Oh no, a dead mouse!

There I was, scribbling away merrily when suddenly my mouse started sticking. I thought it was just dirty again and picked it up to clean it, only to see one of the small silicone slider pads left on the desk. Inspection of its three companions revealed that they'd almost worn down to nothing.

So what's the big deal? Well, I'm very attached to this mouse, as it's an Evoluent Vertical Mouse that I've been using for over five years. The fact that a new one's going to cost me £60 just adds to my misery.

I first encountered Evoluent in about 2002, when a Swedish distributor contacted me to introduce the first revision of the mouse to the UK.

I assumed it was a bit of a novelty at the time, and thought nothing more of it. The sample they sent in got lost during one of the regular office moves VNU subjected us to, but a couple of years later I started to get severe pains in my wrist. The doctors found nothing physical wrong, and painkillers didn't work, so I thought perhaps the vertical mouse could help. After rummaging around, I found another one lying around in the pile of unclaimed review kit and adopted it.

I've never looked back. Although it took a couple of weeks to get used to, my wrist pains gradually subsided and they haven't returned. I used to get occasional twinges working at home with a standard mouse, but managed to live with it as the vast majority of my work was in the office. An additional benefit was that it always baffled any tech support types who came to my desk.

After being made redundant last year, I brought the mouse home with me and it's been one of the best decisions I made. (The other one was to ask whether I could have my superb Wilkhahn FS-Line office chair, which the company kindly agreed to)

Anyway, it looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and order a new one. If there's one sure thing about ergonomics, it's that it rarely comes cheap.

For more musings on mice and men, here's an old 2006 column I wrote for IT Week with some links to video footage of Doug Engelbart's original 1968 mouse.

E-Readers Fall Short for News, says WSJ

"Among its findings: Younger consumers find the Kindle “old” compared to their smart phones, while older consumers miss the traditional newspaper fixtures that they get in the print edition"

This WSJ Digits article ties in quite nicely with my opinion about the iPad the other day. Thanks to Nieman Lab for the tweet.

Guy Kewney

If you know, have heard of or have been influenced by Guy Kewney's writing in PCW or many other outlets over the past 30+ years, please click the link below. Thank you.

Help Guy and Mary Kewney... - The Other Glass: "even give them the wherewithal for themselves the odd bit of luxury. Adrian is here merely acting as a conduit. Below are two buttons. Use the top one to send a donation to Guy and Mary"

Slow internet connection? Don't always blame the ISP

I just spent a couple of hours fixing my neighbour's Virgin Media broadband connection. I also use Virgin, so I was pretty sure there was no local service problem.

The symptom was that his internet connection was crawling along at about 700Kbits/sec on a 10Mbits/sec service. He'd complained to Virgin who had sent an engineer round and changed the set-top box and router with no success. The engineer apparently couldn't find anything wrong and blamed the PC, so my neighbour asked if I could sort it out before he called them again.

I took my netbook around (take note, Mr. Jobs), hooked it up via Wi-Fi and confirmed that his internet connection was working fine, so there was indeed something suspect in the PC. But what? No viruses, no odd services running, network cable connected fine and running at 100Mbits/sec. Hmm.

I tried changing the network cable. No luck. I installed a Wi-Fi dongle and it worked fine, so I started to suspect the network card. Checked the settings and remembered I'd set it last year to a manual 100Mbits/sec full duplex setting, as the Auto-Negotiation setting wasn't working properly. The router (a D-Link DIR-365) has a handy system tool that tells you each LAN port's speed & duplex status - I ran this and it showed the PC was only connected at half-duplex. Puzzled, I set the network card driver back to Auto and the internet connection started working properly.

Seems that a bug in the network card driver was to blame, although it didn't appear to have been updated since I last worked on it. Anyway, the moral is that when you have problems, don't rule something out because it appears to be working.

Similarly, I remember a couple of years ago that my Virgin connection kept disconnecting every few seconds. I blamed Virgin, the router, the cable - until I looked at the network graph in Task Manager and realised the network adapter was turning itself off regularly every few seconds. Replacing it cured the problem.

The iPad is not for geeks

Yes, it's finally arrived, but who is it for? I think that the Apple iPad will actually go down a storm with two groups of people at the opposite end of the age spectrum - the young and the old.

