roguelazer's website

It's been about ten years since I've regularly used that most quintessential of post-1984 computer peripherals, the mouse. The last mouse I had was pretty exclusively used for a gaming PC in college and was a Logitech MX518¹; since then I've used a variety of input devices. It's been a while since I did any brief reviews of technology on this ostensibly-technology blog, so what the hey, let's do it! In brief, we're going to talk about:

• Logitech TrackMan Wheel Optical
• Apple Magic Trackpad and Apple Magic Trackpad 2
• Logitech M570
• Kensington ExpertMouse
• Elecom DEFT PRO
• Elecom DEFT HUGE

My first taste of a wrist-pain-free input device was the Logitech TrackMan Wheel Optical, a long-discontinued thumb trackball made in the mid-00's. According to my Amazon.com order history, I purchased this item on September 2, 2007. If you've never used one before, the idea is that you hold this device much like you would a "normal" ergonomic computer mouse, but instead of moving your whole arm your just move your thumb to control the cursor. The TrackMan Wheel (either in this, its "optical" variant, or the older ball-guided version) was a common first introduction to trackballs in the 00's. The tracking was always smooth², the wheel was refreshingly clicky, and the buttons never failed. This was a great mouse. Unfortunately, it got lost in the move-out from college in 2010, and by that time it was discontinued and they were already going for >$100 on eBay. 😢

I replaced it with the new-at-the-time Logitech M570, which is ostensibly just a Logitech-Unifying-Receiver³-equipped variant of the TrackMan Wheel Optical. A few key notes here:

• Generally, wireless sucks for mice. Even the Logitech Unifying Receiver, which is generally less flaky than Bluetooth, is still flaky and has human-visible latency
• I don't know what happened to the controls on this mouse, but the buttons are not nearly as satisfying as the original and the wheel has always felt gummy
• Forward and back buttons are dumb on a mouse

I used the M570 for a few years because it worked well enough, but it's not a very good input peripheral. I still have it (you can see a picture below, next to a stock shot of a TrackMan Wheel Optical) because there are a couple of games I can only play with it (unless I want to take an unreasonable amount of time to retrain muscle memory, and who wants to do that?)...

In 2012 or so, I had a breakthrough: I purchased a Kensington ExpertMouse. I'd seen these for years⁴ but never gotten around to regularly using one. The ExpertMouse has a single giant ball that you operate with the tips of your fingers and buttons around the edges. At some point, this trackball gained a label proclaiming it to be "joystick" and it became my standard input device; I took it with me to Uber and rolled many miles on that trackball.

Unfortunately, when I left Uber in 2015, the ExpertMouse got nabbed by someone else off my desk and was never seen again. Even worse, some time between 2012 and 2015, Kensington drastically worsened their manufacturing process. I purchased a new ExpertMouse, but the entire thing feels much cheaper. The scroll wheels don't spin cleanly any more, the buttons are sticky, and the ball has to be cleaned twice as much as it used to. There's also a new wireless one that I hear very bad things about. Pre-2013 wired ExpertMouses (ExpertMice?) can sometimes be found on eBay for $150+.

After this, I took a detour and spent some time doing my input with trackpads instead of trackballs. You can see an Apple Magic TrackPad 2 in my new computer post from last year, and I had an Apple Magic TrackPad 1 at work for a while. The Magic TrackPad 2, in particular, is just an absolutely enormous (6¼" x 4½") slab of glass that serves as a multi-touch input for your computer. I still use mine and try to alternate every couple of weeks between a trackpad and a trackball to change up the kinds of stress on my wrists. If you've used a trackpad on any "modern" (unibody) MacBook, you know what a Magic TrackPad feels like. It's great for some things (like horizontal scrolling) and not great for other things (highly precise input; gaming).

But what about trackballs? Isn't that the purpose of this post?

For the last year or so I've been rocking two different Elecom trackballs: an Elecom DEFT PRO at home and an Elecom DEFT HUGE at work. Just today, I went into the office and brought my HUGE home, so I've got them side-by-side on my desk⁵:

Conceptually, they're very similar trackballs: a single large ball that you operate with your pointer and middle fingers, then a scroll wheel and buttons that you operate with your thumb and ring fingers. The HUGE is, well, HUGEr, with a ~25% bigger ball, a couple more buttons, and a built-in wrist-rest. The models I have are a wired-only HUGE (M-HT1UR) and a wired-or-wireless PRO (M-DPT1MR). I initially used the PRO wireless over Bluetooth to my desktop, but after one too many dropouts, I switched it to running wired over the micro USB cable. Unlike the Apple Magic TrackPad, when you plug in the Elecom, it does actually behave as a standard wired mouse instead of just charging.

