I had purchased a Logitech MX Revolution mouse when I purchased my Mac Pro. The MX is very comfortable and offers state-of-the-art functionality. I’d run into a bit of a problem with drivers, but that had been resolved by using Steermouse.

However, I’d unfortunately had an ongoing problem with the MX that’d I’d been unable to rectify; the wireless radio was susceptible to interference from Wifi, being located in the same 2.4GHz frequency range as 802.11b/g/n.

The interference caused the mouse to either fail to respond, or to jerk around erratically when large-scale data transfers were occurring on my wireless network. Moving to 5GHz 802.11n eliminated the problem, but then my g-only iPhone didn’t have network access. Bah.

Being just as pleased as it’s possible to be with the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, I decided to check out the companion mouse, the Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

The first thing to note about this mouse is that it’s not really designed for the laptop user. Firstly, it’s not Bluetooth, secondly, it uses quite a large radio transceiver, complete with a long USB cable. Perfect for my needs with the Mac Pro, but not something you’d want to haul around with a laptop.

Power is provided by a pair of AA batteries. The mouse has a low-battery indicator which turns green briefly when batteries are inserted to indicate that they’re good; it otherwise isn’t lit unless the batteries run low. The batteries seem to last for quite a long time.

The mouse has a pleasantly grippy, rubbery surface, much like an eraser; it feels quite good to me. The laser is very accurate, and movement is precise.

The ergonomic bit is immediately obvious in the height and angle of the mouse. Relative to other mice, it’s very tall, and quite sharply angled. As a result, the wrist is held in a neutral position when using the mouse. This is a bit odd at first; it feels very much like gripping a baseball. However, after a very short period of time one does begin to notice the comfort, to the point that using a regular mouse feels quite uncomfortable in comparison.

Let’s put it this way: after using this mouse for a few hours at home, I went back to the store and obtained a second one for use at work. It’s that comfortable.

Best of all, no Wifi interference.

Potential downsides:

• It’s a relatively large mouse. Individuals with large hands are going to like this mouse; those with small hands may find the forward and back buttons difficult to reach.
• As with many mice, it’s right-handed only.

While the mouse ships with an excellent driver, Steermouse also works perfectly with it. As I’m a huge Steermouse fan, I deinstalled the Microsoft driver, which thankfully ships with an uninstaller.

Truly, a great mouse, highly recommended.

 

Why do we have all this crap?

In my case the situation was particularly bad in terms of paper; I’m a natural pack rat, and file far too much paper away for my own good — a realization I came to while hauling my files upstairs.

Even after a serious purge, I still had too much paper. This is not stuff I can just throw away, but I don’t want to be tripping over it, either. Furthermore, disaster planning is a huge part of my day job, and it bothered me that in most cases I had no backup for the information in my files; one fire and it would all be ashes. The natural solution would be to scan it in, but my experience with scanners was best summed up as ‘slow, gruesome toil’.

It turns out that many of the fine folks who lurk at 43 Folders were in the same boat, and some of the discussions there turned me on to the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. Given the praise heaped upon the device there, and desperate for something to remove the piles of paper, I resolved to purchase one.

These are popular devices; I’ve noticed them in use in hospitals for scanning of insurance cards and the like. However, they’re difficult to source, in my experience, Amazon was the best option. As of this writing, the street price of the current S510M model is approximately $450.

The unit is designed to not take up a lot of room. Here’s mine in the closed configuration, using my beloved red stapler for scale:

Quite compact — 6.2″ x 6.2″ x 11.2″. Not difficult at all to find a place on the desk for it, which is a key consideration; if something is difficult to get to, or so large as to require being packed away when not in use, then you’re not going to use it, which would defeat the whole purpose here.

It’s not much larger in the open configuration:

Bundled software includes Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and ABBYY FineReader OCR software. Considering the list price on Acrobat Professional, the price on this unit isn’t a bad deal. Scan rate is 18 PPM, double-sided, automatic deskew, automatic blank page elimination, with a hopper capacity of 50 pages. Rather than attempt to digest those dry numbers, instead consider the following.

