My Tech Hell

Introduction

I was going to write a review of this super-extreme piece of ultra tech that fixes blue screens just by being near your computer. It is so versatile that at the same time it makes Windows actually secure, allows you to play your games without the disk, and stops spam from being sent to you at the source. It also reverses your hair loss. It is the Alpha, and the Omega

This is not that review.

In preparation for that review, I couldn’t find the USB cable that went with the digital camera I use to take pictures of reviewed hardware. You know – the USB cable that came with the camera, with the standard USB A plug on one end and the what-the-hell-is-that-gotta-be-proprietary plug on the other end? The cable that the camera manufacturer charges $30 to replace? The cable that’s easy to loose in a house with four dogs, five cats, two guinea pigs, eight horses, and two goats? Actually, the animals have nothing to do with it – I’ve got a seven-year-old little girl.  ‘Nuff said.

So what do I, the Alpha Geek, do when I can’t find a cable with the right ends on it? I bring out one of the most useful pieces of tech I carry, one of the few I don’t go anywhere without, and it comes from a company called JDI Technologies.

Construction

The beauty of the GoldX USB connectors is that they very well may save you hundreds of dollars. For a few bucks, you get a spiffy and sparkly gold cable with a female terminator on either end.  Those terminators allow you to plug the included USB connectors onto the cable in any combination needed to connect two pieces of electronics together.  There are three connector kits at last count.  I, of course, have all three.

Each kit gives you a number of tips, a sparkly cable, and a pouch with individual bands in it to hold each tip, making it easy to flip the top of the pouch and peruse the available tips within.  None of that raffle-type “stick your hand in and pull out a bunch” type searching.  The pouches are leather – probably fake, but sturdy, black, and sporting a single snap to close them, which, given the stiffness and construction of the material, works just fine.

The cables are somewhat stiff and sturdy enough that constantly changing tips has not weakened the cable or the terminators in any way.  The kits will last awhile – I’ve had mine now for a few years, and they are almost as good as new. There’s really not much more to say about it.

Usability

Simple and eminently useful, this allows you to connect everything from your Logitech Universal Remote, to your Cannon Powershot camera to your computer.  With the right kit, you can even form a Cat5 cable or a USB extender cable.  Being able to connect any USB device to your computer is so useful that you’ll probably add the GoldX sets to your pared down emergency kit that you take when you can’t take your whole equipment bag.

As I previously stated, the kits currently come in three flavours.  There’s the Hi-Speed USB 12 in 1 Camera Kit, the Hi-Speed USB 5 in 1 Cable Kit, and the Hi-Speed USB 5 in 1 Network Kit.  The “cable kit” is for normal folk, and is the only kit that has the USB A Female connector – allowing you to build an extender cable.  The largest of the three – the “camera kit”, is for geeks or photographers or normal people with a lot of digital equipment, and with it you will never worry about not having the right connector for whatever you need to connect – so long as it isn’t proprietary, like an iPod or Palm device.  The “network kit” has the same four USB plugs as the “cable kit” model, but replaces the USB A Female plug with two RJ45 plugs.  Yes, you can use the same cable to connect both USB devices and network jacks.  Yes, that is just too cool!

There’s also the looks you’ll get from people when they’re in need of a specific connector cable, and you pull out your kit and piece one together yourself.  My wife, borrowing one of my kits, had that happen to her.  A coworker of hers needed to get some pictures off a digital camera, but did not have the camera data transfer cable with her.  My wife claimed should could get the pictures off the camera, to which the coworker replied “What – you’ve got a magic trick in that bag?”.  My wife then pulled the GoldX kit she had borrowed out of her tech bag (I’m so proud of her!), and proceeded to build the right cable and get the pictures.  Her coworker’s response? – “Well, I was joking about the magic trick, but that was cool!”  To those of you not of the tech persuasion, that’s pure gold to us!

