Mini Review: 2009

What They Call The “Real Life”

• 2008 ended with me getting unemployed. The decision being made for me was a catalyst to finally make my move. I was planning to get out of employment in 2009 anyways, so, you know. Thank you, Yahoo!.
• Early in the year I went freelance. As mentioned, I had played with the idea for a while by then, so that was pretty cool. And scary.
• Got a few clients, and managed to keep a good “client work vs. own projects” ratio. I’m not getting rich working like this, but I’d like to be truly happy in my job for once, so it’s important for me to keep the balance there.
• My first freelance project, a WoW-related site named CharPool, was a personal success, but failed nonetheless. About a month after launching it other sites with similar functionality came out and kind of crushed it. I guess I had waited too long to act on the idea for the site. So, in December, I’ve turned the server off. Well, live and learn.
• Speaking of learning, I’ve learned a boatload of new things this year. Lots of Ruby-related things, of course, but also a lot of *nix stuff. Fun!
• Among other things, I rewrote my Twitter contact management site TwerpScan — and had the chance to give a quick talk about it for a mixed audience here in Munich. Another first for me, and I’ve enjoyed it.
• Got myself two ebook readers, a Bookeen Cybook Gen3 and a Amazon Kindle 2. Both nice, but the latter wins, hands down. What a refined piece of technology!
• I’m currently knee-deep in RubyCocoa code, which I consider a road to MacRuby, which I need for my next big project… Loving it!
• Finally got me an iPhone.

Friends & Family

• In August, I had the honor of being best man for M & E. Beautiful, beautiful wedding. It was an absolutely wonderful weekend. I love you guys. :)
• We went up to Northern Germany for a nice vacation, including hooking up with my man Hendrik who showed us his hellhole of a city the (mostly) pretty parts of Hamburg ;), and a visit to the BUGA 2009 (i.e. the annual “German Federal Horticultural Show”).

Games & Movies

• Biggest surprises this year: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin’s Creed II. Both games I knew about but didn’t have much interest in, until Mike would lend them to me, and then… I really didn’t see them coming, but they hit me hard. Good stuff. :)
• Also notable this year: the two GTA IV DLC packs, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Wars.
• Avatar — holy shit. That movie really hit the spot for me. Also great: District 9. A good year for scifi, methinks.

Verdict

• Awesome year. Really, really good. :)

Here’s to 2010. May it be as good as 2009 was.

How to reset your keyboard on OSX

Somehow, after connecting my new Logitech G9 Laser mouse tonight, two keys on my MS Natural Ergo keyboard were swapped. Highly annoying. After some digging around the Googles, I learned that in order to “reset” your keyboard —i.e. making OSX forget your keyboard type— all you have to do is a

rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

Once done, disconnect the keyboard, plug it in again, and the “New keyboard found, wot is it?” dialog will pop up again. Problem solved, case closed.

Thanks to Riccardo Raneri, on whose blog I found this hint. Credit where it’s due.

Tools of the trade

Assaf passed the ball,¹ and I’m gonna run with it. So Mr Cooper asks “What are your tools of the trade?”.

On the desk

iMac 24”, 3.06 GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, early 2009 model. His name is Rupert, and he’s great. Got him in February after my previous iMac” broke down after running ~3 years straight.

Dell 2005FPW. Really nice and affordable monitor. Tilted by 90°, because I can.

iPod touch 16GB. I don’t leave home without it.

JBL On Stage. It was a parting gift I got from my co-workers a few years back, and I really like it. I mostly use it for the iPod dock these days, but I’ve packed it a few times to serve as a portable sound system while on the road.

MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. One of the best ergo keyboards on the market, hands down. Oh, and yes: that’s a wire. I think a wireless desktop keyboard is an useless concept — it’s sitting on your desk, about half a meter away from your computer, it’s rarely moved (if ever). This is a very common scenario, and in my book it’s stupid to waste energy (batteries etc.) for powering a wireless connection to bridge a distance that short.

Logitech MX510. Good, affordable, reliable mouse. Also cable-bound, see above. Sitting on a tw@ mousepad.

Sennheiser headset. Full sound, the mike is a bit quiet, not the USB version.

