Technology Tales

Mouse configuration in macOS

Now having a new location from which I can work, I acquired an all-in-one desktop computer for use while there. While tempted by an HP option that runs Windows, I ended up choosing an iMac instead. That gained me extra disk space and more memory at a cost. Having UNIX-style command line capability was another attraction. After living with the Windows terminal for a while, its limitations were all too apparent to me.

While I started off desktop computing on a Macintosh Classic and having owned a MacBook Pro in the more recent past, there still was a learning curve. One of these related to the configuration of the mouse supplied with the system. Whatever about only having one button and needing to learn gestures, it was the speed at which the pointer goes that really got me reaching for my more usual Evoluent. Even so, the subsequent discovery of LinearMouse makes things much more bearable once all the requisite permissions were assigned.

Getting the Evoluent configured to my liking needed another third-party application: USB Overdrive. If Evoluent's own software fitted the bill, that would have done. However, they have done some finger pointing at Apple instead of updating it to work with the latest Mac technology. There may be truth in the accusations, but it is striking that another piece of software works when theirs does not. Nevertheless, the other option worked once it got the permissions to detect the hardware. Then, it was a matter of working out which button was which on the mouse, so I could have them assigned as I wished.

After that, I could settle into the new system and get used to its idiosyncrasies. Adding Parallels got me a Windows 11 virtual machine for business compatibility, while I got going with setting up some automation using the macOS terminal. All is becoming more settled than working out of a laptop.

Needing third-party software does have a catch, though: underlying changes to macOS could scupper things. It was the sort of thing that made me move away from GNOME Shell as my Linux desktop. The extensions on which I was depending kept getting obsoleted by every new release. It is something to watch, even if macOS evolves less dramatic than GNOME 3 in its various forms.

A little more freedom

A few weeks ago, I decided to address the fact that my Toshiba laptop have next to useless battery life. The arrival of an issue of PC Pro that included a review of lower cost laptops was another spur for looking on the web to see what was in stock at nearby chain stores. In the end, I plumped for an HP Pavilion dm4 from a branch of Argos. In fact, they seem to have a wider range of laptops than PC World!

The Pavilion dm4 seems to come in two editions and I opted for the heavier of these, though it still is lighter than my Toshiba Equium as I found on a recent trip away from home. Its battery life is a revelation for someone who never has got anything better than three hours from a netbook. Having more than five hours certainly makes it suitable for those longer train journeys away from home, and I have seen remaining battery life being quoted as exceeding seven hours from time to time, though I wouldn't depend on that.

Of course, having longer battery life would be pointless if the machine didn't do what else was asked of it. It comes with the 64-bit of Windows 7 and this taught me that this edition of the operating system also runs 32-bit software, a reassuring discovering. There's a trial version of Office 2010 on there too and, having a licence key for the Home and Student edition, I fully activated it. Otherwise, I added a few extras to make myself at home, such as Dropbox and VirtuaWin (for virtual desktops as I would in Linux). While I was playing with the idea of adding Ubuntu using Wubi, I am not planning to set up dual booting of Windows and Linux like I have on the Toshiba. Little developments like this can wait.

Regarding the hardware, the CPU is an Intel Core i3 affair and there's 4 MB of memory on board. The 14" screen makes for a more compact machine without making it too diminutive. The keyboard is of the scrabble-key variety and works well too, as does the trackpad. There's a fingerprint scanner for logging in and out without using a password, but I haven't got to check how this works so far. It all zips along without any delays, and that's all that anyone can ask of a computer.

There is one eccentricity in my eyes though: it appears that the functions need to be used in combination with the Fn key for them to work like they would on a desktop machine. That makes functions like changing the brightness of the screen, adjusting the sound of the speakers and turning the Wi-Fi on and off more accessible. My Asus Eee PC netbook and the Toshiba Equium both have things the other way around, so I found this set of affairs unusual, but it's just a point to remember rather than being a nuisance.

Though HP may have had its wobbles regarding its future in the PC making business, the Pavilion feels well put together and very solidly built. The premium paid over the others on my shortlist seems to have been worth it. If HP does go down the premium laptop route as has been reported recently, this is the kind of quality that they would need to deliver to just higher prices. Saying that, is this the time to do such a thing with other devices challenging the PC's place in consumer computing? It would be a shame to lose the likes of the Pavilion dm4 from the market to an act of folly.

Battery life

In recent times, I have lugged my Toshiba Equium with me while working away from home; I needed a full screen laptop of my own for attending to various things after work hours, so it needs to come with me. It's not the most portable of things with its weight and the lack of battery life. Now that I think of it, I reckon that it's more of a desktop PC replacement machine than a mobile workhorse. After all, it only lasts an hour on its own battery away from a power socket. Virgin Trains' tightness with such things on their Pendolino trains is another matter...

