device!

The Extras

The T580 comes with a built in 3G modem, evident by the presence of a flat little antennae on the top of the screen.

Which means I could just turn off the normal Wi-Fi radios to save power.

At least I could IF turning of the wireless switch didn't turn off WiFi, Bluetooth AND the 3G modem as well. Luckily through the use of Fujitsu's own Power Saving Utility applet I am able to selectively turn off WiFi and Bluetooth radios only.

Another added surprise is that the T580's SATA hard disk slot is easily accesible.

I immediately splurged on a 64GB SSD to replace the 500GB Hard Disk that it came with so that I don't have to worry about any problems that moving around a spinning hard disk might cause.

Summary

The Fujitsu T580 was not my first choice as a replacement for my Asus T101MT, I was initially looking at the sleek Fujitsu Q550 Slate Tablet PC, but all the enterprise features which Fujitsu put in it pushed the price up to a level which I was not comfortable to get something just to work as my notepad, since that is what the Q550's main responsibility would have been cause its powered by an Intel Atom CPU. Where as with the Fujitsu T580, I have a complete ultra portable development machine to work with.

My usage of Tablet PCs are always compared to the iPad, and people have always mocked the weight and thickness of my convertibles. But it's ok, my Tablet PCs allow me to get actual work done so I don't care too much about that any more.

Here's a guide on the settings I use so that my Asus T101MT Netbook is a formidable video playback device capable of watching 720P video content.

First of all you're gonna need to download a few things

• Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition - This is the video player program which I use. NOT VLC.
• FFDShow Video Codec - I don't trust any codec pack or what not, those just tend to mess up the DirectShow filters which you need to use to watch videos through the DirectShow architecture. Go to the link and then select the MOST RECENT generic build and you should be fine.
• Real Alternative - If you need to watch RMVB video files, you need to install this or.. god forbid.. Real Player itself.
• Latest DirectX Update - You'll need this for Media Player Classic
• Latest Display Card Drivers - Ensure that your video card drivers are up to date.

Note that this is for playing local video files, and not YouTube, Hulu or what not. That said just remember this mantra before starting.

Software Decoding Of Video Data Is VERY Processor Intensive And I'm Trying To Do It On My Wee Little Netbook!

By taking note of this, remember that if you're going to watch 720P video on your netbook ensure that

• No other programs are running - Web browsers especially, not because they hog memory when you have lots of tabs opened but more because we don't want any errant plugins *cough* Flash *cough* stealing precious CPU cycles. You want to multitask while watching a 720P video, get a better Notebook!
• Always run at full performance - Some netbooks have a power throttling/battery life enhancement program running that slows down the processor when running in battery mode. So remember to always set it to FULL POWER if you're watching a movie while on battery power.

First off we'll deal with the settings in Media Player Classic, open the Options window (View->Options)

From the left item list, select Output, Under DirectShow Video, select EVR Custom Pres, if you want to you can select Nearest Neighbour as the resizer which gives a SLIGHT speed boost by sacrificing video quality.

Next select the Internal Filters item on the left.

Under Transform Filters find H264 and uncheck the options, this will get Media Player Classic to use the newer FFDShow codecs installed in the system instead of it's internal one.

Click on the OK button to close the Options dialog, and then RESTART Media Player Classic.

Open your H.264 content and then as it is playing check your tray icons.

You should see the FFV icon which indicates the FFDShow codec is in use, if not, double check on the Internal Filters and make sure you've disabled the built in H.264 codecs.

These settings work VERY well on my Asus T101MT, there are some problems that I haven't solved though

• Weird inconsistencies when trying to pause the video stream, pause button doesn't work sometimes. Have to tap the space bar a few times, wait a while, then try it again to pause the video stream.
• Trying to seek into a point on the video stream might be a bit slow and irresponsive.

That's my settings for my Netbook, and it might work for yours so try it out!

I never thought I would get a Razer product since they make mostly mice for PC game players, and I've pretty much swore off PC games. So boy was I surprised when I found myself picking up the Razer Onza Tournament Edition Xbox 360 Controller

When you first unpack it out of it's classy looking box and hold it in your hands, it feels incredibly light! Which coupled with the rubber like surface makes it feels incredibly cheap since there's no sense of mass, at first I thought they didn't include the rumble motors inside but after playing a bit it confirmed that yes, the stick rumbles. So if you don't like your joypads light you might want to stick some weight on this.

