Getting a better keyboard for my HTPC for free

The keyboard and built in keypad that comes with the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo EV 2535 is less than optimal. It misses characters and it's difficult to navigate the mouse pointer precisely. (You kinda think this would be a standard feature on a wireless keyboard.) After having read Johannes's recommendations (post in Swedish) I wanted to buy a better keyboard+mouse combination.

But why? I have several alternative input devices laying around already (iPod touch and two laptops). Why not remote control the computer with those instead?

Reading up on different solutions VNC seems the way to go. It's open and cross-platform and you can get clients for OS X, Windows, and even iPod touch. But the server doesn't seem to work on Vista. Then I found TouchPad Pro, which seems like an excellent application for the touch and their installation instructions did mention Vista.

So I installed it. And it did work.

All that remained was to get a good VNC client for the Macbook and here Jolly's Fast VNC fit the bill. Now I can remote control my HTPC from my laptop and I don't have to rely on the finicky keyboard that came with the HTPC. Instead I use the excellent MacBook keyboard and trackpad. I think I need to configure the keyboard layout since accented characters are not where you expect them.

To sum it up: don't believe everything you read on the web. You can use TightVNC in Vista.

Next step will probably be to get the TouchPad pro application once it hits the AppStore (I haven't bothered to jailbreak my 2.0 iPod Touch) and use the iPod as a remote.

Twitter is addictive

As it turns out Twitter is quite nice. It also removes the need/urge to post to this blog. Do follow me on twitter for more frequent updates on what's going on.

Oh, my FriendFeed might be of even more interest since it in addition to tweets also will include other activities. On my part it will probably mostly be shared Google Reader items and Flickr activity.

This blog will not be updated nearly as often.

Testing Twitter

As you can see on the right, I've added a twitter box. I've been reading a lot about the service during the past year or so in the blogosphere, but haven't tried it out myself. But when I read the post "Twitter is like sex" I decided to give it a go.

Many say twitter is the new facebook (which I tried, but didn't use for long), but I'm not convinced. We'll see.

Replacement of Guitar Hero III disks in Europe

Activision, you've got to be kidding me. The process for getting a replacement disk for Guitar Hero III is atrociously bad. The Aussies got a different deal, and in the US you got a pre-paid envelope. Here in Europe?

• You register your shipping address on a web page
• Wait for an email (with a sender you can't reply to)
  
• Go to another web page as stated in just received email
  
• Print out a label to put on an envelope (you have a printer, don't you?)
  
• Get a bubble envelope and put your disc in (because you probably have nothing better to do than go shopping for an envelope)
  
• Send it off to Activision
  
• Wait (unclear for how long) with no possibility to play Guitar Hero in the meantime
• Get a replacement disk shipped to you

You would think Activision would have improved the replacement process after having tried it in both US and Australia, but this one seems like the worst yet.

All companies make mistakes, but good companies handle them in a good way and turn the customer support experience into something positive.

This is not a positive experience.

Update: Activision's complete response to my request for an improved process:

Hi,

Unfortunately there is no alternative if you would like the remastered disc.

Got MacBook?

As I mentioned a while back I was getting a MacBook. I've had it for a while now, and I'm loving it. There's still bugs in OS X of course (exhibit A and B), but it feels much more solid and polished than XP and Vista. And even though the MacBook is the entry laptop made of plastic the build still feels solid. I got the middle version and upgraded to a 250G HD, which made it identical to the black MacBook but 800 SEK ($140) cheaper.

After a couple of days I had most of the system in place. This is most of the software I've installed that I felt lacking from the beginning:

• Transmission, a bittorrent client
  
• Mactex, a LaTeX distribution
• Aquamacs, an editor (I also tried Carbon Emacs, but Aquamacs felt better integrated)
  
• NeoOffice, an office suite (the OpenOffice OS X version is really terrible, don't bother trying it)
• iSquint, a video converter to convert video to mp4
• Firefox 3 beta 5, a web browser. Safari is actually quite nice and speedy too, but lacks the plugin support that Firefox has. I'm currently mostly addicted to Piclens (not yet available for Safari 3.1) and Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers.
• SqueezeCenter, a music server for my SqueezeBox. Also added the lazy search plugin which is truly excellent.
• Skype, a chat program
• VLC, a media player
  

After having transfered all my music and images to the MacBook that was pretty much it. I've been using iPhoto quite a lot of the software that came with the computer. I tested the Aperture trial download, but decided it was not for me. I don't want to mess around that much with my images.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Cmd and F5 to Spaces and added two finger tap for right-click, but left most other settings unchanged. Oh, I put the touchpad acceleration at max as well.

The two finger scroll (in both directions) is beautiful and I find myself doing that on my work PC laptop as well. What I'm still getting to grips with is the different keyboard shortcuts. Using e.g. cmd+Backspace for delete, Fn+right arrow for page down and Fn+down arrow for end of page takes some getting used to. Finding the backslash (Alt+Shift+7) and other not so common characters we're also tricky and not the same as on a PC. But I'm getting there.

All in all I'm very pleased with the MacBook and OS X. Highly recommended.

Getting mininova RSS feeds and uTorrent to play nice

uTorrent has an excellent built in RSS feed parser, but it does not work properly with mininova's RSS feeds (which only supplies URL:s to the torrent's web pages and not the torrents themselves) without some sort of kludge. RSSatellite has been quite popular, but then you either need to find someone who has set it up for sharing or install a local web server.

Enter direct option. You simply pass it on to a mininova RSS URL, just as any other URL option by tacking on "&direct" (without quotes) after the original URL. It is described on mininova's blog, but that post doesn't show up when searching on Google for solutions to this problem. I'm doubting this will either, but at least I have a placeholder for future reference for myself.

Nice

Facade, originally uploaded by morberg.

Went to Nice this past weekend and it was really nice. Check out flickr for more images I took in Nice.