Targus Bluetooth mouse

I got a Targus bluetooth mouse (AMB04US) at $13. I prefer Bluetooth mouse as there’s no dongle that protrudes from my laptop (and frees up a USB port), but this means far fewer choices. The size of the mouse is 4.1″L x 2.1″W x 1.4″H (104.8mm x 54.4mm x 35.7mm). I’d say it’s medium size as according to this thread, Bluetooth mouses have length from 3.1″ to 4.9″. Dell 5-button Bluetooth travel mouse matte black looks great but it’s considerably more expensive at about $30 (3.75″ in length).

Usually it connects within a few seconds, and if it doesn’t it’s the bluetooth of my laptop not working and I have to switch it off and on again to have it working. The feedback when scrolling the wheel is not as strong as my other mouse, but it’s still way better those that scrolls continuously (I hate that), and I get used to it after a while.

It takes 2 AAA batteries and the batteries are good for at least 10 days for my light usage (I don’t care that much how long would the battery last as I’m using rechargeable ones). The LED will not switch itself off completely as opposed to my other mouse using 2.4Ghz (for which you can wake it up with a mouse click). The LED will fire more sparingly when not in use, though. When it’s low battery the scroll wheel will flash red. The DPI setting can be changed between 800 and 1600 DPI by pressing and holding the scroll wheel and the right button for 3 seconds.

I’m very satisfied with this mouse, and it’s one of the cheapest you can find on the web (It’s $10 on Amazon few days after I’ve bought it!).

SSD

I got a couple of gadgets recently. One is the Targus AMB04US Bluetooth mouse at $13. The other is the OCZ OCZSSD2-1VTZPL120G Vertex Plus 120GB SSD drive at about $1/GB, together with a external harddrive enclosure for my 320GB harddisk originally on my laptop.

Originally, I followed the instructions in this post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/473866-installing-ssd-my-x201s.html

However, two days later I find my system32 folder missing (!) and so I have to recover the system. A day later, some other system files is missing and again Windows failed to boot. I then contacted the tech support of the SSD company and they suggested a fresh install, as opposed to using the Lenovo recovery disk. To do this I have to download the Windows 7 iso image:

http://techpp.com/2009/11/11/download-windows-7-iso-official-direct-download-links/

Then transfer this on to a USB thumb drive with the tool from Microsoft:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/12/-the-usb-flash-drive.ars

The installation went smoothly, but after that I couldn’t go on to the internet as drivers are missing. I had to download the driver for the wireless interface from another computer to get things started. After that I can download the System Update software from Lenovo, which takes care of other drivers.*

After that it’s time to tweak the system to be SSD friendly:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/windows-7/2441-windows-7-ultimate-solid-state-drive-speed-tweaks.html (Although it turns out not every tweak in it is useful)
Few things to highlight: Install a RamDisk (Dataram Ramdisk is pretty good), and put the Chrome Cache on it (using the parameter --user-data-dir="E:\TEMP\User Data"). If you save the ramdisk image to the data disk after re-install the search history will be preserved, which is very good. Also, tell Firefox not to use disk but ram instead for cache (google “firefox ramdisk”)

In order to avoid the pain of backup/restore my data, I decided to partition it into system disk and data disk. I then move my user folder (C:\Users\user_name) to the data disk. I first tried this but it doesn’t work for me.

http://lifehacker.com/5467758/move-the-users-directory-in-windows-7

So I fall back to the supported way of doing this: for every folder in my account (Desktop, Downloads, Favorites, My Documents, …) I opened the Properties page and move them in the Location tab. Not fun but it’s the safest way as it is supported.