Conclusion

Get a kit – in fact, get two – the camera and cable kits.  That way, if you need to build a cable and it’s still too short, you can still build an extender cable.  Get the network kit as well only if you’re like me and need to be the Alpha Geek wherever you go – or if you find yourself needing to connect to a wall RJ45 plug for network connectivity every once in a while.  Whichever you get, trust me, you WILL use them.  You’ll have a USB mouse cord too short, or a USB camera or gadget with a missing or destroyed cable, and these kits will save your bacon.  If only JDI Technologies would make iPod and Palm connectors, I’d come up with an award to give them. (They probably don’t want to or can’t pay the needed licensing fees)  I’ll have to come up with that award anyway for Radio Shack’s iGo line, but that’s another review (coming soon!).  In the meantime, enjoy the complete lack of stress that comes with having a GoldX kit around to ensure you never again get that sinking feeling in your stomache that comes with a lost proprietary USB cable.

[smartads]

Introduction

For a portable mouse, I used to use Targus, but I was Christmas shopping in December ‘08 at an Office Depot when I spied the Logitech VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse.  It was cute, compact, came with its own case, and worked wirelessly.  I considered it a Christmas present to myself and poped it in the basket.  I tell you that I had no idea how much I’d like it until I used it a few days later.

Construction

The mouse feels solidly constructed and has a good weight for a portable mouse.  I say portable mouse in that this mouse is small enough to fit into briefcase or backback with your other tech kit.  Any larger and the VX Nano would be a full sized mouse.  Any smaller, and it would be what I’d call a mini-mouse, which is one of those mice you usually have to hold between your thumb and ring finger to move effectively on a surface – about the size of an iPod shuffle.

Construction covers not only how solidly something is built, but its design as well, and here the Nano is a step above.  Someone put some thought into the design of this nice piece of tech.  First, the mouse is symmetric and can be used left or right handed comfortably, which is nice for our south-paw friends.  The only exception is the two buttons where a righty’s forefinger would be.  Southpaws will have to use their middle finger for those.

Then there’s the bluetooth receiver, which slots nicely into the bottom of the mouse after opening a panel. Under that panel is where you put two AAA batteries, a slot for the receiver, and a little red button.  Get this – you put the receiver in the slot and the mouse automatically turns off.  You press the button and the receiver pops up for easy withdrawal, and the mouse turns on.  That right there is brilliant as far as I’m concerned.  There’s also a power button on the bottom of the mouse – not under the panel, to turn the mouse off when you don’t want to disconnect the receiver from the computer.

To protect this cute little addition to your tech kit repertoire, Logitech includes a nice little black zippered sleeve made from some kind of airy neoprene netting that feels scrunchy between your fingers and provides more than just the your normal “throw it in a bag” protection.

Usability

It fits in a medium sized paw like mine.  If your hand is on the larger side, you may need a full sized mouse for your portable, but for the rest of us, the Nano is just fine.  The real story on usability here is the mouse wheel.  The bad news is that it does not and cannot function as a third “middle-click” button.  For that, there is a button just below the wheel closer to your palm which will act as such.  Instead, when you click on the wheel, it changes function physically.  Initially, it works as any mouse wheel – as it scrolls up or down, you feel the soft clicking as it moves from one position to the next, each position a certain number of lines the target application will move.  If you click on the wheel, it changes to its other mode, which is click-free scrolling.  This means that you can spin the wheel like the wheel of a bike.  The spin is almost frictionless, so one good spin with your finger can result is a half a minute or more of spinning action.

If you have one of those mile long web pages or word/acrobat documents (or in my case a ridiculously long Java class) that you have to repetitively hit the mouse wheel to scroll though – this new frictionless spin can have you flying through them in no time.  At first I thought that it was a waste of the wheel functionality, but after whipping through a few web sites and ExtJS source files (35,000+ lines of Javascript. Yea!), I found myself missing the ability on my desktop MX5000 wireless mouse.   It really does make moving through large documents easier, though it does take a little time to get used to.

To finish up, there’s the two aforementioned buttons which can be assigned functionality through Logitech’s Setpoint softare or, in Setpoint’s absence, through your OS.  The button just below the wheel can also be mucked with so.