Traditional scanning tends to work like this:

• load paper into scanner
• begin scanning
• clear jam
• reload job
• clear jam again
• realize input is double-sided, reload job
• watch software choke on input
• throw pile of paper across room, seek adult beverage

In contrast, scanning with the ScanSnap works like this:

• load paper into scanner
• press large one-touch scan button
• watch job scan and OCR

This thing has to be seen to be believed. It just churns through paper effortlessly, no jams, no errors, no babysitting required. The rate at which one can eliminate a pile of paper is amazing; so far, I’ve put several linear feet through it. This has dramatically reduced my inventory of dead, bleached, pressed trees, converting them to easily-searchable full-text PDFs.

This is in nearly every respect an outstanding solution. If I have one complaint, it’s that the bundled driver software is an application, rather than a driver, and as such sits in the dock. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, but for whatever reason, the developers decided that the dock icon should be overlaid with a gigantic, garish, red cross symbol when the scanner is off. I find this to be annoying in the extreme.

To address this, I’ve found Dock Dodger, donationware from Foggy Noggin Software, to be just the thing. Dock Dodger allows for the icon to be hidden while the application is running, this removing the fugly icon from the dock. The icon can be reinstated at any time by simply running Dock Dodger again.

However, all in all, the dock icon is but a small issue in what is otherwise a fantastic piece of kit. Highly recommended.

 

The Apple Airport Extreme had been recommended to me in the past, but I’d passed on it due to lack of gigabit ports, which were commonly available with competing products. However, this deficiency has recently been addressed, so it was time for some serious investigation.

I’ve recently subscribed to Don McAllister’s excellent ScreenCastsOnline, which is a treasure trove of Mac reviews and tutorials. Don covered the Airport Extreme in ScreenCast 87; it’s a very comprehensive overview of the product, providing details that aren’t available in other review formats — video is hard to beat in this regard.

The clincher, however, was the following warranty statement on the product homepage:

The AppleCare Protection Plan for your computer covers the AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Well, that was the sale — I’ve already got the 3-year AppleCare plan, and at the rate I’ve been going through routers, that’s at least two of them I won’t need to buy.

I live within walking distance of an Apple Store. Glorious, is it not? My need was quickly fulfilled there, and I returned home to install the new box.

The Extreme is quite minimalist compared to my various deceased routers, sporting only a single LED on the front. The requisite ethernet ports and a USB port are on the rear. The unit is similar in dimension and style to a Mac Mini.

Setup was simple enough; plug everything in, bring up the Airport utility on the Mac, and follow the bouncing ball. Unfortunately, rather than the solid green LED of joy and happiness, I was presented with a flashing amber LED, indicating some problem.

Upon investigation, the Airport was complaining that PPPOE wasn’t working. I fiddled with the relevant settings a few times, to no avail. This was a bit of a puzzler, since PPPOE had been working on the late, lamented router. In desperation, I changed the connection type from PPPOE to stock Ethernet and…presto, connection, although there was some complaint about a double NAT going on.

Weird….that wasn’t supposed to work; my ISP requires PPPOE, and where was that double NAT error coming from?

I learned a great deal in the next few minutes. My DSL modem, as is somewhat common here in the Bay Area, where RBOCs come to die, is a Siemens SpeedStream 5100B:

Interestingly, this is far from a dumb modem; it’s actually quite an intelligent device, providing NAT function and PPPOE on the modem. SBC had shipped the modem with a CD containing the usual selection of blechware; I’d installed it to configure the modem then purged it immediately when we had a difference of opinion as to what my browser home page should be. As it turns out, that initial configuration had set up the modem to do PPPOE and NAT by itself; it had no need of a router for those functions.

Now, that sounds great, and it’s a nice thing for people with simple needs who wouldn’t otherwise have any kind of protection. However, it’s problematic when a router and the need to run VPN software come into play, as the NAT tables on the modem seem to overflow periodically, causing connections to drop. I’d been having this happen for years, but had just resigned myself to accept it, as I was unaware of the issue and customer service was certainly no help (“have you tried clearing your browser cache….”).

