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Just bought a Razer Orochi

Oh man, went to the store and ended up dropping way too much on a mouse. Well worth it, but $80 was not my intention that day.

I recently got a new MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and I needed a good notebook mouse. I had a 5 year old bluetooth Kensington mouse, but it was not responding very smoothly. It would kill my batteries and didn’t work well enough. So I almost bought a Logitech mouse but waked by this thing.

I didn’t even realize Razer made a notebook mouse. It’s bluetooth, and even though originally wanted to avoid bluetooth (due to battery life and having had bad luck with another bluetooth mouse) but this one had an interesting feature. I could optionally use it as a corded mouse.

Sweet right? I love the Razer brand but their old Pro|Click mouse for the mac just is not well supported anymore. Annoying, but whatever. I didn’t want to drag a desktop mouse with a long cord around with my laptop anyway.

So far it’s going good. I love having back the programmable buttons. One trick I found was in using Macros to assign keyboard buttons, I could avoid the conflict with the OS when in games. Expose would override any in-game buttons, and being so customizable, I no longer need to wait for Valve or Apple to fix the problem.

Oh, and even though it’s nowhere on the outside of the box, it does work as a corded mouse with no batteries. I’ve yet to see how long the mouse works in wireless mode though since I just purchased it.

Razer Lazer Mouse for Mac

(Say that title 5 times fast.)

I am very picky about the hardware I use. I’m on the computer a lot of the day developing websites, and I won’t settle for a keyboard / mouse setup that is not comfortable and responsive.

(95% of the reason I switched to Mac was due to the keyboard on the late Powerbooks and original Macbook Pros)

I tried the Copperhead by Razer for my PC, and loved it so much that I ended up getting the mouse Razer markets towards the Mac. Meet the Pro|Click

The software for the mouse is nice. The best thing about the Razer mouses is the ability to change the sensitivity on-the-fly. You set up a button on the mouse and when you hould it and scroll your mouse becomes more or less sensitive.

Perfect for switching between graphic editiong, coding or general web browsing.

Laptop for the Mom on the go

Mothers Day is coming up here, could she use a new computer?

Netbooks (net not note) are smaller notebooks. The screens are usually 10 inch or less. The don’t pack the punch that a larger laptop does. So this won’t replace the computer that handles all the family videos.

However, they also are very mobile and can be found for as little as around $350. They are great when traveling, perfect for email and light office use, and could be perfect for poking around the internet on the couch.

Here’s a link to an example. It’s at TigerDirect. Like many places they offer a lot of Netbooks, so look around.

Lenovo IdeaPad S10-1211Ubl Netbook PC – Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 10.2″ WSVGA, Windows XP Home, Blue

The only thing I’d reccommend would be to find one with a VGA port, so if you want to you can hook it up to a larger screen when at home.

Gaming tower under 600 dollars

This will be the first of many posts. Computers cost less these days, and you don’t need to spend a couple grand to get a good gaming computer.

XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Barebone Kit – Intel Pentium D 965 Extreme 3.73GHz, 4GB DDR2-800 OCZ SLI, 1TB, Clear Side Case, 550W PSU

I’d recommend one this card. Nothing special, an average card that will drive the games out there well.

That totals to about $540.

This system is a one of many barebone systems at Tiger Direct. This is the tower, so make sure you have a keyboard, mouse and monitor.

It also comes with a blank hard drive, so you need to make sure you have a copy of windows. I haven’t seen a game yet that requires more than Windows XP.

Also, you need to buy a graphic card. It supports PCI Express graphic cards, and supports SLI, so I’d stick with Nvidia cards.

What does all that mean?

SLI means that the motherboard is able to support up two graphics cards. So you can get a couple of low cost or high cost cards and double up your power.

Note though, the power supply is only 550 watts, so if you get a couple of cards, a nice future upgrade might be to get a new power supply. If you get a couple high cost cards for this, you would almost need to upgrade the power supply.

Facebook push notifications on iPhone

So, I just updated the facebook app on my iPhone, and was pleased to find that they added Push notifications!

So far, I notice that when someone send a direct message to me I get an alert telling me there is a message waiting for me in my Facebook inbox.

I wish though that the alert told me a bit more. Maybe the subject.

Also, I wish I could go directly to the message from the alert instead of the only option being to close the window.

It’s nice either way.

Random mac restart?

So I had just sat down at my computer and for the first time ever I was asked to restart my mac due to a crash!

It was bound to happen someday, I’m suprised it took 3 years to see my first OS crash on a mac though.

CNET: 8 Underrated video game characters

A nice little article showed up on CNET News.

Photos: The 8 most underrated videogame characters ever

Made me remember the good old days of 8 bit and before. Though, the images here are not very 8 bit they do a good job of covering a bit of everything, from a game on Atari to a few newer games. Best one, Hammer Bro.

DoubleCommand to customize the keyboard in Mac

When I switched from PC to Mac, the single hardest thing I had adjusting to was the new keyboard shortcuts. At the top of the list was the Home/End keys, they never worked quite right.

I quickly adjusted to using Command-Left or Command-Right, and it even became natural, and since I was on a 15 inch Powerbook, it seemed even better anyway since I didn’t have a dedicated cluster of keys with the Home/End.

If your on a full sized keyboard and just don’t like how the keys are setup, there’s an easy solution. DoubleCommand.

This freeware will add a Preference Pane to the System Preferences and will allow you to easily set some keyboard bindings.

The preference pane of DoubleCommand

The preference pane of DoubleCommand

Though I don’t think you can create your own keyboard bindings, it does offer the ability to quickly ‘fix’ the Home/End keys.

WordPress for the iPhone app review

This one will be short, I’m writing it from the wordpress iPhone app. It’s nice, but I don’t know it could be used long term for quality blogs.

There’s no way to post audio/video. Picture support is nice though, it even optionaly resizes the image to be smaller and upload faster.

All-in-all though, the app offers a nice intuitive interface and makes light blog management on the road easy.