Archive for February 2013

EMAGINE mini wireless keyboard

EMAGINE mini wireless keyboardI was at the launch of EMAGINE yesterday, and all of us walked away with a door gift: an EMAGINE mini wireless keyboard.  

When I first saw it I thought it would be a Bluetooth wireless keyboard (potentially handy for a tablet). Sadly, I notice that you need to connect it via USB. It works like a clicker.

Its vendor is Sonix Technology Co., Ltd. The manual is clearly written in China (words like “Accissories”). It’s been around for quite some time (testing on Fedora 7, Ubuntu 8.10, etc.).

It’s a 2.4GHz wireless mini QWERTY keyboard, comes with a touch pad as well (so you can mouse around).

Plug it into Linux or Mac OS X and it “just works”, without drivers. You end up having to power the device on/off. It comes with its own USB-based charger (no wall-plug), so I presume you’re meant to charge it/dock it at the EMAGINE device itself. 

In the package contents though, it suggests you only get a remote, not this keyboard. Beta testers (I’m not one) claimed that they already had a keyboard.

I’m not sure that the keyboard is made for many regular hands. I consider my hands no larger than the average, and find it quite difficult (not impossible, just strained) to type with two thumbs as it is a little too wide, thanks to the touch pad. Your mileage may vary. Then again, how many of you want to do serious keyboarding in front of your TV?

Next up, some thoughts on the EMAGINE (based largely on tweets from last night). I do plan to order one to give it a twirl. 

IMAGINE. CREATE. EXECUTE. DELIVER.

Jaehyo Lee, South Korean artist gone global with a play on textures & shapesDoes having a critical mind require you to be a critic? Does being a critic long enough make you a cynic?

These are thoughts that have crossed my mind in recent times. As I’ve grown older, I realise that I’ve been overly idealistic in the past.

These days, I’m motivated to see the positive in things. Punditry overall is boring as it doesn’t create.

I’m motivated by Scooter Braun’s motto:

IMAGINE. CREATE. EXECUTE. DELIVER.

I think I’ll spend some free time going back and only looking at the positive side of things.

Upgrading to OS X 10.8 and a new MacBook Air

Yesterday I unboxed my new MacBook Air 13″ (full-spec) laptop. I used a USB3 disk to backup via Time Machine the old laptop (which maxed out at USB2), and then did a restore using USB3 last night and today it seems that the laptop is ready to use. This is my first experience with OS X 10.8.2 as well – I was previously on 10.7.5. What did I have to change?

  1. I had to re-login to Dropbox, but at least it didn’t have to perform a full sync (there was some data exchanged, but it wasn’t the entire Dropbox folder).
  2. I had to re-login to Google Drive. This required a full sync as the old folder was not recognised as an original.
  3. I had to make sure settings for iCloud were sane again (as there was a popup).
  4. I was asked to re-download MsgFiler and login to the App Store.
  5. I had to change the caps lock key to become a control key manually again.
  6. The Mail.app version changed and it has to reimport/reindex messages again (this takes some 1 hour 15 minutes on my machine with 33GB of mail).
  7. The F4 key for some absurdity goes to an application called Launchpad (that makes it look like an iOS device). I used to have Dashboard on F4 and I much prefer that. It seems the only way without a third party app like Functionflip is to press Fn+F4 to get my Dashboard. I think this is rather silly of Apple – changing muscle memory is difficult.
  8. My scroll continued to work from the old settings (I’m no fan of a natural scroll).
  9. Time Machine allows you to “inherit backup history”, thus using the same drive that brought you over to be the new backup drive.
  10. There now exists a Notification Centre. A little odd thinking that iOS styled notifications have made it here. Do I still need Growl which constantly reminds me that there is a (paid) update waiting?
  11. Seems the screensaver and the lock after it has been enabled needs to be re-enabled.
  12. CrashPlan would not work as you need Java SE 6 so you’d have to install it – seems odd that Apple decided to drop this rather significant piece of software. Then again, considering who drives ownership, and the recent security scares…
  13. sudo tmutil disablelocal – the local backups were enabled again, and I only want Time Machine to have backups to an external disk.
  14. I couldn’t print as there needed to be new printer drivers. Many apps had to be updated in the App Store. Gasp.
  15. Turn off most notifications with Notification Centre. I really don’t want to be “beeped” when mail comes in.