Unless my BlackBerry is discounted, battery life seems to be something with which I haven't had much luck because my Asus Eee PC isn't too brilliant either. Without decent power management, two hours of battery life appears to be as good as I get from it. However, three to four hours become possible with better power management software on board. That makes the netbook even more usable, though there are others out there offering longer battery life. Still, I am not tempted by these because the gadget works well enough for me that I don't need to wonder about how money I am spending on building a mobile computing collection.

While I am not keen on spending too much cash or having a collection of computers, the battery life situation with my Toshiba more than gives me pause for thought. The figures quoted for MacBooks had me looking at them, even if they aren't at all cheap. Curiosity about the world of the Mac may make them attractive to me, only for the prices to forestall that, and the concept was left on the shelf.

Recently, PC Pro ran a remarkably well-timed review of laptops offering long battery life (in issue 205). The minimum lifetime in this collection was over five hours, so the list of reviewed devices is an interesting one for me. In fact, it even may become a shortlist should I decide to spend money on buying a more portable laptop than the Toshiba that I already have. The seventeen-hour battery life for a Sony VAIO SB series sounds intriguing, even if you need to buy an accessory to gain this. That it does over seven hours without the extra battery slice makes it more than attractive anyway. The review was food for thought and should come in handy if I decide that money needs spending.

A bigger screen?

A recent bit of thinking has caused me to cast my mind back over all the screens that have sat in front of me while working with computers over the years. Well, things have come a long way from the spare television that I used with a Commodore 64 that I occasionally got to explore the thing. Needless to say, a variety of dedicated CRT screens ensued as I started to make use of Apple and IBM compatible PC's provided in computing labs and other such places before I bought an example of the latter as my first ever PC of my own. That sported a 15" display that stood out a little in times when 14" ones were mainstream, but a 17" Iiyama followed it when its operational quality deteriorated. That Iiyama came south with me from Edinburgh as I moved to where the work was and offered sterling service before it too started to succumb to ageing.

During the time that the Iiyama CRT screen was my mainstay at home, there were changes afoot in the world of computer displays. A weighty 21" Philips screen was what greeted me on my first day at work, only for 21" Eizo LCD monitors were set to replace those behemoths and remain in use as if to prove the longevity of LCD panels and the validity of using what had been sufficient for laptops for a decade or so. In fact, the same remark regarding reliability applies to the screen that now is what I use at home, a 17" Iiyama LCD panel (yes, I stuck with the same brand when I changed technologies longer ago than I like to remember).

However, that hasn't stopped me wondering about my display needs, and it's screen size that is making me think rather than the reliability of the current panel. While that is a reflection on how my home computing needs have changed over time, they also show how my non-computing interests have evolved too. Photography is but one of these and the move to digital capture has brought with a greater deal of image processing, so much that I wonder if I need to make less photos rather than bringing home so many that it can be challenging to pick out the ones that are deserving of a wider viewing. Though that is but one area where a bigger screen would help, there is another that arises from my interest in exploring some countryside on foot or on my bike: digital mapping. When planning outings, it would be nice to have a wider field of view to be able to see more at a larger scale.

None of the above is a showstopper that would be the case if the screen itself was unreliable, so I am going to take my time on this one. The prospect of sharing desktops across two screens is another idea, one that needs some thought about where it all would fit; the room that I have set aside for working at my computer isn't the largest. After the space side of things, then there's the matter of setting up the hardware. Quite how a dual display is going to work with a KVM setup is something to explore, as is the adding of extra video cards to existing machines. After the hardware fiddling, the software side of things is not a concern that I have because of when I used a laptop as my main machine for a while last year. That confirmed that Windows (Vista, but it has been possible since 2000 anyway...) and Ubuntu (other modern Linux distributions should work too...) can cope with desktop sharing out of the box.

Apart from the nice thoughts of having more desktop space, the other tempting side to all of this is what you can get for not much outlay. It isn't impossible to get a 22" display for less than £200 and the prices for 24" ones are tempting too. That's a far cry from paying next to £300 (if my memory serves me correctly) for that 17" Iiyama, and I'd hope that the quality is as good as ever.

It's all very well talking about pricing, but you need to sit down and choose a make and model when you get to deciding on a purchase. There is plenty of choice so that would take a while with magazine reviews coming in handy here. Saying that, last year's computing misadventures have me questioning the sense of going for what a magazine places on its A-list. They also have me thinking of going to a nearby computer shop to make a purchase rather than choosing a supplier on the web; it is easier to take back a faulty unit if you don't have far to go. Speaking of faulty units, last year has left me contemplating waiting until the year is older before making any acquisitions of computer kit. All of that has put the idea of buying a new screen on the low priority list, nice to have but not essential. For now, that is where it stays, but you never know what the attractions of a shiny new thing can do...

Best left until later in the year?