The solution here is actually very simple once you understand the problem. Onboard PPPOE can be turned off by connecting to the modem directly at its 192.168.0.1 address, entering the hardware access code printed on the bottom of the modem, and setting onboard PPPOE to off; at this point the Airport can be configured to handle PPPOE tasks, and only one device will be doing NAT. In my case, the modem wouldn’t take the access code, but was receptive to a paperclip in the hardware reset port.

This has happily solved a number of aggravating problems for me. As but one example, VPN connections which previously could be expected to terminate with some odd error after a couple of hours now stay up indefinitely.

Odd that the old router didn’t complain about this at all. Good riddance, I suppose.

 

In my case, that’s a R0DE NT1-A, a nice studio condenser mic which requires phantom power.

I had a few requirements regarding an audio interface:

• External. The components in a computer generate a great deal of electrical noise; this noise gets introduced into an analog signal unless it’s well shielded. Thus, the inside of the case is quite a hostile environment in which to run analog/digital converters, making an external interface a compelling choice.
• Low-latency headphone monitoring. An entertaining party trick is to have someone speak into a microphone while they’re monitoring their own voice with a slight delay. This has the odd effect of causing the victim to dramatically elongate vowel sounds, which is fun to hear. However, it’s no fun at all to do anything serious with, so a low-latency headphone hardware monitor is key.
• Firewire connectivity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve had the worst luck with USB audio devices; it seems as if I’m always tripping over some bug in the chipsets. The pros have been using Firewire for this sort of thing for years, so the kinks have been worked out.
• At least one Mic preamp input with 48V phantom power.
• At least two line inputs or an effects send/return; there’s a lot of very cool analog signal processing equipment available, but it’s all line-level.
• Finally, zero driver hassles. In the PC world that we’ve recently escaped, the dominant vendor in the sound card landscape can’t seem to create a reliable driver despite years of trying. Every so often, a young, vibrant, and forward-thinking company with solid, reliable drivers would spring up, only to be acquired by the dominant vendor, who would then return us to our regularly-scheduled blue screens of death. (Incidentally, this vendor finally appears to be teetering on the brink of demise; don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, chumps….)
• Cost should not be of a magnitude sufficient to generate The Look from my Lovely Wife.

Now, even with this somewhat restrictive set of requirements, options are hardly limited; ask any musician and you’ll learn that there’s just no lack of gear to spend money on. Armed with a list of my possible options, I ventured forth to Guitar Center, our local audio Mecca, there to fondle the possible choices.

I quickly settled on the Presonus Firebox.

While several gear choices met the requirements, the build quality of the Firebox was a differentiator for me. I’m a sucker for metal, which the Firebox possesses in quantity, while many competitors were mostly plastic.

Hates plastic. Hates it, we do.

However, the clincher on the Firebox was the fact that it’s a ‘class compliant device’. To the uninitiated, ‘class compliant’ should be equated with other two-word combinations, such as:

• tax refund
• winning ticket
• free beer

In short, it means that there are no drivers required for the device. Let me go over that again.

There are no drivers required for the device.

They’re built into the OS; you just plug the unit in and it all works out instantly. Words cannot properly convey my feelings on this topic after reflection on just what it was like to rebuild a Windows machine after a sound driver ‘upgrade’ went bad.

There’s a lot to like here. A total of six inputs, including two with mic preamps. It’s a 24bit/96K interface, which is certainly good enough for my needs. On most machines, it’s actually completely powered from the Firewire bus; a supplemental wall wart power supply is provided for those machines with inadequate bus voltage. Seems to have excellent A/D conversion, at least to my ears, and the monitoring has no detectable latency. Also, the headphone volume does literally go to 11, though I suspect that a depressed skull fracture and/or cranial implosion could be expected to occur in the 7-8 range.

I think the one downside to the unit is the relatively low gain of 45db provided by the mic preamps; this is apparently a Firewire voltage limitation. That’s a decent amount of gain for most mics, but it’ll be marginal for some of the quieter ones. In my case, I had to nearly max the gain to accommodate my mic.

Street price on these is presently hovering at around $300 US.