Initial impressions of the laptop? The machine is fast. It has a lot to do with the SSD disk, as well as the 4-core i7 processor. Out of the box, the battery capacity is meant to be 6700 mAh, though I’m getting 6669 mAh. Battery life is one of the strongest reasons why I picked up a 13″ over a 11″ – I just didn’t want to have to deal with flaky batteries a few years down the road… 7 hours brought down to say 5 is manageable, but 5 hours brought down to say 3 is annoying.

Another reason is resolution. Using a 15″ MacBook Pro to a 13″ MacBook Air has no change in resolution for me either – its all 1440×900. It seems 512MB of virtual RAM is reserved for the Intel graphics card (so I guess this Air won’t suffer the same fate as the first ever MacBook Air which was dog slow in terms of graphics).

Its good to note that the Thunderbolt port is also MiniDisplay compatible – all my old cables work. The only catch is that it is no longer on the left side of the laptop but the right side.

How I attended an evening talk using Google Hangouts

Today I was on a phone call when I hobbled onto Twitter to see that DigitalNewsAsia’s #disruptmy was happening (follow the moneymore panelists) . I found a link to a Google Hangout, so I plugged in my external monitor and decided to watch. In the meantime, I setup Twitter to be a second screen. On my main screen I did tasks that needed to get completed: catch up on IRC backlog, reply to lots of emails.

What has Google Hangout done for me?


Attending an evening talk

The event starts at 5.30pm sharp. I probably joined not long after and I didn’t feel like I missed much. Do you know what it takes to get to The Gardens at 5.30pm? Traffic jams in the country will mean that I probably should leave at 4-4.30pm at the latest to be there safely. No looking for parking. Not paying for parking. No driving.

What did I miss out? The potential to socialize with some of the panelists & attendees. However I’m willing to bet I know most of the folk in that room, or can be connected to them at best by one degree of separation if required.

Overall, these Hangouts are awesome as you’re going to save time. It’s a secondary thing, like watching TV while you get work done… or listening to a podcast. Very different experience to actually being there.

Come Q&A, I got pretty bored and could tune out relatively quickly (except maybe the part about not getting excited by the Techcrunch hype; I think it goes down to the fact that many people just don’t understand finance). Next up, Team DigitalNewsAsia remember to take Q&A via Twitter. Remember folk, events are fun & all, but don’t be a conference ho. Back to work!

Performance over time

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” 

Harvey Dent (fictional character) said that in Batman The Dark Knight. Deep, and something we should often think about.

Time Machine making mount_hfs & syslogd use CPU resources

Time Machine decided to misbehave. I’m still running OS X 10.7.5. 

mount_hfs & syslogd were consuming close to 100% CPU time (on this machine with 2 cores), so it was clearly grinding the system to a halt. I couldn’t kill the mount_hfs process (kill -9), but I could kill syslogd though it would repeatedly restart.

Problem was only solved via power cycling. There was advice from Macworld titled: One fix for a runaway syslogd process, but nothing from that was useful.

Root cause seems to be another external disk going wonky. Yes, I’ve seen 2 disks die being Time Machine backups in a span of what, 3.5 years? Worrying trend. 


root 30064 88.0 0.0 2434804 776 ?? R 10:40am 2:45.62 /sbin/mount_hfs -u 99 -g 99 -m 755 -o nodev -o noowners -o nosuid -o owners /dev/disk1s2 /Volumes/Expansion Drive


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