Another interesting problem is that the top left and right corners are SHARP AND POINTY!!

Why the heck did they make it like that?!?!?! It HURTS if you scrape or press your finger on this, I'm gonna introduce it to a file after this can't have WZ cutting himself on it when I leave it in the room.

Let's talk about the pad's nifty features now, first we start with the face buttons.

We can't really call these buttons, they are basically little caps sitting directly on top of the switches. They have very little travel distance, which means when you press these they engage almost immediately. How much difference does this make in a match already running with lag through the internet is anybody's guess but one thing to note is that you need to get used to the fact that you might not even notice you've pressed the button. Also.. the buttons light up because that's the cool thing to do. :P

Next we come up to the D-Pad...

Or rather, the OTHER face button set. Because it's NOT a pad or meant to act like a directional input in the traditional sense, it is just 4 DISTINCT buttons arranged in a cross manner. Absolutely FANTASTIC for use in games where you use the D-Pad to select weapons cause you know exactly which direction you're pressing. Pretty much USELESS if you're thinking of using it for fighting games and such. Oh and these are normal buttons which have travel distance and not like the hyper-response (Razer's name) ABXY buttons.

The Onza TE's headphone jack

Is in the usual spot at the button of the controller, note that it will not accept the puck style connector. And I've personally haven't been able to test it out properly yet cause on some reviews they mentioned that there's interference using this port.

Then we have the shoulder buttons

Your eyes do not decieve you, there are TWO bumper buttons. The lower one is your regular LB RB button, the higher one is called the Multi Function Button (MFB) and is one of the main selling point for this controller. Through the use of the assign buttons below the controller.

You can map the MFB to almost any other button on the pad, with exceptions being that the thumb stick, bumper and trigger buttons can only be remaped to an MFB on the same side. This opens up a world of possibilities, for example in Halo:Reach I can assign the Left MFB to Crouch, and the Right MFB to Jump. This means I can now move and crouch easier since I don't have to hold the left thumbstick down to crouch, and because I don't have to move my finger away from the right thumbstick when jumping some interesting possibilities beckons!

There's just one problem with the whole MFB concept though, and I already knew it when I saw the placement of the button. You also should have figured it out by now. Yes... you're VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY likely to press the wrong button in the heat of a match, it'll most likely go away once you're used to it but if you see me in Reach and I melee and jump at the same time? I'm still not used to it then!

And now for the main reason I decided to buy the Onza, the thumbsticks.

If you're asking yourself what are the little groves underneath the pad, then you're focusing on the right item. The groves allow you to push the housing of the stick downwards. What this achieves is that it makes the stick STIFF and you can in theory make smaller, tighter movements such as when trying to no scope someone. When fully screwed it the stick looks like this.

The problem here is that it's like a screw and as you tighten it it gets harder to turn with each click. What's the problem then? The problem would be when you ask yourself "I'd like this to be a wheee bee tighter, but is it at max yet?" But.. there's no indication of where MAX is, and there's the warning in the manual that states Over tightening the stick WILL damage it so that kind of scares you a bit.

Does a tighter stick give you better control? I haven't played enough games with it to confidently say so. I think it makes some difference though. Not sure wheter it's a good or bad difference.

The Onza has one last trick, and it's a very interesting one. You can swap the sensitivity of the stick from normal to RIDICULOUSLY sensitive while the steps below.

What does this achieve? I can only answer in Halo : Reach terms, a sensitivity of 3 in Reach now acts like a sensitivity of 6. Does that help? Maybe... Would it be considered an unfair advantage? HARD to say. :P

In closing I still can't confidently say wheter the Onza TE will improve your game or not, the button remap and stick sensitivity features are interesting tools to have. But like all tools it's up to the user to learn to use them effectively. I can say it's worth a try if you are a serious FPS player and can spare the price. Because the weird out D-Pad does NOT help at all with any other type of games.

The latest release of Microsoft Image Composite Editor has a very neat feature, it can stitch up panoramas by using a video instead of just pictures. Makes it pretty easy to make a panorama like this.