I only have two complaints about the Elecom trackballs:

• It's very hard to hold the wheel down. This is not a common operation unless you play a video game that uses holding the wheel down as an important action...
• When wired, do not use standard USB HID classes so cannot be used on macOS for anything besides tracking and LMB/RMB without third-party drivers. SteerMouse seems to be the only option that supports all of HUGE's buttons on Catalina⁶. It will be a sad day if they ever drop support. Notably, BetterTouchTool, which I use for other input customization, does not support any of the extra buttons on the HUGE.

Anyhow, that's my brief run through input devices. If all of my mouse-like devices were destroyed in a mysterious laser strike, I would go out and buy another Elecom DEFT HUGE. For now. As I've found the hard way with both Logitech and Kensington, everything seems to get worse with time. Maybe I should just buy a few extra Elecom devices now now and put them away in an airtight box somewhere? No, that's probably crazy. I'm not Jon Siracusa...

For those of you who've made it this far, here's what my desk looks like today:

Stay safe out there, readers.

As every company I've ever bought a product from has been reminding me all morning, today is my birthday. 32 revolutions around the sun. Still ticking.

Obviously it's been a pretty busy year; most of that is in my post from last month. According to the accelerometer on my wrist, I've walked 2,904,398 steps in the last year¹ but I'm mostly still in the same place as I was. Probably by the time I hit 33 revolutions around the sun, it'll be a very different story. Still got that baby on the way (another ~6 weeks to go), and my company just announced that we're going permanently remote so I guess that'll be a big life change.

Maybe I'll actually post more this coming year? Who knows!

For the past few years, I've been using a one-port 2016 MacBook¹ as my personal laptop that I carry with me whenever I am traveling or need to work outside the house. It's been a mixed bag -- the size was pretty much perfect and very similar to a thin version of my old 12" PowerBook G4, but the CPU performance was absolutely awful and the battery only lasted about two hours. Also, I was finally bitten by the infamous Butterfly Keyboard Issue and was getting double-entries from my spacebar.

In March, when Apple released the new MacBook Air with a new keyboard and one of the first 10nm Intel CPUs² on the market, I decided it was time to upgrade, so I bought the middle stock configuration of the new machine³.

Basic specifications:

	Component
CPU	Intel Core i5-1030NG7 (1.1GHz base, 3.5GHz turbo, 10nm process, Ice Lake μarch)
RAM	8GB4 LPDDR4-3733
Storage	500GB Apple AP0512N SSD
Display	13.3" 10-bit Retina display @ 2560x1600 (221dpi)

I haven't had it for long, but here are some initial reactions:

• size isn't as nice as the 12" (37% heavier, and about 20% more volume)
• new keyboard is more reliable and has a pretty good feel. backlighting is also much stronger.
• battery life is way better. 5-6 hours of moderate use, and several days of standby
• screen is a bit brighter and looks less goofy with night shift on. still not nearly as good as my 2019 iMac.
• CPU performance is nominally a lot better⁵ and feels less like the limiting factor in day-to-day operations. It still chugs a lot when trying to do medium-intensive things like processing 24MP RAW images from my Ricoh, but at least it finishes eventually now instead of beachballing until I die of old age.
• integrated GPU is massively observably more powerful than on the 12" (GeekBench says the "compute" score is only 50% higher, but it feels much smoother when doing basic rendering operations like Exposé)
• the enormous trackpad is really fun. My work MacBook Pro has the same trackpad, but I basically never use it undocked, so this machine is my first time intensively using the giant trackpad on modern 13"-class Macs. I'm pro.

There's a reason that the MacBook Air is Apple's best-selling Mac. If you need a portable Mac, it's probably what you should get. No TouchBar, acceptable price, and now a functional keyboard. Officially endorsed.

PS: I wrote this entire post on the new machine and didn't get any inadvertent double keystrokes at all. Hurray!

Small update: I rewrote the CSS for this website to replace all of the Bootstrap Grid system stuff with straight up Flexbox. It's so much better! We should all use Flexbox for everything!

The "gallery" view (used in, e.g., the end of yesterday's "Life Updates" post) is also now Flexbox and better.

I tested this on a bunch of browsers and screen sizes, but please let me know if you find anything that looks broken.

I also got bored and made the tags page a tag cloud on wide-enough screens because it's like the 90's again.

There are trees growing out out of the sand at the park near my house, closed for the last few months due to COVID-19. What a weird world.

Hey, so, it's been a while since I posted. I guess I just wanted to post and update. Let's see... what has happened since February 2020....

Family

Yeah, so, we're having a baby. If you didn't see that on other social media already. He's¹ due at the end of July².