CanoScan LiDE 200. No-frills flatbed scanner.

iWork ‘06 Install DVD. Used as coaster.

Belkin n52. Funky little left-hand keyboard/peripheral, mostly for gaming, but I’ve heard of people using it for serious work like 3D stuff. Might be a myth, tho.

Belkin 7port USB hub. It’s not bad. Has some troubles with my external soundcard, tho.

Not in the picture:

• 13” black MacBook, 2GB. Also running Snopard, and kept lean. Used for working remotely.
• Western Digital MyBook Pro, 500 GB, Firewire. For backups.
• Creative Xmod. Keeps me from having to plug my headphones in and out all the time. If there was a software solution which would let me switch sound output between the built-in speakers and the headphone jack, I wouldn’t need this.

In the dock, in my mind

I ride the Snopard, naturally.

• Textmate, of course. What else?!
• Tweetie. I like it for keeping track of my various Twitter accounts. Both on the Macs and the iPod.
• Terminal. I prefer it over pretty much every other shell app so far.
• My homedir repo. This is one of the first things I install on each of my local & remote boxes. All command-line-related stuff goes in there, the very same repo is used for each machine, and it’s just crazy handy. Tip of the head to Norm for the initial one and Brad for a suitable version to fork from. :)
• Mailplane. The ability to keep an eye on several Google Mail accounts at once is nice.
• Launchbar. Awesome. Besides app launching I mostly use it for its clipboard history and calculator.
• VMWare Fusion for all my virtualization needs. Got a cheap license a few months ago and never looked back.
• Dropbox. On all of my machines. Lovely, lovely piece of software.
• OmniFocus for all my todo needs, on all my machines, including the iPod.
• I’m currently giving BusySync a spin. After trying to coerce Snopard’s native Google Calendar conduit into a) synching two 2 machines and b) not sucking for a few hours I’ve decided my time is too valuable to keep trying, and went with BusySync. Which is really nice and painless so far. I’ll probably buy it once the trial is over.
• Minuteur for Pomodoro-like 2-hour sprints. (The Pomodoro app is a bit too much for my taste. It’s not bad, but not for me.)

Update On The Stability Of The Bookeen Cybook Gen3

A post on the MobileRead forums hinted at my Cybook Gen3 stability issues being related to the font face used for displaying text, so I’ve replaced the very lovely Liberation Serif with the slightly less lovely, but nonetheless enjoyable DejaVu Condensed Serif.

Lo and behold, the stability improved tremendously — my Cybook hasn’t crashed once since I’ve switched.

So, yes, the crashes/lockups are definitely font issues. The more you know.

Review: Bookeen Cybook Gen3

One of the first applications I’ve installed after buying my iPod touch last year was Stanza, one of the few dedicated ebook reading tools for the platform.

The idea of electronic reading appeals to me. I’ve tried my luck several times over the last few years, on different devices, with varying success. (Anyone remember Palm? Haha, yeah… me neither.)

First of all, I like a good novel. Being able to carry a number of them around with me, wherever I go, is a good thing. Back then I was spending almost two hours each day in public transit, and imagine that: reading beats staring at subway tunnel walls the whole time.

My second argument is a bit more elaborate. You see, I’ve read a lot of books in my life, most of them just once. Not everything written by man is a gem begging to be re-read time and time again. And while this is okay —not everyone can be Shakespeare, and most of these books I’ve enjoyed at least a bit, after all— it raises the question of what to do with them after reading. There are so many “one-off” books in my basement, it’s not really funny anymore. Some of them I gave away, some I’ve sold, some I’ve fed to a recycling bin. But the others are sitting there, silently, and everytime I look at them I wonder a) what to do with them and b) how much wood was used up to make them. (Yes, I’ve actually had a point to make here.) Thus, I’d feel less bad about getting said one-time-read-through novels in electronic form.

Anyways: After a few months with Stanza I’ve decided electronic reading works well enough for me to warrant a dedicated device for home use — a real ebook reader. After some shopping around, comparing prices and reading up on different offerings I went with the Bookeen Cybook gen3.