A bunch of software install follows (the most time consuming part). I’m jotting them down so I can refer to later on if the system needs to be re-installed for whatever reason:
Microsoft Security Essentials
Dataram Ramdisk
Chrome and Firefox
cpime
Skype
Microsoft Office
Adobe reader
PDFXChange viewer
Dropbox
Spotify
miranda-im
7-zip
MikTeX, gsview and ghostscript
Winamp
Putty and WinSCP
Vim and latex plugin
Printer driver
Picasa
JRuler
Windows update
Calibre (ebook management software)
WinSplit Revolution
mpc-hc
uTorrent
WinDJView
iTunes

* Rant about the system update software from Lenovo:
1. It still doesn’t support 64-bit system directly — it’s relying on the Windows XP compatibility mode, even after a few years.
2. For some reason the power manager doesn’t install, which means I have to do it manually.

minus.com

I’m using dropbox.com for syncing files across computer, as well as backup. Today I saw on slickdeals that there is a minus.com that offers 10GB of storage with 2GB file size limit. I tried that out and the registration is simple: just type in a user name and a password and you’re good to go. It doesn’t even ask you for your email. The upload speed is quite decent (2MBytes/sec) while the download speed is 1MBytes/sec (I’m on a 25Mb connection). After upload you can share the file with friends: just give them the link (if it is private) and you can also share it as public. It’s good if you have large files you want to share and neither you nor your friends have to setup a server, and you don’t have to tolerate the slow speed file transfer using those IM clients. It’s worth trying it out.

中大校長蒞臨華盛頓晚宴

二零一一年八月二十日

照片可於這裡觀看(何景文攝)。

這是我參加過最盛大的校友活動，也是第一次唱中大學生會會歌。

沈祖堯校長、許敬文副校長、楊如虹處長和跟我同檯的校長室職員(忘記了他的名字)，與出席的七十多位校友一同聚餐。他們跟我們分享了大學的最新消息，包括
二零一三年中大五十週年校慶活動，並叫校友們到時要回去一看。
深圳分校事宜
大學三改四課程改動

沈校長原來很會說笑。他説我們知道他在港大讀本科，但自港大畢業後一直在中大，所以流的都是中大的血。許副校長説在晚飯前致詞很難(怕聽衆不耐煩)，他説飯後致詞更難(因為怕聽衆睡着了)。

當晚有抽獎運，得到中大素描明信片六張。

P.S. 一直不知道”蒞”音同”利”，”有邊讀邊”並不適用。

蒜蓉開邊蝦

第一次整蒜蓉開邊蝦。唔記得落酒，加上蒜蓉唔夠蓉(應該用grater、石磨或者garlic press)。雪櫃仲有幾兩蝦，下次再試過。

再試一次，蒜蓉蒸唔熟，有啲辣…
原來可以先爆香蒜蓉，之後就唔使蒸咁耐(五分鐘就得)。

More Nook comments

To enable installing apps in NookMarket:
http://nookapps.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/feed/howto.html

Twook (version: 0.0.8): consistently turn the screen off when I move from the password field to the submit button. Solution: press any page flip button to turn the screen back on in the login page. Reading tweets on Nook is great but tweeting one isn’t, because of the lower sensitivity of the keyboard compared to iPod Touch and you need arrow key to navigate to your typos and correct them (no spell check of course).

WikiLocker: allows you to lock your wifi so it doesn’t turn off (beware of battery drain), turn wifi off, keep touchscreen on, disable screensaver and stop adb.

It would be nice if there can be gamma settings in the pdf viewer—the CMR fonts commonly used in LaTeX appears to be thin on screen (both computer and Nook). I have yet to figure out a way to hack this:

The first one is the original APDFViewer output whereas the second one is an image processed with gamma=0.5 from the computer. PaperCrop will do this for you but the resulting file is huge because the pages are converted into images in PDF.

Bookshelves do not survive a reboot? Why?

Nook

(This is not meant to be a detail review, just a few points that interest/annoy me.)

Chinese file name is supported, but for EPUB format books a CSS has to be added so that it will use the built-in font for displaying Chinese, or otherwise you’ll get ‘????’. For PDFs it relies on the built-in fonts for displaying Chinese.

The built-in Chinese font is okay, but if you think it’s not, you can slip in your own font.

