As long as you haven’t been living under a rock these past few years you should have at least heard of Firefox. If you have heard of it but haven’t switched yet, here are some very good reasons. I have done so (from IE to Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox) and have no regrets. But, just to be on the bleeding edge, I downloaded the alpha 3 release of Firefox 3.0 aka Gran Paradiso. It’s supposedly just alpha, not final, not eve beta. The developers nor I do not recommend using it due to possible instability. But I must say that after hours and hours of using it, I have encountered no crashes or bugs whatsoever. Looks like 3rd time is a charm. If so, since this is also going to be its third major release, Firefox 3.0 is sure to rock!
Month: March 2007
I had wanted a Razer or Logitech gaming mouse but they were either hard to find or too expensive. Luckily we chanced upon some A4Tech gaming mice at one shop. We tested a few. They felt right and the price is also right so we each got one. I also had good experience with my second mouse ever, also an A4Tech, so the choice was easy.
The build was excellent. Almost as good as a good Logitech mouse. Mine has a matte black finish with glossy black trim. It is symetrically shaped: important for a lefty like me. It has the usual primary button, secondary button, and wheel. In addition, it has 2 thumb buttons on its left side for additional functions. Unfortunately, it is only easily accessible to right-handers. Somewhat disappointing but no matter, I mostly just use the standard controls anyway. At the bottom is not 4 but 6 mouse feet, for better gliding. Finally, it has a thin mouse cable to reduce drag.
Its optical mechanism can be switched between 400, 600, 800, and 1200 dpi resolutions with just the press of a selector button situated unobtrusively behind the wheel. When you change dpis, the wheel changes color from white, to green, to yellow, to red. This dpi switching mechanism allows you to easily and quickly switch mouse responsiveness depending on your needs e.g. office applications, to RTS (real-time strategy) game, to FPS (first-person shooter) game. I kept mine at red or 1200 dpi. Not only because I like the response at that resolution but the red glow is so cool and sinister as befit a gaming mouse.
As expected, the mouse was very responsive in actual use: office applications and Starcraft. Unfortunately I couldn’t test it with an FPS game since my laptop doesn’t meet system requirements. However, I’m sure it would perform just as well.
Rating: 5/5
We’ve had such functionality for some time now. The MediaGate immediately comes to mind but I’m sure there are others out there. However, if there’s one thing Apple does very well, it is package everything essential into one cool package, make everything easy to use, and then tie everything up together. Plus of course there’s the Apple mystique. They did it with the personal computer (Mac), they did it with portable entertainment (iPod) and now it seems they’re going to do it for home entertainment.
I can see new TVs coming out with that white and silver theme now.
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I’ve been planning to dabble in a bit more serious photography for some time now. Nothing so serious as to go for monster DSLRs with gazillions of pixels. Just enough to get to know the technical aspects. So the answer is one of those entry-level DSLRs that have been popping around all over lately. The choice has boiled down to the Pentax K100D and the Nikon D40. Both good entry-level DSLRs.
I’ve been comparing them for some time now and the way I see it, the K100D has higher-end DSLR features that the D40 does not: Shake Reduction (SR), dust removal, 11-point AF (D40 has 3-point AF), built-in AF motor, depth-of-field (DOF) preview, auto exposure bracketing, and top LCD status display. As a bonus, it uses widely available AA batteries. With 2500mAh and even 2700mAh rechargeable batteries becoming available, longevity should not be an issue.
On the other hand, the D40 has two things the K100D does not have: dedicated AF-assist lamp and large continuous shooting buffer. The D40 also is generally better in terms auto white balance (AWB), metering, noise reduction, and image processor.
However, in terms of picture quality, it’s a toss-up. From the sample shots I’ve seen, usually the K100D’s has better colors and the D40’s are sharper. But there are quite a lot of exceptions to this.
Tough choice.
Finally was able to find a solution to the problem that had been bugging the Linux laptops at the office for quite some time already. The problem was that USB devices were not being detected. The error messages go like:
USB: device not accepting address 2. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 3. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 4. Error -110
USB: device not accepting address 5. Error -110
Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ
After quite a bit of searching. I finally found this thread. It turns out that the solution is quite simple. You’ll need to go open your boot loader configuration file (in my case it’s /boot/grub/grub.conf) and put irqpoll as one of the kernel parameters. Reboot and voila! USB devices are now detected.