Mitch's Blog

A few months ago, my right wrist was bothering me. I had been using the Apple Magic Mouse since it came out on all my computers. But apparently my wrist was tired and I needed to look for alternatives. So I bought a lot of mice of various sorts. After testing them for a few months, here’s what I learned about these mice (from left to right in the picture above):

Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 ($60, Amazon)
This mouse is a “fat” mouse on the left side; it forces your hand at an angle vs the “flat palm down” position of a regular mouse. I was excited about the angle. The tracking and scroll wheel are the same as all other Microsoft mice. If you like other Microsoft mice and you mouse with your right hand, this could be a great mouse for you. However, I have never been a fan of Microsoft scroll wheels, so it wasn’t a good solution for me.

Apple Magic Trackpad ($70, Apple)
I actually bought this when it came out but rarely used it. I still don’t find it comfortable as a solo mouse on my desktop. There are a few things I do love about it—the gestures such as two-finger scroll are all wonderful. I find clicking on it a bit awkward.

Apple Magic Mouse ($70, Apple)
I love this mouse. It has left/right click, it’s relatively lightweight, and enables two-dimensional scrolling. It is “short” and that took some getting used to. I own four Magic Mouses and really enjoy them.

Logictech Wireless Trackball M570 ($50, Amazon)
I didn’t expect to like this but I bought it in the interest of diversity. It is actually quite wonderful. Although it doesn’t put my hand in a substantially different position, the use of the thumb to move the cursor instead of the wrist means my hand is doing different motions.

Razer Abyssus High Precision Optical Gaming Mouse (wired) ($30, Amazon)
I bought this because a friend mentioned she loved her Razer mouse. I love how lightweight the mouse is (note that I have a corded version). It’s very easy to move around and tracks very well. Unfortunately, it’s just a regular mouse and didn’t put my hand into a different position, so I didn’t notice any difference in pain.

Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 (Right Hand) ($90, Amazon)
A colleague had this mouse on his desk and so I thought I’d given it a spin. Initially it feels very strange to use, like coaxing a potato around on your desk. It took me a few days to get the hang of it. In particular, precision movements are very tough initially. My girlfriend took this mouse for a drive and loved it so much she ordered a left-hand version for her office. This mouse comes in two versions, left and right-hand, so you’ll need to know which hand you will mouse with before you order. The scroll wheel is very nice to use on this mouse.

DXT Precision Mouse ($100, only available from Kinesis)
This mouse is similar to the Evoluent, except it feels more like holding a pencil in your hand. The mouse is small, super lightweight and “reversible” for either left or right hand use. The buttons feel good and tracking is excellent. The only negative is that the scroll wheel is a disaster. My hands really can’t use the scroll wheel at all on this mouse. I think this is my favorite mouse, scrolling issues aside.

Adesso Glidepoint (in the background in the above picture)
I actually bought this mouse years ago. It was good for its time and has two-dimensional scrolling by moving your finger on the edges of the pad. However, the Apple Trackpad is the winner in this category now. I wouldn’t buy this now, but tossed it into this lineup for comparison. My biggest issue with this trackpad at the time was that it’s not heavy enough and it would end up sliding around on the desk. Trackpads should stay put.

So what did I end up doing?
Because none of the mouses were perfect, I have ended up using 4 mice most of the time: The DXT Precision Mouse and the Logitech Thumb Trackball I use with my right hand and switch back and forth between them throughout the day. I found it more convenient to buy a large mousepad (about 14″ x 18″!) to avoid running out of room as I switch which mouse is closest to the keyboard. With my left hand I switch back and forth between the Apple Trackpad and Magic Mouse. This lets me keep the nice scrolling features of those mice handy and offer a bit of relief to my right arm. Sometimes I will use one of the other mice for a little bit to get my arm into a different position. Although I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, my belief is that the key to “RSI” is the “R” (repetitive). Putting my hands in different positions should reduce the “R”. Either way, the pain is gone.