Nook uses Adobe ADE (Adobe Digital Edition) to display PDFs and EPUBs. If you choose a font size that is too big for a page, it starts to reflow your document. The result may not be what you want: (i) words can be broken half way depending on the PDF, and (ii) formulas would be unreadable.
(There are 6 font sizes for you to choose from, but Nook only maintain a global setting which means you cannot have small for one file and medium for another—you must switch the font size every time. [Mine is on firmware ver 1.5])

The USB mode is good—no software needs to be installed on the PC side (although you may want to install Calibre—a free ebook management software)

Screensaver: choose between Cityscape, Nature (nice) and Authors (not that good). There are a couple of images in each set.

Charging light does not disturb reading—it’s at the bottom and you won’t see it from the front.

If you don’t crop the PDF it’s likely you’ll get sub-optimal results (a lot of white margins)

(cropped PDF)

After you have hacked (root) the Nook there’s another option for viewing PDFs (APDFViewer). When opening a PDF file it will ask you which one to use.

APDFViewer allows landscape mode. You need to crop the white margins of the PDF, though, because by default it does “fit to page” in portrait mode and “fit to width” in horizontal mode. Other zoom levels exists, but is limited to 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, 250% and 300%. There’s no “panning” from the touch screen and buttons provided are minimal (from left to right: zoom level, rotate (upright or 90-degree clockwise; edit: long press for clockwise), page up/down (tap and hold for page selection slider) and quit. (as of ver 0.0.3)

As for cropping the PDFs, pdfscissors is free and nice but will leave a watermark at the first page and the last page (*edit, 13 Oct 2011: the watermark is removed in 0.0.2). PDFill PDF Tools (8.0) somehow produce files that Nook has trouble determining the borders. pdfcrop script is another option. (edit: Briss also works—thanks Ke Wu for pointing it out)

(edit: Documents made with LaTeX do not look so good because the Computer Modern Roman font does not look good on screen—the strokes tend to be thin.)

Instead of making a lot of edits there’s more comments here.

WinSplit Evolution

www.winsplit-revolution.com
Winsplit Evolution is a utility to organize your windows, so we don’t have to do manually resize them every time. With a large monitor this comes handy.

I disabled the ++ key combination in my display driver (no one really want to use the monitor to be upside down, right?) and assign it to Winsplit. It will cycle through these settings (I’m using the screen in the portrait mode — 1080 x 1920)
1. upper half of the screen
2. lower half of the screen
3. lower 5/6 of the screen (using the full height for reading is just too much)

If you have a better suggestion, leave a message here.

Windows 7 x64 Ramdisk

I downloaded the Ramdisk from here. It’s free if your ramdisk size is less than 4GB. It works for my Windows 7 x64 version. It saves and load the ramdisk image when you shutdown or boot your computer so it’s really painless.

Then I moved my Chrome cache to the Ramdisk by copying the “User Data” directory from “C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome” to “D:\TEMP”. Then modify the Chrome shortcut and add the parameter --user-data-dir="D:\TEMP\User Data" after chrome.exe.

Reference: http://solnyshok.blogspot.com/2009/05/windows-7-x64-ramdisk.html (but you don’t need all that hacking mentioned because the software is not beta now)

Red leaves

A tree full of red leaves, on a rainy day (yesterday). Photo taken on my way from home to the shuttle bus stop.

The road is slippery when it’s wet, and it’s even more slippery when it’s covered with fallen leaves. When I said to myself this morning that the scene with fallen leaves is so beautiful, I had no idea my bike would skid because of the leaves five minutes later. I was making a turn onto the wooden bridge across the Indian creek, when my bike skid because the road is covered with leaves. Fortunately I landed on the wooden floor, so only my knee was scratched slightly as otherwise both my elbow and my knee would bleed if I should land on the asphalt bike trail.

With too many fallen leaves it’s hard to spot the bike trail…

P.S. Using alcohol to disinfect the wound is so “exciting”! …