In the middle of last year, my home computing experience was one of feeling displaced. A combination of a stupid accident and a power outage had rendered my main PC unusable. What followed was an enforced upgrade that used a combination that was familiar to me: Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and Crucial memory. However, assembling that lot and attaching components from the old system from the old system resulted in the sound of whirring fans but nothing appearing on-screen. Not having useful beeps to guide me meant that it was a case of undertaking educated guesswork until the motherboard was found to be at fault.

In a situation like this, a better developed knowledge of electronics would have been handy and might have saved me money too. As for the motherboard, it is hard to say whether it was a faulty set from the outset or whether there was a mishap along the way, either due to ineptitude with static or incompatibility with a power supply. What really tells the tale on the mainboard was the fact that all the other components are working well in other circumstances, even that old power supply.

A few years back, I had another experience with a problematic motherboard, an Asus this time, that ate CPU's and damaged a hard drive before I stabilised things. That was another upgrade attempted in the first half of the year. My first round of PC building was in the third quarter of 1998 and that went smoothly once I realised that a new case was needed. Similarly, another PC rebuild around the same time of year in 2005 was equally painless. Based on these experiences, I should not be blamed for waiting until later in the year before doing another rebuild, preferably a planned one rather than an emergency.

Of course, there may be another factor involved too. The hint was a non-working Sony DVD writer that was acquired early last year when it really was obvious that we were in the middle of a downturn. Could older unsold inventory be a contributor? Well, it fits in with seeing poor results twice, In addition, it would certainly tally with a problematical PC rebuild in 2002 following the end of the Dot-com bubble and after the deadly Al-Qaeda attack on New York's World Trade Centre. An IBM hard drive that was acquired may not have been the best example of the bunch, and the same comment could apply to the Asus motherboard. Though the resulting construction may have been limping, it was working tolerably.

In contrast, last year's episode had me launched into using a Toshiba laptop and a spare older PC for my needs, with an external hard drive enclosure used to extract my data onto other external hard drives to keep me going. While it felt like a precarious arrangement, it was a useful experience in ways too.

There was cause for making acquaintance with nearby PC component stores that I hadn't visited before, and I got to learn about things that otherwise wouldn't have come my way. Using an external hard drive enclosure for accessing data on hard drives from a non-functioning PC is one of these. Discovering that it is possible to boot from external optical and hard disk drives came as a surprise too and will work so long as there is motherboard support for it.

Another experience came from a crisis of confidence that had me acquiring a bare-bones system from Novatech and populating it with optical and hard disk drives. Then, I discovered that I have no need for power supplies rated more than 300 watts (around 200 W suffices). Turning my PC off more often became a habit, friendly both to the planet and to household running costs too.

Then, there's the beneficial practice of shopping locally, which can suffice. You may not get what PC magazines stick on their hot lists, but shopping online for those pieces doesn't guarantee success either. All of these were useful lessons and, while I'd rather not throw away good money after bad, it goes to show that even unsuccessful acquisitions had something to offer in the form of learning opportunities. Whether you consider that is worthwhile is up to you.

From laptop limbo to a new desktop: A weekend restoration of computing order

This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC, with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare-bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual-core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.

Once I had set all the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life, with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to do its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz, so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.

In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build, and they weren't wrong. While the delivery arrived at 09:30, I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent when I noticed the speed increase on putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots, but that's not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that warded me off for a little while longer. For now, I'll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain, over which I may even mull in another post...

A case of the reverse Midas touch?

Last week, a power outage put my main home PC out of action. While it may have been recoverable if that silly accident of a few weeks back hadn't happened, a troubled rebuild is progressing. Despite the challenges, I somehow manage to remain hopeful that an avenue of exploration will yield some fruit. Even so, thoughts of throwing in the towel and calling in professionals rather than throwing good money after bad are gathering. The saga is causing me to question the sense of self building in place of buying something ready built. Saying that, they can have their off days too.

Meanwhile, I have been displaced onto the spare desktop PC and the laptop. In other words, my home computing needs are being fulfilled to a point, though the feeling of frustrated displacement and partial disconnection from my data remains; because I have been able to extricate most of my digital photos and my web building, things are far from being hopeless. With every disappointment, there remains an opportunity or two. Since the spare desktop runs Debian, I have been spending some time seeing if I can bend that to my will, which can be done, sometimes after a fashion.

A few posts should result from this period, not least regarding working with Debian. On the subject of hardware, I will not elaborate until the matter comes to a more permanent resolution. From past attempts (all were successful in the end), I know that the business of PC building can feel like a dark art: you are left there wondering why none of your efforts summon a working system to life work until it all comes together in the blink of an eye leaving you to wonder why all the effort was expended. The best analogy that I can offer is awaiting a bus or train; it often seems that the waiting takes longer than the journey. Restoring my home computing to what it was before is a mere triviality compared to what some people have to suffer, but resolution of a problem always puts a spring in my step.