Conclusion

I like it.  I like it a lot more than most of the tech I have.  The Nano is compact, well built, has a nice protective pouch, works wirelessly, doesn’t cramp my hand like most travel mice, and has that neat fly-wheel feature.  The price is a little high, but for the premium price, you get something that will last a while, does it’s job well, and as happened to me at work last Friday, gets your coworkers attention with exclanations of “Cool – what is that?”.  That last point is worth a lot to geeks.  The well-builtedness (sp?  real word?) should appeal to you financially frugal users out there that want something actually worth the money you pay.  This is one of those things.

You’re at Thanksgiving and your sister is cooking in the kitchen with your wife.  Your daughter is reading next to you on the couch, and with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade over, the TV is firmly set to whatever channel is showing the NFL.   Where are you?  Sitting out the couch with a laptop on your legs setting up your new blog.  You are a tech addict.  …and you are in trouble with your wife.

Other signs you’re a tech addict?  You mother asks you to look at her digital camera to figure out why it doesn’t display the battery charge.  Your brother-in-law, who’s house you’re staying in for the holiday, tells you he’ll show you how to turn the TV on using the four remotes that control the TV, Playstation, cable box, etc… then remembers who he’s talking to and figures you don’t need any help.  Your brother, who’s computer is besieged by MS Antivirus (which is actually a very tenacious computer virus) asks if you have his operating system install disks so he can reinstall.  He asks you because you have almost your entire family’s install disks, and because you’re the one that built his computer from scratch.  If any of this hits close to home, just keep in mind that there is no hope – only acceptance.

This blog will detail the thoughts and experiences of a man who cannot keep away from the internet lest he go into information overload withdrawal.  That poor addicted soul would be me, and yes, I’m declaring there is such a thing as information overload withdrawal.

When you think about it, technology has changed every facet of our lives and how we interact with the world – something every technology pundit in the world has opined at one time or another, but to really get what that means, go ahead and hit the circuit breaker for your house.  Just try to relate to your family for ten whole minutes without a TV, DVD player, PVR cable box, (take the battery out of your cell phone/PSP/Nintedo DS too – no cheating!), and everything else that can come between your family and a good conversation.  This is not to say that families would be relegated to staring matches without all this stuff – my family manages to converse pretty well with the help of a game we’ve been surreptitiously playing for decades now of how many jokes, rips, and cracks you can make against every little thing anyone says.

The point is that most of how the family interacts these days involves computers. For example,  it’s now my turn in a game of bowling on a Wii and a copy of Wii Sports.  For playing that, I’m rewarded by being creamed by my seven year old daughter, who somehow managed to figure out the exact swing of the arm needed to get a strike almost every time, beating out the rest of my hyper-competitive family (much to their eternal chagrin).  Does someone want to take a walk?  – check the temperature on weather.com.  Going to someone else’s house before calling it a night? – directions from maps.google.com.  Wishing good friends a happy turkey day? – texting on your cell phone can unobtrusively convey the missive.

General conversation while everyone relaxes on the couch in the living room watching a few of us play Wii Golf consists of neat things they’ve seen on YouTube, and how Wii Fit would be a really good thing help lose some weight and retain our girlish figures.  Then, with a quick trip to Facebook, I get to wish my best friend a Happy Thanksgiving in real time while he tells me something I already know – that pierogies made by true polish immigrants are some of the best food on the planet.

Coming back around to the point of this post,  we, the tech addicts of the world, are the ones that grease the wheels of our brave new technical lives.  We iron out the little glitches that keep our mothers from sending email (the “send” button is at the top right, mom!), our siblings from self-destruction (did you really have to download the torrent for that mp3 with the file name ending in “.exe”?), and our mothers-in-law from chucking their laptop out the window (“Why did they have to change it all again!”).  We’re the ones that get the questions at family gatherings now that used to be spent on your relative with the medical degree.  It’s no longer a matter of “I have this thing on my arm – could you look at it?”, but a matter of “My computer freezes up when I open Quicken – could you look at it?”.  If you’re a true tech addict, questions like that are greeted with a mixture of exasperation and not a modicum of curiosity.  After all, without that almost pathalogical curiosity, we’d never have become tech adicts, now would we?