After a few weeks of using it a lot I now feel comfortable enough to share my findings. I know at least a few people are curious about it — hi Mookie & Bernhard. ;)

Quick Facts

• 6” e-ink screen
• 600x800 pixels, 166 dpi
• B&W, 4 grayscale
• No backlight, naturally
• Multi format: reads Mobipocket (DRM and non-DRM), HTML, PDF, TXT, PalmDoc, image formats etc.¹ Both EPUB and better PDF support are promised for the upcoming firmware update. (Hopefully this’ll include reflowing text in PDFs.)
• Has an SD slot — in case the 512MB onboard storage isn’t enough.

The Good

• Rather affordable: I’ve ordered mine in the UK, and paid €225 incl. shipping to Germany. The box contained the Cybook, a short pamphlet, and an USB cable. Not more, not less.
• It’s a light device: Only ~170g, battery included.
• The screen is great, the time it takes to turn a page is surprisingly short and not noticeable anymore after reading a few pages.
• There’s no proprietary software to be installed. Connect it to your Mac/PC, and it’ll show up as mass USB storage device in your Finder/Explorer. This is also how you put new content on the device. I like that.
• Truetype support: Don’t like the built-in fonts? Just copy TTF files to the device and use them instead. I really like that.
• Rather simple and logic menu layout. The menus mostly make sense.
• Handy display controls: Font family, font size, layout (justification etc.).
• Impromptu bookmarks: Turning off the device or going back to the “library” (i.e. the main list of stored texts) during reading will make a note of your progress. Going back to the text later on will bring back to you where you’ve stopped reading.

The Bad

• Doesn’t support EPUB yet, but apparently this will be “fixed” within the month.
• The PDF support is… well, let’s just say that yes, it displays most PDF files. But it either tries to cram one document page into the space of the 6” screen or flips the display 90° and shows either the upper or lower half of the document page. It works, but it ain’t fun, yo.
• No page numbers: There is an (optional) horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen to display how far you’ve progressed through the book. It’s a neat idea, and a good alternative to page numbers. Well, in theory. It’s an idea that wasn’t fully thought through, as you can also jump to any page using its page number through the menu. Which is somewhat useless, as the current page number isn’t indicated number anywhere. It’s just not displayed. I know that on a device that supports different font families and sizes, calculating page numbers can be a drag, but come on: the navigation currently in place is only 4 parts working — and 1 part barely sufficient.
• Stability:
  • It locks up every now and then, which puts me in the strange situation that I had to reboot my book. (There’s a tiny reset button on the back of the device.)
  • Since the reading progress is only stored during shutdown or upon return to the library but naturally not during a lockup, the device will not remember where I was when the crash happened. So after a reset the last automatically saved bookmark will be used — my progress made between opening the text and the lockup will be lost. This is unfortunate, as there is no “forward ten pages” menu option, so I usually end up flipping through dozens of pages after a crash, looking for the right page.
  • Update: The crashes are apparently directly related to the font used — using DejaVu Serif Condensed instead of Liberation Serif helped the stability quite a bit. YMMV.
• Not all books come with a TOC, and it’d be nice if the Cybook would autogenerate one. Alas, it doesn’t.
• I’m having problems opening the PDFs from the Suvudu Free Library, which makes me a sad panda. I hope this will change with the aforementioned firmware update.
• I don’t like the available three library views all that much. They’re a wee bit uninspired.

The Useless

• Plays MP3.
• On the left side of the device there are four buttons. Only three of them have a function.

DIY Improvements

• I wanted a cover to protect the screen, but didn’t want to spend money on them “official” leather covers. So I’ve …molested a Moleskine (ahem²). Which actually worked out pretty nicely after all. Because I am a man of many talents! Oh yeah.
• Liberation Serif. ‘nuff said.
• Impress the ladies: MobiPerl and hpricot make for a good team.

The Verdict

It’s no Kindle 2. It’s a neat device without frills. It’s not perfect. But it’s affordable and works, and I don’t regret the purchase.

Cordless Hardware Is Killing Your Children

Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh, but think about it for a moment. Everyone is complaining about power consumption and global warming and whatnot, THE EARTH IS DYING!!!1oneoneeleven, yet by now it’s really fucking hard to find a decent mouse or keyboard that does have a cable.

Why is that?