If you’re looking for a better mouse solution, I’d definitely give the DXT a shot although the scrolling situation for large hands isn’t very good. If you have the room and budget for a secondary scrolling solution, that might be an ideal combination.

(“Mousing Around” was the name of the mousing tutorial that came with the Macintosh in 1984 to teach folks how to use the mouse. I loved that program.)

Back in December 2005, I received a pair of Sony MDR-DS3000 headphones for Christmas. I reviewed them on Amazon, giving them 5/5 stars. I used them for years and never had any problems with them–they are comfortable, have good range, and the strange proprietary batteries still work great.

However, the audio quality of the Sonys was at best fair and I wanted something a little more. In order to achieve acceptable audio quality with them, an amplifier is needed and the user should keep the volume on the headphones themselves no more than 50-60% up. Even with these tweaks, the audio quality is just acceptable–it’s not fantastic.

So in July 2011, I bought the Sennheiser RS 180 headphones. I’ve been a Sennheiser fan for a while now; I also own the Sennheiser PXC 350 noise canceling headphones and the Sennheiser HD800 headphones.

The audio quality of the Sennheisers is much better than that of the Sony. The other nice feature is a line output that enables plugging amplified speakers or another downstream device into the headphones.

Where Sennheiser misses compared to the Sony is the amount of micromanagement required by the user. There is a power button on the base to start transmitting to the headphones. This is stupid; if the headphones are lifted from the base, that should be an implicit ‘on’ operation. There is also a power button on the headphones themselves. The way the Sony headphones work is that the power button is embedded into the head adjustment, such that putting on the headphones causes the headphones to turn on. Brilliant, and I assume Sony has a patent on this design–but Sennheiser needs their own technique to accomplish the same. If you were reading closely, you realized that the Sony has no power buttons the user has to turn on while the Sennheiser has two power buttons. On the bright side, Sennheiser uses standard NiMH AAA batteries and includes a pair with the headphones. The base is also a little nicer styling-wise.

The other major difference is transmission technology. The Sony is infrared, so line-of-sight is required. The advantage is that there’s no chance of cordless phone or other RF interference. The RS-180 is radio. Both transmit a digital stream; the RS-180 claims to transmit lossless 44.1 khz 16 bit audio to the headphones. I am not sure what the Sony is transmitting, though I’d be impressed if it is transmitting such a wide stream of data over IR. The Sony can take an S/PDIF optical input and provide simulated surround sound. I never used this feature and cannot comment on it.

The other contender worth looking at is the Sony MDRDS6500 — it has a modern stand like the Sennheiser and uses RF instead of IR. If it matches the Sennheiser sound quality with some of the conveniences of no power buttons, that would be a clear winner. I am skeptical on the audio quality front, but it is possible.

I will write more on this when I’ve had a chance to live with the RS 180 headphones more.

I’ve recently taken the plunge on LED light bulbs. I never found CFL bulbs that I liked enough to put into living areas of my house, so I have been using GE Reveal incandescent bulbs and GE Reveal halogens throughout most of my house.

However, I’ve recently found Philips AmbientLED bulbs, which have excellent color temperature and brightness. I tried a few of the bulbs and liked them so much that I’ve upgraded all the bulbs in my office to these bulbs. I am using 3 x 5 watt bulbs and 6 x 12.5 watt bulbs in the 9 lamps in my office. These lamps were using about 520 watts of electricity before the upgrade, but now that has been reduced to 90 watts. These bulbs aren’t cheap (total cost for the 9 bulbs was $300 before sales tax!), but the light quality is excellent. Electricity costs me $0.16 per KWH, so I’m looking at around 10-11 months for break-even. This estimate does not include reduced air conditioner costs in the summer, since the AC will not need to remove as much heat from the lights.

Beware not all LED bulbs are created even. I bought some cheaper bulbs for my front porch, since the front porch light isn’t on a sensor and we sometimes forget to turn it off. Those bulbs use far less electricity–about 4 watts instead of 120–but the color temperature is very similar to CFLs.

