So I took a chance and bought Buffalo Tech’s Ethernet Converter (despite their site’s lack of a defined background color). I’m not sure why they don’t call it a bridge, since that’s what it is, but hey, I’m not a marketing guy (at least not until the lobotomy). It worked perfectly, so I picked up another.

Of course, you’d think with the amazing speed of Pre-Draft Wireless N, I’d be living the high life. Not quite. Though I picked up D-Link’s Wireless N Notebook Adapter, it doesn’t work very reliably: my connection would drop constantly, and when my laptop would go into suspend mode, the card would never reconnect.

Anyhow, I’m pleased: so far, the router has been rock solid (though it does take a little time for it to reboot if it does have problems), and everything is working as it should.

Technorati Tags: networking, wireless, D-Link, Linksys, BuffaloTech

I am a mouse whore.

There, I’ve admitted my problem. I should be well on the road to recovery soon. I really am a mouse whore, though: I can’t resist buying a new mouse, even if the old one works perfectly fine. Indeed, I’ve never had a Logitech mouse fail on me (wish I could say the same for Microsoft ones). So when Logitech announces a new mouse, my brain starts producing butt-loads of endorphins, forcing me to find out when where and how I can get said mouse.

The Logitech G5 Laser Mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever used. Recently, at least. It hits all the major things a mouse should really do, while adding a variety of extremely cool new features that I’ll probably never use.

First off, the mouse is extremely light. I’ve been using one of Logitech’s cordless mice (the MX900) and find it to be way to heavy for daily use. I shouldn’t have to try and push my mouse around. The G5, in contrast, glides alone as if nearly weightless (part of that, of course, is that the G5 is a corded mouse). In fact, this mouse is so light, Logitech ships it with a set of weights for you to put into a clip that slides into the mouse, making the weight quite adjustable. It’s such a weird feature, but it works perfectly: want a heavier mouse, you adjust it.

Since this is a gaming mouse, another set of adjustments you can make on the fly is the sensitivity of the mouse’s laser sensor: you can dial the sensitivity up or down. Need fine control in an action game? Want the pointer to fly across the screen? You can fine tune the sensitivity, store it, then recall those settings with the press of a button.

The bad news? Well, I’m not fond of the form factor: it uses the same form factor as some of the other Logitech mice (the 500 series, for example). I wish it used the superior MX1000 form factor: it’s much more comfortable for my hand. The thumb button on the G5 is badly placed: when I hold a mouse, my thumb is near to the bottom of the mouse, yet the thumb button is higher up and uncomfortable to reach. I prefer the old placement of the thumb button on mice from a few years back. The scroll wheel is stiff to use: click it for use as a button takes a lot more effort than it should. It’s got the wheel that allows scrolling right and left as well: cool, but I really haven’t found a good use for that yet (though it should be nice in Photoshop).

Even with those shortcomings, though, I totally recommend this mouse. It’s clearly the best mouse that you can buy, currently. At least until the G7 starts shipping.

I’m also whoring for Amazon.com now: Buy a Logitech G5 Laser Mouse at Amazon.com. You know you want it!

Technorati Tags: mouse, Logitech, gaming

Luckily, there are a multitude of resources for doing the change: the Tivo Community has a lot of great information, as well as advice from people who have updated their Tivos. I found a couple of guides and was on the path.

The first order of business was getting some drives. I had mistakenly assumed my Tivo was a dual-drive one, so when a sale popped up on 80 gig drives, I bought a couple, intending to use them for this project. A week afterwards, CompUSA had a sale on 200 gig drives, so I bought one to use as external storage (along with an enclosure). As you’ll see, that was a good plan.

The directions require a lot of swapping of drives in and out of a PC, and I have a few of those around. I grabbed my Linux machine (it’s been languishing in a corner, anyhow, since the Mac Mini tends to do all the things it used to) and prepped it for fun. The basic process is that you make a backup of the Tivo software from the original hard drive to some other hard drive. You then use that backup to create a new drive for the Tivo (you can also just copy the old drive to a new one and skip making a backup file).

Like any card-carrying nerd, I’ve got about a half dozen hard drives around, the remnants of upgrades long since forgotten. My Linux machine had and extra unused Maxtor drive in it, and I had an old Western Digital drive and an ill-fated IBM Deskstar around, as well. I decided to use the Maxtor, since I knew it mostly worked: I remembered that the Deskstar failed in my wife’s PC: I should just throw that thing away.

To perform the backup, you boot up a live Linux CD with the tools you needs. I downloaded and burned a copy, then attempted to get it to boot the PC. It failed. At first, I thought it might be the monitor, so I hooked up another with no luck. Okay, maybe my CD copy was bad: made a new copy with still no joy. I pulled out all the non-essential memory and PCI cards and still nothing. Finally, I popped off the hard drive and discovered it had about 7 broken pins. After removing it (and throwing it away), I was back in business. I tossed the Western Digital drive in and was back in business.

Next up, opening the Tivo. The instructions I found were very good: detailing the screws to remove, the best method for removing the case, the warning to NOT touch the power supply. About 10 minutes later, I had the Tivo open, and discovered I had a one-drive Tivo. In a way, that made me sigh a little in relief: doing a one-drive replacement is much easier. I attached the original Tivo drive, the new Tivo drive (I decided to use one of the 80 gig drives), my backup drive, and the CD-ROM drive. Everything was set. Except that nothing I did would allow the PC to see the new drive. So I removed it and performed the backup from the original to the backup drive with no problem: took about a half-hour or so.