Lockdown

As you and everyone else knows, the world has been in lockdown since March due to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. My company sent us all on mandatory work-from-home on March 12th and I haven't been across the bridge into San Francisco since. Working from home is... tough. We have a house (unlike many of my workers who have apartments or even just single bedrooms), but it's still hard to get enough space that you can clearly delineate "work time" from "home time". Some parts are nice; I like being able to eat lunch in my backyard with Eva, and I like the fact that I haven't had a cold in two and a half months due to the lack of BART and the constant hand-washing. It's damned helpful that we bought a car when we did, both because public transit is basically gone now, and it's also really hard to buy a car right now.

The baby stuff is also incredibly stressful -- everything about preparing for a new child is a million times harder when the world is locked down. You can't go to any stores to buy clothing or supplies; it all has to be blind over the Internet. I can't go to my wife's OB appointments due to the strict contact procedures. And, of course, they still have no idea how this disease affects pregnant women or newborn children, so we're trying even harder than normal not to get infected.

I can't really write anything about this disease or lockdown that isn't said better by a million other people online, but my sympathies go out to all of those infected and affected. I wish that we had literally any other political leadership at this time, and I hope that we make it through anyway.

Rabbits

We had some sad news recently; one of our rabbits (Alot) was diagnosed with cancer in February and had her ear removed. Unfortunately, she developed a cough and then ended up going into severe stasis and passing away on May 24th. She was a good, brave rabbit and will be missed; she is survived by her bonded partner rabbit Mirabelle.

Hobbies

In preparation for having a new (and hopefully photogenic) baby and to entertain myself while locked in the house all day, I did buy a new camera recently. I decided that part of the reason I don't use my OM-D E-M5 enough is that it's pretty big and heavy with a lens on³ and I don't have it with me enough. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you⁴. Anyhow, I got a Ricoh GR III after reading several hundred reviews of every high-quality pocketable camera, and for the few days I've had it, it's been absolutely fantastic. An APS-C sensors in a 250 gram package is completely insane, and I'd forgotten how much more light you get with that big of a sensor compared to the Micro Four Thirds sensor on my OM-D or the teensy sensor on my iPhone⁵. The Positive Film setting on the Ricoh in particular produces a delightful æsthetic. It also produces phenomenal RAW images which someone with time and skill could surely extract a ton out of; I have neither the time nor the skill so I mostly shoot JPEGs.

Stay safe out there, gentle readers.

I've had this sitting on my desktop for months and figured I'd post it. No idea where it originally came from.

After more than 10 years of avoiding it, I've finally rejoined the ranks of the private-car-owning bourgeois. $SPOUSE and I spent the past few weeks doing research and reading reviews, spent Saturday and Sunday test-driving a bunch of vehicles, and ended up buying a brand new Cosmic Blue 2020 Honda Insight yesterday afternoon.

read more

Went to Austin, Texas this weekend for a work event¹; it was my first time in Austin so I figured I'd write up some notes:

• Cities are so indistinguishable now. Downtown Austin has the same restaurant and store chains as San Francisco, Boston, Miami, or any other American city.
• Its is weird how much Confederate stuff there still is for the supposedly-liberal Texas city. Until '96, the Capitol Visitors Center was administered by the Daughters of the Confederacy; lots of Confederate flags.
• Live music everywhere, even at the broiest bars near the hotels --- even at the hotel bars! This was great! I wish more Bay Area bars had live jazz or blues or funk just as a regular thing.
• Everything was incredibly cheap compared to the Bay Area. For what I paid for my 1400sqft house in Berkeley I could get a mansion sitting on several acres in Austin. Despite how cheap everything is and how plentiful housing is, homelessness still seems to be a big problem. Tent cities under the overpasses and folks sleeping on all the benches. Kind of a downer for me as a YIMBY; more housing alone won't do it, we also need supportive socialized housing programs!
• Gun culture is insane. There were a number of gun stores near our hotel and businesses apparently have to have a giant sign if they don't want people to open carry into their restaurant or office. I don't care how many feral hogs are coming into your rural backyard; you don't need a gun in a WeWork. I could never be comfortable in a place where so many people live in such fear that they need to carry weapons to breakfast.
• Good barbecue². Duh.

I'm drinking some coffee at the airport now³. Only another seven or so hours of air travel and I'll be home.

Here's a surprising change for you: Python 3.7.6 (ostensibly, a patch bugfix release) totally changed how URLs are parsed by Python programs.

As of Python 3.7.5, a URL like foo:8888 would be parsed into the following:

>>> urllib.parse.urlparse('foo:8888')
ParseResult(scheme='', netloc='', path='foo:8888', params='', query='', fragment='')

As of Python 3.7.6, foo is now detected as the scheme:

>>> urllib.parse.urlparse('foo:8888')
ParseResult(scheme='foo', netloc='', path='8888', params='', query='', fragment='')

This will cause massive chaos if you are ever parsing URLs with ports in them but without schemes. The relevant Python bug is bpo27657. I consider this to be a major regression, especially since it was introduced in a patch release.

Good luck out there...