Since I’m such a lonely single bastard, my xmas shopping this year consisted mostly of buying junk for myself. Some things I have bought in the last month:

• Seagate external 500GB drive. I was long overdue for an increase in external storage, but have had a few issues while moving stuff about (see previous post). In theory I will have this set up to store documents in an encrypted disk image and media etc on the main drive, but right now I’m suspecting that FAT32 was not a smart decision for the underlying format. I’ll probably reformat as HFS+ just to maximize Mac compatibility.*
• Cheapie PC drawing tablet. The old Wacom is just too big and weirdly shaped, I wanted something smaller and flatter so I bought a cheapie one (branded DSE), which uses a battery in the stylus, has no "eraser" button but apart from that works fine. Also I figure it’s good to try Jujusketch with a few different devices. So I’m bound to draw a picture on that any time now.
• Apple USB Keyboard, ie the new flat aluminium one that goes with the iMac. Quite nice and seems superior in build quality to my previous Apple keyboard. If I could find a dead simple PC keyboard which didn’t rearrange the insert and printscreen keys for no good reason I would consider that instead, but unfortunately such things don’t seem to exist, thanks largely to Microsoft and Logitech leading the charge to see who can create the most retarded looking giant oval of plastic with the most superfluous media and function buttons.
• Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse. Jesus, is it really called that? How could a company so concerned with being uber-stylish come up with this name…? Anyhow, it’s extremely good tracking-wise (unlike a lot of other mice I’ve used), and doesn’t have a blinding red light coming out the bottom, which is a nice change for an optical mouse. It’s a bit on the heavy side (uses 2 AA batteries, which is rare for small devices these days; they often have just 1 or 2 AAA cells) The buttonlessness of the thing also takes a little getting used to; When you first start using it, it defaults to single button mode (no right click - fucking DUH, Apple; right-click is useful and you know it!) but if you go to mouse preferences you can enable right-click. Only problem then is that the click determination seems to use some sort of touch sensitivity (rather than piezo/force sensors), so, if your index finger is resting even lightly on the left side, when you click on the right (no matter how decisively) it will register as a left click. This means that when I right click I actually have to lift my index finger from the mouse, which seems kind of stupid. The tiny scroll ball is quite nice with a grippy texture and gives the feeling of reasonably precise control. Oh yeah, the squeeze buttons seem like a horrible afterthought, extremely unergonomic; if I actually had to use them much I would expect an awful handcramp.
• Cheapie RCA mini stereo to plug my iPod into. I was using some Logitech R-20 speakers, but they’re not very good, with far too much subwoofer action and hardly any midrange. Also this means I now have a radio! Of course, the only station I can bear to listen to is Radio New Zealand National, because it’s the only one that doesn’t have commercial DJ assholes yelling at me every 20 seconds with their stupid station promos. How can anyone listen to commercial radio anymore? These stations must survive solely on the telephone hold and automotive repair markets…

*UPDATE: I just spent more than 7 hours moving everything off this drive, reformatting it, then copying everything back again. Then, just as I was copying just a few extra bits and pieces onto it I accidentally kicked a cable and brought the thing crashing to the floor, killing it dead in an instant. So there goes the rest of the data on that drive. What’s especially fabulous about this is that just seconds earlier I deleted the temp copy I had made on a network drive at work, since obviously I don’t want to leave all my files lying around, and it was time for me to pack up and go home. Why the hell am I laughing right now? Granted, I have lost no crucial files, no source code, but I have lost about a day of my time as well as a hard drive and 200GB of media and software backup files, disk images etc. Oh poo.

To top it all off I suspect that dropping it on the floor as well as having already could make it rather difficult getting the thing replaced under warranty.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.