You can also choose specific parts of the video to include in the stitch which allows you to make some surprising effects like this. (Zoom It picture below)

I'm sure you all agree that it's a neat trick!

Only recently from the last few years did I finally figure out the beauty of duct tape. And now I have found yet another versatile tool/construction material that is very useful in repairs/hacking stuff. Epoxy putty! Here's what I'm using it for.

What's so cool about epoxy putty? When you start to use it, it's like Play Doh. Then after a few minutes (which can be a good or bad thing) it starts hardening into something rock hard. This makes it good for repairing holes in items, reshaping stuff, etc. etc.

My most recent use was when I had to do some exploratory surgery on the wheel of WZ's old baby stroller. After I was done, I realized that the hole I left in the hub cap was a water risk so I plug the hole with epoxy putty and it's sealed up perfectly again!

Wonder what other weird stuff I can do with this?

I picked up another Car 5V power adapter from Low Yat today.

On first glance it looks like any other 2 USB plug power adapter, but on a closer look.

Other dual plug power adapters I saw promised 2.1Amps when only ONE device is connected. This one states that the top port always delivers 2.1A regardless of wheter or not a second device is plugged into the bottom port.

This is a Kensington Power Bolt Duo Car Charger, so I hope it's not lying about it's current output.

Some of you out there are probably using the ReadyBoost function of Windows with a USB flash drive to accelerate your system cache performance, maybe you just use some old, quick random access capable drive you just have around like this.

Large, unsightly and since it's sticking out like a sore thumb, moving your notebook around with it connected would probably be inviting some sort of trouble.

So you go out and get a smaller thumb drive.

Yes, its much smaller so instead of a sore thumb, you have a sore pinky sticking out the side of your notebook.

This is the main reason why I don't use ReadyBoost on my Asus Tablet, it's kinda dangerous to have something juting out when you're likely to change the holding orientation of the device frequently. And since my SD card slot is used to bit locker my OneNote files.

If only there was a USB drive that just sat snugly into the port and got out of the way like what those wireless mice use now! If only…

Oh… why hello there! What's this lovely little thing? This is Verbatim's Store And Stay USB Drive and as you can see, it's exactly as advertised.

8GB of storage in a tiny compact form factor that doesn't get in the way of day to day operations. EXTREMELY delighted that this thing had sufficient performance to handle ReadyBoost duties! (Granted, every notebook's USB bus might be slightly different so while it works for my Asus it might not work for your notebook)

It's not much more expensive than your typical 8GB USB drive, if you do use ReadyBoost with a USB drive I'd STRONGLY recommend it (with the above caveat of course) Heck.. if you just need 8GB of storage for something and would like it to be there all the time… this looks like a great solution. Now I need to see if I can find a 16GB one.

This here is my LG Optimus 7

With it's Gorilla glass protected screen, it would have been ok to just carry it around naked like this. But that was before WZ realized that games on the Optimus 7 is different from games on the iPod, and he would like to have some variety... So I knew I needed some sort of drop protection since it would only be a matter of time before he dropped it while playing for one reason or another.

I decided I would just go for a simple bumper case, tried searching around the local shops but as expected it's not exactly a mass market device here so I couldn't find anything. So I turned to PDAir and found this.

The Luxury Silicone Case!!! The main reason I choose this instead of the soft plastic case was that from experience, those soft plastic case usually made it VERY hard to press the buttons that are covered by the case. So I figured soft silicone would be easier, that and yeah... I really wanted to find out how LUXURIOUS it was. (Curiosity killed the wallet in this case)

The main difference I found between this and other silicone cases I've seen is the surface texture, yes... it's a silicone case with a SURFACE TEXTURE.

It's not just plain smooth like other silicone cases I've seen, feels like some non smoothed leather to me. So... feels like leather means luxury?

The case works as it should, as a soft dampening bumper in case of drops. The main problem when using cases like this is that you've put a frame on your screen and therefore reaching the edges might be a bit tricky. Luckily since it's a silicone case it can be pushed aside easily.

One problem that I do have with it is that, when my hands are dry, and the case is dry. It feels smooth and SLIPPERLY to the touch, does make me worry that it might slip off if my hands are too dry!

Still unsure about the luxury title though!