I’m on the computer pretty much all day and I consider myself a power user; I need my system to behave the way I expect to maintain productivity and sanity. Every so often something comes along that throws a wrench in that smooth operation and makes me want to flip off my monitor. Lately that wrench has been programs that decide to reinvent the wheel and change the order of the options of the taskbar right click menu. What am I talking about? Right click a program in your taskbar and look at the order, close is the bottom option right? Well let’s try another scenario, hit F1 to bring up the Microsoft’s Unhelpful Help and right-click that. You’ll probably see the same atrocity that I see below:
SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL! Thankfully only a handful of programs were developed by morons who thought this modification to the standard Windows experience was a good idea. One principle I follow when I do user interface design is don’t make the user think. With this right-click scenario I instinctly click the first option to close. When it doesn’t close the program I have to stop what I’m doing and figure out why my computer decided to do something different than I intended. Sorry for the rant, but these flaws are the kind of things I try to avoid in my own applications and have become more aware of.
Tagged with: computers, usability
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Well not exactly like Tivo, but close enough. I had gotten tired of trying to tape shows or download them after they had showed and I wanted a better way to do things. Being the practical person I am (it also helps that I’m cheap) I decided to turn my computer into a High Definition Personal Video Recorder (HDPVR). I had been watching shows on my computer for a while and thought why not make the process easier and get better quality at the same time. Tivo would be nice but I’d rather not have to pay a monthly fee to get full functionality and I’m looking towards the future and an HD tv.
I decided on pulling down over the air (OTA) high definition because I don’t want to pay for TV and 90% of the shows I care to watch are broadcast for free. Next I bought a HD tuner card, VBOX DTA-150 ATSC HDTV receiver, and ran coax from our rooftop antenna to my room. The funny thing is you don’t need a special antenna to get HD signals but they’d probably try to sell you an “HDTV” antenna at one of the big box stores. I hooked up the 20-30 year old antenna on our roof and it works great.
Next I had to decide what software to run to manage and schedule all of my recordings and playback them back. I started off with GBPVR, open source, and it worked ok but I just wasn’t very satisfied and had to fuss with it. I looked at the commercial offerings, I didn’t want Microsoft Media Center so I tried the trial of BeyondTV. Wow, what a difference and the nicest thing about it is that it works great with minimal configuration. Trial was only for 21 days and it was reasonably priced, but they were throwing in a decent Firefly RF remote for free for a limited time so I bit and ordered it.
In this process I also found out that an hour of uncompressed HD video can take up about 6-8 GB on the hard drive so I had to order a new 250 GB Western Digital SATA drive to expand my 160 GB storage capacity to about 400 GB.
So I pretty much have all the functionality of Tivo for a fraction of the price, considering the new HD Tivo they just released is well over $600, plus the monthly $13.
Tagged with: computers, htpc, television
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I have a lull in stuff to do at work and I looked at my keyboard and realized that it is quite an outdated and unfriendly piece of equipment. A line from Atom and His Package’s song on the metric system comes to mind, ” You’re drunk with your tradition / That has no validity”. Ever wonder what the scroll lock key really does (was used to allow scrolling text around the then small screens with the arrow keys)? Ever actually used it for anything? Me neither. So why is it still being placed on our keyboard even though it hasn’t been used since the 1980’s.
Most things we use are engineered for a particular use, the shifter in your car is made just to shift and P, R, N, and D all make pretty good sense. The keyboard sitting in front of you though doesn’t make sense because it is meant as a general purpose input device and this leads to a boatload of problems.
In Microsoft Word, know what the F7 button does? It brings up the spellchecker. The only way you would know that is if you have it memorized, not because it makes sense to associate function key 7 with checking your spelling. Any guesses on what the other function keys do?
The shift key is another marvel all in itself, with the addition of one key the number of available functions available on a keyboard double! So in Word, when you hit shift+F7, it no longer brings up the spellchecker, this time you get the thesaurus. In some programs like Photoshop, I’ve seen some functions being tied to triple and quadruple key presses, good for people highly proficient in the program, bad for people trying to learn it.
Some keyboard functions have become standardized simply because of the location of the keys themselves! Ctrl+X cuts text and places it memory, Ctrl+V inserts that text wherever the curser is on the screen, and Ctrl+Z undos the process. There is no real meaning tied to the Z, X, and V keys, they just happen to be the easiest to press while holding down the left Ctrl key with your pinky. I feel sorry for people without a left pinky because it would make copying and pasting a pain.
So what’s the problem? This abstract relationship between buttons and functions is not user friendly. The longer things stay the same the more people get locked into it and that makes changing things even harder. I think our biggest hope for change lies with laptops and smaller form factor devices that don’t have the real estate luxury for extraneous buttons.
Have you had any problems with your keyboard or experienced difficulty figuring out what keys actually do what?
Tagged with: computers, usability
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I got a new monitor. It is pretty sweet. It is a Dell 2007WFP 20 inch widescreen. I like it a lot. Here is a picture of it.
I bet writing like this annoys Denise. Have a swell Sunday. I am going to do homework and prepare for a job interview and more resume submitting.
Tagged with: computers, lcd, monitor
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Last week I dumped Sprint and signed on with Verizon and got a brand new spiffy phone. I did some research and the Motorolla e815 was one of their best offerings but I’ll post on that a little later. Well my new phone has an expansion slot for a MicroSD card (formally known as TransFlash) and I picked up a 512 MB to load up pictures, songs, ringtones, video etc… on my phone. Here it is side by side with my 512 MB Compact Flash card (which I am about to replace with a 2 GB card. The MicroSD card is just a tad smaller wouldn’t you say.
Tagged with: computers
Posted under: Geek Stuff