I seriously don’t understand why it’s necessary and accepted among computer users to have a formerly cable-bound piece of hardware that now doesn’t “need” a cable anymore, but batteries (rechargable or not). Or worse: the mice that come with their own base stations and power adapters.

Mind you, your mouse and keyboard are usually around 50cm to 1m away from your Mac or PC. So why not use something with a cable?

I am currently shopping for a new mouse, hence the confusion. Well, actually I am annoyed. I was eying the beautiful Logitech MX Revolution, which is a wonderful piece of equipment, is ergonomic, has the right size for my paws, it would be perfect!

Unfortunately (for Logitech) I refuse to buy something as mundane as a pointing device with its own PCU. Sure, they probably don’t care.

/sigh

His name is Rupert

Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’’ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT.

First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small.

The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.

I also installed World of Warcraft/Burning Crusade, since it’s the only game I have lying around for OSX at the moment. (Which reminds me, I also have Uru and Warcraft III and should probably take them for a spin as well.)

Short verdict: frickin’ sweet. 1920×1200px, all settings cranked to max, glow enabled, 16xAF—I get 30-60fps all the time, no matter where I am. One thing that for some reason doesn’t work, tho, is FSAA. Apparently the 7600GT doesn’t do FSAA in WoW, but it’s a known problem, and I hope they’ll fix it at some point. That said, it’s not like the lack of anti-aliasing is really apparent. :)

Also, the box doesn’t really break a sweat running anything. For example, the CPUs hover around 20% while playing WoW. Even when converting AVI videos to something my iPod can handle it was blazingly fast, yet quiet and still responsive, the way it should be. The difference between a single G4 Mac mini and a Core 2 Duo iMac 24” is nothing short of breathtaking. (If it wasn’t, I’d be seriously disappointed anyways.) It performs admirably.

I named it Rupert.

Post It #5

Summing up YouTube. xkcd does an excellent job of taking a snapshot of YouTube in one single comic strip.

It’s art! jr has an iNsight

Apple is not a business. It’s an art co-op.

Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007. Interesting list. I “liked” #2, Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran.

How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won’t say:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

Dick in a box. IKEA instructions for making a DIAB.

AG? Nine year old Wired story, still fascinating and mindboggling:

Skeptics had a field day when a scientist claimed in 1996 that gravity could be negated. Now his findings are being investigated in laboratories worldwide.

Solid State Disk Changes The Game [via Simon]:

And, it will change the way your software runs. When there’s little penalty in saving to disk, there’s no reason not to. Your changes are stored as your writing the memo, or playing with the spreadsheet.

Post It #3

Windy. Outside a storm is brewing that is assumed to end all life in Germany. Everywhere. We’re all going to die! Is Jesus coming back, bringing his lawyers? No idea. I just hope we’ll still have a roof in the morning.

New keyboard. Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, excellent even on a Mac, thanks to the surprisingly flexible IntelliType software. I love Apple hardware, but the glaring lack of an ergonomic keyboard is nothing short of a shame.

Reusable Components, Today: Keyboards

A dirty, dirty, dirty keyboard can be cleaned thoroughly easily, it doesn’t necessarily have to be thrown away—you can reuse it! Here’s how.

Unplug the keyboard. Then disassemble it, usually that means taking out the screws in the back and ending up with one plastic board holding all the keys and the (more or less) fancy casing. If the cable can be detached, even better.

Now, take the key board and the casing and put it in a dishwasher. Put it in an upright position. Close the dishwasher and let it do its dirty work.

When the dishwasher is done, take both parts of the keyboard and put them in a dry place. Again, in an upright position. Usually leaning them against a closet works fine. Leave them there for one or two days so the remaining water can drip out or evaporate. The longer, the better. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Once the parts are dry again, reassemble the keyboard and plug it in. Usually (see disclaimer below) you’ll have a clean and working keyboard now. Even all the board chow is gone! Splendid.

If it doesn’t work correctly, it’s probably not entirely dry yet. Just let it dry for another day or so and try again.

Disclaimer: I’ve followed this procedure two times by now. The first time with an Apple Keyboard. No disassembling necessary (or possible). Worked fine. Second time just last week with a no-brand ergonomic PC keyboard. Both times I was successful. Your mileage may vary, and I won’t take any responsibility.