I’m quite pleased with mine. Presonus produces an array of form-factor equivalent analog equipment such as a preamp and compressor which stack with this unit, thus leaving the door open for further gear acquisition. Apparently, they’ve studied my buying habits…..

 

This is one area in which the PC has spoiled me. I’ve used Microsoft Natural keyboards for as long as they’ve been available; going back to a standard keyboard just feels horrible. When you type for a living, the specter of repetitive strain injury is ever present; something had to be done.

Microsoft does produce a Mac-specific keyboard/mouse combo, the Wireless Laser Desktop for Mac. Nice, but not quite what I was looking for. It’s got Mac-specific keys and it’s ergonomic, but it’s not a Natural layout; rather, it’s “Comfort Curve”. Close, but not quite.

Fortunately, while not as attuned to the Mac as the above, there’s a nice alternative available, also from Microsoft; the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

In deference to the aforementioned RSI concern, I’ll refer to this keyboard as the NEK hereafter.

Pros:

• Natural layout
• Nice large keys with pleasant tactile response.
• Solid feel to the unit; heavy enough to stay put
• Many programmable hotkeys, software-configurable
• OS X supported
• Unique, very supportive wrist rest
• Extremely comfortable

Cons:

• Keys have Windows labels
• No SuperDrive eject key
• Wired, not wireless

I’m torn as to whether or not the fact that it’s wired is really a con; it’s not like keyboards move around during use like mice do. However, it is a differentiator for someone with limited desk real estate; it’s nice to be able to put the keyboard aside in favor of a writing surface.

However, the important thing is comfort, and the NEK is extremely comfortable. The wrists are supported in a neutral position, and the Natural angle eliminates pronation of the wrists, key when one’s shoulders are 1.5 airline seats in width.

The driver software installs a well-designed preference pane; configuration is quick and intuitive.

This is without a doubt the best keyboard I’ve ever used. Worth a look if you find the standard Mac fare too small to be usable.

 

Quicken began to behave oddly; upon invoking it from the dock, the icon would do the customary couple of bounces, then nothing. Opening the Quicken data file met with mixed results; sometimes it’d open, sometimes it wouldn’t. Scary error messages, a weird file creation error in the backup process, that kind of thing.

Not the behavior I was looking for.

A bit of digging around led me to the console log, which contained entries like this:

kernel[0]: shared_region: 0x46bac64: lsf_map: unable to allocate mapping

Curious. Well, I’m a babe in the woods when it comes to OS X, but there’s BSD under them thar covers, and at least that I understand.

I happened upon a very informative arstechnica discussion of this problem, wherein a luminary for whom I am unqualified to fetch coffee had identified the source of the error. In short, one of the kernel’s non-expandable memory zones was full; the problem would prevent Rosetta applications such as Quicken from functioning.

Sure enough, from a terminal prompt:

$ zprint load_file_server
                          elem    cur    max    cur    max   cur alloc alloc
zone name                 size   size   size  #elts  #elts inuse  size count
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
load_file_server            36   491K   492K  13994  13994 13994    4K   113

Hmmm…yep, that’s full.

I did a restart to see just how fast this memory zone was filling; it had 293K in use immediately after a restart. Not good.

One individual in the discussion had indicated an issue with APE causing this problem. Now the thing was, I certainly hadn’t installed APE; heck, until a couple of minutes ago, I didn’t know it existed. However, when you see hoofprints, you should think horses, not zebras, so I fired up Activity Monitor to check.

And there it was, aped running. Curiouser and curiouser.

A little more digging uncovered the fact that the driver for my Logitech MX Revolution mouse silently installed APE, at a version (2.0.2) that was known to have issues with 10.4.9 Tiger.

I discovered some discussion about the possibility of installing the 2.0.3 version of APE after the Logitech Control Center installation, but by now, I was beginning to get a bit of a grump on. I am not at peace with software silently installing stuff I didn’t ask for or agree to; the time had come to purge.

I ran the Logitech uninstaller, which removed the Logitech Control Center preference panel; however, it didn’t get rid of APE. Fortunately, APE itself does provide an uninstaller, which did remove things cleanly. Frankly, the APE site and blog appear to be all about full disclosure, with a wealth of information provided. As such I’ve really got nothing against them; rather, I’m displeased with Logitech doing things behind my back.