Once I had the backup, I removed the original drive and put it somewhere safe (in case I totally screwed the pooch). I then hooked up the upgrade drive. And, again, it wouldn’t recognize it. Since I had bought two of them, I tried the other 80 gig drive. Argh. Both the drives were bad, whee! So I had to disassemble the 200 gig drive that I had tossed into the enclosure earlier. By now, I was about 4 hours into the project and was feeling a little frustrated. Happily, the 200 gig drive worked with no problem. I restored the backup to that drive, then ran a command that allowed the Tivo software to use the full space on the drive. Net result: swapped a old 30 gig 5400 RPM drive with a 200 gig 7200 RPM drive. Everything went back into the case with no trouble, and about 10 minutes later, the Tivo was working again. I did lose all my recordings (I could have preserved them, but it would have cost me about 4-5 more hours, and most of what I had wasn’t worth keeping), but everything else was working better than before: the UI was a little quicker when having to access the drive, and I haven’t seen any stutters or jitters yet. And the capacity went from about 9 hours on its highest quality to about 40 hours. That’s a lot of crap I can record now.

I’ll be keeping my eye out to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong (I have another Tivo that I can use to shadow the recordings for now), but it was a pretty good upgrade, I think. A newer Tivo would have cost me about $400 (the cost of the Tivo and lifetime service) but the upgrade only cost the price of the drive (about $80) and about 5 hours of my life.

With a working unit, the connection and setup was quite painless (though I knew what to expect this time through). The SlingPlayer is rather nice: it asks what type of device you hooked up (in my case, an old Series 1 Tivo) and it provides a set of controls appropriate to the device.

Video quality is good (considering I’m streaming via a 802.11b wireless bridge: I might try my G bridge if I can get it working reliably). You get options for optimizing the stream (for Low, Medium or High action, as well as even more precise controls for the tweakers). I’m currently using a Medium Action encoding and it seems to be just fine: I can see some compression artifacts, but nothing I didn’t expect.

So far, I’m pleased. Rough start, but good end.

Original post follows:

Well that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

This evening, I ran out and picked up a Slingbox, a media distribution tool. The idea is that you hook the Slingbox up to your cable/satellite box, your Tivo, or even your DVD player, and it can stream the video to any computer with Windows XP installed. So, for example, I could hook it up to my Tivo and watch an episode of Justice League I might have recorded and control the playback from my PC. It basically acts like a pass-through box: the Tivo hooks up to it, then it hooks up to your television. There’s an ethernet port on the back that connects you to your home network and streams the video. By punching a hole or two in your firewall, you can also connect to it remotely and watch shows from any network-connected Windows XP computer.

So, I picked up a Slingbox at CompUSA and connected it to my Tivo. Things were going somewhat fine: the packaging looks cool, but it’s one of those origami-like boxes: getting the thing out took longer than hooking it up. One big plus is that it comes with all the cables you need to get it in place: normally, I end up having to make a trip for cables for half the things I buy, so it was a nice surprise to have it all in the box.

Had some difficulty with the wireless ethernet bridge I had, so I cannibalized one I had elsewhere. Took about 15 minutes to get everything in place. Then I went upstairs to my PC and downloaded and installed the software. Pretty painless: it downloaded new firmware into the Slingbox, configured the video, then voila, it was streaming the video signal. Only one problem: the sound was non-existent. I could get sound by cranking up my speaker volume, but then normal Windows sounds were deafening. The video quality wasn’t too bad, though, considering I was using an 802.11b wireless bridge for it. There was some compression artifacts, but nothing I couldn’t live with. But sound is also sorta important. So back downstairs to take a look.

The Slingbox itself looks like a giant silver candy bar, and the cables all plug into clearly marked places on the back. However, the build quality is a little suspect; downstairs, it wasn’t doing a great pass-through job to the television: jostle the Slingbox and watch the signal appear and disappear. Eventually, there was no way I could get an image on either the TV or the PC. I attempted using the composite connection, rather than S-video, but with no joy. Reluctantly, I repackaged the device.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll exchange it for a different unit and see if I’m just unlucky.

Some other people have had better luck:

• Live Digitally’s Review
• Slingbox 411
• SlingBox, Comes Out Slinging

Now, I’m not the kinda guy who spaces out listening to music, so I won’t be walking down the street jamming. However, I do find that if I listen to music while working I do tend to be more focused (or, really, less distracted). The Shuffle is perfect for that: it doesn’t have a cool screen to futz with, and I’m never really concerned with finding specific songs, so the lack of precise controls doesn’t faze me.

The Shuffle is small, though: thank the Lords of Kobol that the lanyard attaches to it securely. This is one of those items that appears easy to lose or sit on, it’s that small and light. But, despite the size, it sounds really good (and that’s the number one priority for a music player).

Transferring music to the Shuffle can take a while, though: the USB 2.0 transfer speeds can be a little slow (especially over a wireless network), but it is tolerable. Takes about 15-30 minutes to fill it using iTunes’s autofill feature. I wish there was more configuration for autofilling: while you can have it choose higher-rated songs more often, there doesn’t seem to be a way to exclude audio from being chosen without creating playlists. I’ve got a few audiobooks in my library, and it’s a little annoying to hit chapter 7 of I, Robot while listening. I hope the next version of iTunes improves autofill.

Controlling the Shuffle is simple: there’s previous and next buttons, a play-pause button, and the volume control on the front; the back has the on-off, shuffle and linear play toggle. The controls are nicely laid out and easy to press, even when the Shuffle is underneath a sweatshirt.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the Shuffle: I’ve been listening to music I forgot I owned, and I like the form factor as well. You have to give Apple some credit for turning what from the outset looks like a mistake, the lack of a dsiplay, and turning that into a selling point for the device.

I guess I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, slowly but surely…