I am pretty new to these Philips bulbs and don’t have comprehensive experience with them, but I have observed that the metal parts of the housing take far longer to cool off than incandescent bulbs and they get far hotter to the touch, so be careful if when changing bulbs.

All in all, I am very excited about these bulbs and looking forward to reduced prices on them as the LED market matures.

Check out some pictures of the new MacBook Air for 2010 with the previous generation.

In December 2009, I made the switch from a 15″ MacBook Pro to a then-maxed 13″ MacBook Air. In some ways, the Air was a big downgrade–I went from 4 GB down to 2 GB, from 500 GB of storage to 128 GB. However, the MacBook Air’s SSD was wicked fast, and more importantly, the Air weighed 2 lbs less and took up about 50% of the volume in my laptop bag.

2 lbs doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re dragging it through airports 100 times a year, any pounds you can shed are worth some tradeoffs.

Last week, I ordered the new MacBook Air, sight unseen. I am not usually an early adopter, but I’ve been waiting for a new Air since I bought the old Air. I have traveled 100,000 miles with my Air and it has been tremendously better than my MacBook Pro for this purpose.

The new Air has the same CPU and about the same weight (2.9 lbs vs 3.0 lbs). However, the new Air has 4 GB of RAM, a 256 GB flash disk, a 1440×900 screen, more battery life, and a newer Nvidia graphics chipset.

The new laptop has left Shanghai, probably from Foxconn, en route to me. I am looking forward to it!

I do a lot of heavy disk I/O on my desktop Mac in testing code related to storage. For years I’ve wanted to have some fast primary storage on my Mac to speed up my work. In the past, I had used internal SATA drives and software RAID for drive failure protection, but speed isn’t really there. In hindsight, I probably should have ordered my Mac Pro with the built-in RAID card. The card runs around $800, but installing it apparently requires some cable work that I didn’t want to get bogged down in. After reading some of the forums, I wasn’t sure that was such a great choice for me either. I considered SSD for boot and some kind of cheap external RAID for data, but most of the cheap external FW RAIDs are crap (I tried a few of them).

What I ended up with has been fantastic. I have a 8×1 TB physical array with 7200 RPM SATA drives that run around $90/ea on Amazon. These are in a single 8-drive chassis from www.pc-pitstop.com. I had never ordered from these guys before, but the order showed up fast and in good shape. I bought two SAS cables and an internal SAS card–the Areca 1680x. Altogether, this ran me about $2,300 for the drives, chassis, and the SAS card and cables.

With the EFI firmware loaded into the Areca 1680x (found on their FTP site), the SAS card is bootable in my 2008 Mac Pro and I have no internal hard disks. The RAID is configured as a 7 disk RAID-6 with 1 spare drive. Creating the single RAID volume (~5 TB usable) took a while, and I/O performance is very fast.

Management for the Areca card can be handled with a local driver and web browser, or through Ethernet and a web browser, which is what I’m doing. The card provides a separate Ethernet port for management, so there’s no weird software bridging. This is awesome stuff–the PCIe card is essentially managed as an appliance via HTTP from any host.

On the left, Xbench results with a single 2 TB SATA drive.  On the right, the SAS-SATA RAID. (Click to view full-size.)

One thing to keep in mind if you are new to RAID–RAID is not a substitute for backups. A hardware RAID is formatted by the controller card and only that card will be able to read the data. For backing up, I use Time Machine with a Drobo Pro loaded with 12 TB of drives, connected via iSCSI on a dedicated NIC. This works very well; in fact, I installed my data onto this RAID by doing a recover from Time Machine.

If you’re looking for high-performance direct-attached storage for a Mac Pro, it’s tough to top this solution–It’s bootable, it’s relatively cheap, and it’s fast. I’ve been running this for a few months now, and it’s been completely reliable. My only complaint is with the chassis–there is a power button on the front at the bottom, which is an accident waiting to happen. However, this is minor and the price is right.