Now, after a restart:

$ zprint load_file_server
                          elem    cur    max    cur    max   cur alloc alloc
zone name                 size   size   size  #elts  #elts inuse  size count
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
load_file_server            36    49K   492K   1412  13994  1412    4K   113

Much better.

So, now I had a system that wasn’t acting freaky, but my way-cool mouse was reduced to a shadow of its former self, most of its many buttons unresponsive. There had to be a solution for this problem.

Sure enough, there was. Steermouse is a third-party mouse driver, supporting a large array of mice, my MX included. The developer provided an unrestricted 30-day demo, which I installed. Steermouse immediately recognized the MX, and the dead buttons sprang to life once again.

One feature of the MX is the scroll wheel, which includes a clutch; the clutch can make the wheel operate in a free-spin or a click-to-click mode.

Personally, I find the free spin mode to be the best of any mouse I’ve ever used, but the click-to-click mode feels to me like stirring a vat full of rocks with a hockey stick.

Unfortunately, the click-to-click mode is the default. Ugh.

The Steermouse developer has an easy solution for this problem. I entered the following in a terminal window and relogged:

defaults write jp.plentycom.SteerMouse LOGITECH_MX_REVOLUTION_WHEEL -int -2

Presto, the mouse is now always in free spin mode. I love these guys. Other values provide different behavior for the scroll wheel; the Steermouse documentation contains complete details.

One final interesting feature of Steermouse is the ‘automatically move the cursor to the default button’ option, similar to that available in Windows’ pointer options control panel. Judging from the comments of reviewers, this feature is either the Single Best Thing Ever or the Manifest Work of the Devil; I tend to be in the former camp, having used the snap-to feature under Windows for years. It’s configurable and can be turned on or off as desired.

Steermouse was $20 USD to register. Not bad for giving me back a functioning Quicken and my mouse buttons.

All’s well that ends.

 

I had, frankly, written this off to some type of collective insanity. I mean, seriously, how interesting could this be? I’ve unboxed countless systems, and the experience is quite predictable — idiotic packaging, styrofoam so ill-fitting that a team of oxen are required to extract the device, industrial staples engineered to inflict gruesome injuries. All in all, something that you detail someone else to do if at all possible.

However, I wanted to be in the spirit of the thing, and so I asked Patrick, who’d started me on this path in the first place, to join me. He said he was glad I’d asked, so that he could witness this transcendent moment in my life.

I swear, this is like joining a cult or something. I’m expecting to be taught the secret handshake at any moment.

It was immediately obvious that the two hours I’d booked for this task would be unnecessary. Try five minutes. The care and concern that Apple puts into their packaging is just incredible. Everything opens easily, removes easily, and there’s not an industrial staple to be found. Heck, the styrofoam inserts are bevelled for easy access.

As for build quality, I’d expect the system unit to withstand naval gunfire. Heavy-gauge aluminum throughout; opens easily with a single latch. Easy access to the drive bays and slots, no cables flopping around, obvious airflow paths. Connectors slide home with a satisfying pop into detents; peripheral connections are nicely spaced and clearly labeled.

I work with systems costing in the millions; the design and build quality here are superior to anything I’ve seen.

So in the end, yes, I now understand the unboxing hype. My journey to the Dark Side continues.

 

We left the store with a Mac Pro Quad 3.0, complete with 4GB of RAM, an extra 500GB drive for Boot Camp, an ATI X1900 XT video card, a 23″ HD Cinema Display, the enhanced Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless options, and an AppleCare service contract.

I passed on the .Mac option for the moment, figuring that I already had a Google domain and an online backup service provider; might as well see how those fared in the new world before potentially duplicating functionality.

Even with the employee discount available through my employer, a supplier of parts to Apple, this was some serious outlay. However, given that my previous machine had lasted for 6 years, the expected amortization isn’t that bad, and I do this stuff for a living. Further, once spousal approval for this type of thing is obtained, one may as well go for the gusto.