Here’s something you won’t see me doing often: giving useful advice that people (mostly geeks) can actually take to heart and not regret.

This is an entry with some advice I could give based on recent experiences with some technology products I recently used/acquired.[0]: http://sbooth.org/Max “visit site”

Of Mice and… Keyboards

First would be with regards to wireless keyboards and mice. The mouse on my Logitech MX Duo has been getting more and more useless as of late. The primary button is pretty much shot to hell at this point. In fairness, it has been with me for quite a few years so it has already been a solid investment all things considered.

What I wanted to do was just get a mouse that would be compatible with the MX Duo’s receiver. At first I thought all Logitech wireless products were compatible with each other’s receivers – but apparently I was wrong. I tried connecting my sister’s wireless mouse (same brand) to my receiver, and it was a no-go.

This meant [which I haven’t confirmed] that the chance of getting a compatible mouse would entail having to get another MX-series as well. Given the costs of such a line, the mice alone are so expensive that you just ad a little more and you can practically get a new cordless keyboard/mouse set – which is what I eventually did.

I decided on an S510. Because it looks elegant, and the mouse that comes with it can be bought separately (and cheap) – so I hopefully, wouldn’t have to deal with the same issue I had with my previous set.

U3

U3 LLC is a joint venture that is backed by Sandisk and M-Systems. U3 is responsible for the development of a proprietary application design specification created for Microsoft Windows operating systems so that applications can be executed directly from a specially formatted USB flash drive. Applications are allowed to write files or registry information to the host computer, but this information must be removed when the flash drive is ejected.

Simply put, it is a portable application environment. My uncle’s gift to me was a U3 enabled flash drive and I have one word for the said spec: overrated!

This is only useful if you’re on a windows platform, and even then, it’s not that reliable. Sometimes it wouldn’t load the environment. You could imagine if you had important data which you need to access and find out that it didn’t want to load the damn thing. Obviously it’s entirely useless if you want to use the same data across platforms.

Given that you already have portable/standalone versions of applications out in the net, you really don’t need to go as far as to have them in a U3 environment (unless you want to password protect access to them). Having said that, I’ve promptly uninstalled the U3 partition on my USB drive to reclaim space to be used for useful purposes.

iPod Disk

For those rare times I need to access the music of any iPod, I’ve been using iPodRip ever since I can remember. It amazes me why I never found out about this little gem sooner.

iPod Disk achieves the same goal which other iPod accessing utilities offer: accessing contents of an iPod regardless of the owner. The difference is the way it accomplishes it. While other applications let you browse and grab the contents of iPods through their client interface. iPod Disk has no GUI to interact with. It instead mounts an iPod as a volume/drive and lets you access its contents via the Finder. ¹ “Finder” is Apple’s “Explorer” This has the added bonus of you being able to access the iPod from a network (since it’s basically acting like a regular volume)

Max

I always liked encoding my CDs to MP3 format via LAME. ² THE best MP3 encoder bar-none. While I access my music library via iTunes I never was impressed with the MP3 encoding quality iTunes had to offer – hence wouldn’t trust it to encode any audio.

I instead use a third party plugin called iTunes-LAME to allow me to rip/encode using LAME via iTunes. Still, it’s pretty basic all in all. This is where [Max][0] comes in.

It’s basically EAC‘s counterpart on the Mac. That right there should be enough information to convince you.

But for those who have no idea what I’m talking about. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is (or was up until now) the best audio ripper/encoder. It was free, it had features that catered to the most demanding ripping enthusiast which allowed them to make perfect rips of their media, and best of all, it used 3rd party codecs to encode to different formats.

Apple’s 802.11n Wireless enabler update

This is only applicable to Intel Mac users: did you know that your MacBook(Pro)s had hardware that already supported the new wireless standard, and was simply “dormant” this whole time? Well you do and Apple released an update weeks ago to enable them.

Now this is mere news – also the fact that they’re charging for it is mere news, the advice I’m bringing to the table is this: Do not pay for it. Just try looking for it in the internet. It’s a ridiculously small file, so it’s not that difficult to find.

Granted Apple is charging a negligible price for it, in fact they say that the only reason they’re charging is because of legal accounting issues. But quite honestly, I don’t buy it. The reason why I don’t want to pay is not because I’m cheap, but because in principle, I don’t think anyone should be paying for it ³ And of course because I also support piracy

RefreshWindows

Here’s a really useful application. Actually it immediately unloads itself once it’s done so I wouldn’t really call it an “application,” but in any case, here’s the deal.

One glaring flaw OS X has is it’s seemingly lousy way of keeping Finder information up to date. Sometimes you’ve been moving files back and forth, and you notice that the Finder is still reporting the same information since the last time you checked. Windows has a refresh button (F5) that can force Explorer to refresh, but sadly OS X doesn’t. RefreshWindows is a good workaround as it does exactly that.

Just add it to your Finder menu bar like you see in the picture (just drag the application icon to it and hold it there until you see a visual indication that you can add it) and click on it whenever you think the Finder is not displaying up-to-date information.

---

There you have it. My [hopefully] useful tips. Have at it and enjoy!