My 5-year old granddaughter enjoys playing games on my PC. Before Christmas, I was considering buying her a Nintendo DS, so I dug mine out of the cupboard to see how she got on with it. It didn't take her long to get used to it, but she couldn't be bothered with anything that required use of the buttons. But the next day I found her playing intently with my daughter's iPod Touch, and asked her which she preferred - the iPod won hands down, because 'it's easier to hold and the games are easy to play'. Asked whether she'd rather have that or a PC, the iPod won again.

Those who carry no preconceptions of what a computer should be - such as my granddaughter and, to a lesser extent, my parents (who are retired and have unsuccessfully tried to get to grips with PCs) - will be attracted to the iPad, as it does pretty well everything that a computer needs to do these days, but with a less intimidating  point-and-touch interface.

The iBooks app will also appeal to them, as will the oversized on-screen keyboard. Teenagers will hassle parents for one because it looks cool, students may well be interested in it for digital textbooks because it overcomes the lack of colour in other e-book readers like the Kindle. But the wider tech community - myself included - mostly won't see the point of it, because it's not really aimed at them.

Another day, another home network standard

Just saw a press release from the Home Grid Forum (thanks to FierceIPTV's newsletter) crowing about how they've finally managed to ratify the last bit of the G.hn home networking standard. From what I can gather, they've finally joined up the data layer with the physical layer, which means that now chip manufacturers can go ahead and start making real things. Well, hoo-ray.

G.hn actually has commendable goal: it's intended to work over any kind of physical interface in the home - wires, coax, mains, phonelines, that bit of string you had left over from Xmas, and so on. Will it succeed? I haven't a clue. I'd delve into it more, but to download anything from the HGF's library you have to regsiter for each document. Great idea, chaps - how about a single sign-in to complement your single network standard?

Solwise 3G11nMRW Mobile Router review

V3.co.uk has published my review of the Solwise 3G11nMRW mobile router

AlertMe Energy review

Computeractive has published my review of the AlertMe Energy power monitoring system

HP Mediasmart Server EX490 review

Computeractive has published my review of the HP Mediasmart Server EX490

Vexia Econav 380 review

IT Reviews has published my review of the Vexia Econav 380 UK & Ireland sat nav

Solwise 200AV Homeplug Wi-Fi adapter review

V3 has just published my review of the Solwise 200AV Homeplug Wi-Fi adapter

Books, books, books

I love books. Not only do I have bookcases overflowing with them, over my years as a tech writer I've read them in pretty well every digital format you can think of. Yet I'm in no rush to get rid of my 'real' books, even though I also own an e-book reader (a Cool-er, if you're interested) that could, in theory, replace much of my library.

Notice that 'much' in the last sentence? That's the point. I'm not a great reader of novels, as you can gather from the photo of one of my tidier bookcases (I think Tolkien is just about visible on the middle shelf - naturally - but that's about it). Most of my books contains illustrations of one sort or another, and on the current generation of E-Ink-based readers, illustrations are for the most part hopeless. It's not just that they're monochrome, although that doesn't help, but they can take an age to display on these battery-sipping feebly-powered devices.

A beautiful book like Donald Johanson's From Lucy to Language (blimey, my £18.99 purchase looks cheap now..) is, at present, totally impractical for a portable reader. But the PC version of Adode's Digital Editions proves that it's not the format, but the hardware that's the bottleneck - you get full colour and interactivity (try Jinx the Black Cat Activity Book from the Adobe Sample Ebook library for a fun example), all made possible by the processing and graphics power of the PC.

Yes, E-Ink is gorgeous for text - you really do have to experience it in full sunlight (not an option for many UK readers, I know) to appreciate how it can almost match the contrast of paper - sort of shown in the photo below on a rare sunny day last year. The downside is the same as a paper book, of course - you can't read it in the dark without a light.

If Apple wants to use its soon-to-be announced iBook Mk II (or whatever it ends up being called) to bring a desktop PC reading experience to a handheld format, good luck to them.

As for the e-book as a publishing format, what's the future? The technology for creating beautiful facsimiles of print publications is old hat, as is that for creating things that aren't possible in print. The problem is the partly the hardware as I've mentioned above, and also the high cost of e-books (publishers need to have their heads seriously banged together on that). But Amazon's Kindle has shown that, as Apple did with iTunes, it's really the delivery model that's just as important to get right. And Apple being Apple, I'm sure they'll (re-)invent something special just for the occasion.

