simont | (no subject)

When I buy something expensive, I always forget to account for the auxiliary purchases that invariably follow it.

As of last week I have a shiny new iMac. Unfortunately, it's currently forced to sit on a small and rather wobbly ornamental coffee table that came with the house, so I need to buy a proper desk for it as a matter of moderate urgency. Also the mouse is already starting to annoy me, so another trackball for my collection seems in order. And I'm going to need another 4-way mains adapter in short order as well. I ought to try harder to anticipate this kind of thing and factor it into the total cost of ownership.

In other news, hmm, well. Over the weekend I looked up the pictures from the Huygens probe landing on Titan. It seemed very exciting; there's a certain thrill to seeing the first real pictures taken on an alien world with a real camera (there was with the Mars rovers too), particularly when it's a world I almost feel I know already thanks to novels like Imperial Earth. But when I actually saw the pictures, they were a terrible disappointment somehow; they just looked like a flat plain with rocks on it, and I'm sure anyone could have knocked up something similar in the Gimp if they'd wanted to. The Mars pictures gave much more of a feel of really being on a different planet; perhaps this is just a function of their higher resolution and better colour depth.

Also I was particularly depressed to find this morning that when I googled for ‘Titan’, the first link I got back was ‘The Titan Corporation: Homeland Security and War on Terrorism’, and Cassini-Huygens was only the fourth hit. Sigh.

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FWIW, the USB version of the Expert Mouse (http://www.kensington.com/html/1175.html) works very nicely with Mac OS X once you've installed MouseWorks (http://www.kensington.com/html/1385.html).

Ooh. I'd half expected that the modern Kensington products would have infinite numbers of additional strange buttons; I'm sure I've heard this from someone, perhaps

senji. A nice simple one just like my existing trackballs looks ideal :-)

On the subject of Kensington MouseWorks, I don't suppose you as an experienced user know how to get it to keep its settings across reboots on Win2K?

I must have done once, since I use it on Win2K and it seems to. But it's been years since I reconfigured it, so I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, I'm afraid. Remind me when I'm at home (somehow - ring me pre-Calling tomorrow or something?) and I'll poke around a bit.

FWIW it worked well for me to configure this one (http://www.kensington.com/html/2200.html) as,

Option  "Device"        "/dev/input/mice"
Option  "Protocol"      "Auto"
Option  "Buttons"       "6"
Option  "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5"

The panoramic descent pictures on Titan are more exciting and less anti-climatic IMHO.

I share your peripheral pain though. The amount of hoops I've had to jump through to get my old trusty IBM Model M keyboard working with OS X is just stupid. You should /not/ need to hack the HID driver just to get around lacking a Windows key!

"Also I was particularly depressed to find this morning that when I googled for ‘Titan’, the first link I got back was ‘The Titan Corporation: Homeland Security and War on Terrorism’, and Cassini-Huygens was only the fourth hit."

T'were ever thus. :(

Aha! I see that last year's gadgets embargo is well and truly ended then.