Earthquake tracking tools

As a one-time geophysicist, earthquakes fascinate me, not least because in the oil exploration business I spent most of my time creating mini-quakes using a variety of seismic sources.

The USGS still offers the best worldwide earthquake resource, and there are a few widgets out there using its feeds. My favourite is the Yahoo Widgets Earthquake (above) which gives you a little world map displaying earthquakes as they happen.

The USGS also has a range of RSS, Twitter and other data feeds, including a Google Earth KML overlay.

A novel experiment called USGS TED (Twitter Earthquake Detector) analyses Twitter for references to quakes and plots them using the Twitter geolocation information.

It's fascinating science, but as the unfortunate citizens of Haiti know only too well, earthquakes destroy lives and even countries. If you want to find out how you can help, there's a widget the top of this blog, or alternatively you can go to the donation page at the UK Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) site.

[Update 23/1: removed Red Cross Haiti widget as it wasn't working]

Femtowhat?

My old pal Clive Akass (PCW's news editor until the mag closed in 2009, making us both redundant) has just posted an interesting piece on femtocells over on The Inquirer. Femtocells are miniature mobile phone base stations - the idea is that if you can't get a signal at home, you install a femtocell which connects to your phone and routes your calls over your domestic broadband link.

Clive's written about femtocells mainly from an operator's perspective, and for them it makes perfect sense to offload as much traffic as possible onto a broadband backbone.

Vodafone has just started flogging its Sure Signal femtocells in earnest (it's been piloting them for many months), and many customers will be totally bemused at having to fork out either one-off fees of £50 or £120, or £5 a month subscription to fix the lack of coverage in their properties.

Not only do you have to pay for the broadband yourself, but you still get charged for your calls. It's not going to catch on unless operators start giving them away as part of a bundle, even if they just make them available in areas with poor coverage.

If you have a Wi-Fi enabled phone and broadband, you might as well connect via VoIP over Wi-Fi - but of course unless you've an unlocked phone, you might well find the VoIP capability has been hobbled by the operator.

Another time, another place

It seems like a lifetime ago now, but from 2003 to 2008 - during my time at Personal Computer World  magazine, which closed in 2009 - I wrote a monthly column for the sadly-defunct IT Week. With the various site redesigns and CMS changes there, it's getting harder to find them all online (that doesn't sound right, does it?). The best I can do is a custom Google search which gets 49 results with a few duplicates. I wrote 66 columns in total, so I've no idea where the rest have disappeared to.

Draytek Vigor IPPBX 2820 review

V3.co.uk has just published my review of this natty combined ADSL router & IP PBX from Draytek.

Go away, Ovi Suite!

I love my Nokia N86 8MP phone, but Nokia's PC connectivity software is a pile of junk. I've used fought with PC Suite for several years, and tried Ovi Suite 1 but couldn't fathom it at all. PC Suite isn't too bad, except for its huge download size (260MB? Why?) and it insisting on installing Windows drivers every single time you connect (see the pic below if you don't believe me..).

So the other day when Nokia announced its free turn-by-turn guidance upgrade for Ovi Maps, I thought I'd try out version 2 of Ovi Suite. Hah! This bloated pile of poo failed trying to update both itself and the firmware for my phone. It also failed to update the Ovi Maps app on the phone, leaving it broken.

After a reinstall I got Maps working, but Ovi Suite was taking hours to sync anything, even over USB. Finally today it took over 2 hours to send a text message, so now I'm happily (well, almost) back on PC Suite.

What is the problem, Nokia:? I'm using Windows 7 and PC Suite integrates much better than the newer Ovi Suite - I don't want a bloody great window appearing when I start my PC, and when it updated itself Ovi Suite sent a 'Restart' message via a Windows 7 compatiblity screen, the first time I've seen this.

Add to this an inability to set detailed sync options in Ovi ('sync' seems to be a one-way option..) and a truly terribly user interface, and there's no wonder people have a dim view of Nokia phones. And we won't even mention the abysmal Ovi Store...not today, anyway.

Just what the world needs

Well, perhaps not. There's hardly a shortage of tech bloggers, but what the hell. I just want somewhere to broadcast and store my thoughts on the industry, so this seems as good a place as any. I have no agenda, just a broad love of science and technology.

Although I've left this post open for comments, at the moment I don't plan to do this for other posts - I've spent too much time over the past years moderating company blogs to want to wade into that swamp again.