Yes indeed, Gearhead is now completely virtualized. We’re online, on time, on target and “en point.”
After last week’s missive on mice, reader Jeff Hall in Amherst, N.H., wrote in to say: “Speaking of mice that you either love or hate, my two favorites are the Roller Mouse from Contour Design and the Ergo Mouse, which is made by a Norwegian company and marketed in the United States by 3M . . . I use the Ergo Mouse at work, and as we could only afford one Roller Mouse, my wife uses it in her home office. Neither of us would give our mice up for any amount of money. You should try these out!”
Good stuff. I’ve also rekindled my love of the Wacom Graphire Mouse/Pen. I didn’t really say much about these devices last week, so here goes: The product comes with an active pad, wireless mouse and a pen. The pad on my unit has an active area of 4 by 5 inches, but other models are as large as 12 by 19 inches.
The pressure-sensitive pen detects and reports 512 levels of pressure and has a two-position rocker switch on the side for right click and left double-click. You also can double-click by tapping the pen tip to the pad twice, but that isn’t a good idea when you are trying to be very accurate. To cap it all off (pun intended), the top of the pen is a virtual eraser!
The pen operates in mouse mode (relative coordinates) and pen mode (absolute coordinates), the latter being ideal for detailed forge — er, photographic image editing. The Graphire system is a great combination of tools, and works on both Windows and Mac OS X. Editing images with Photoshop on OS X using the Graphire pen is perfect!
But just as our mousing pleasure seemed assured, the rocker switch on the side of the pen simply fell out (my pen is a previous design of the one described above). Sigh. It vanished I know not where, and now I need to find another one — but wait, can such a thing actually be purchased? No. I have to buy a complete pen for $29.95 when all I really want is a 10¢ piece of plastic! The 4-by-5 Graphire is only $99 to begin with, so spending 30% of the original price to get a tiny piece of plastic is, to say the least, irksome. Let’s see if customer service can help — I’m e-mailing them now — so more as and when it happens. Or doesn’t.
While I’m talking about Wacom Technology products, check out the amazing Cintiq 21UX. This bad boy is a 21.3-inch high-resolution display (1600 by 1200 pixels) with a digitizing surface on top of it! The pen detects 1,024 pressure levels, and it comes with a load of cool software and a set of ICC profiles – that’s the data required to match display performance to output device characteristics so what you see will be what you output (although it must be said that WYSWBWYO isn’t as memorable as WYSIWYG).
I tried one out at a trade show some time ago, and loved it. For serious image editing, the Cintiq appears to be tremendous, and at $2,500, it better be – I hope to review it in a future Gearhead.
There are a huge number of pointing devices out there so tell me: Which ones do you love and which do you hate, and why?
Learning Crystal Xcelsius
Switching gears a bit — I’ve written about Business Objects’ Crystal Xcelsius more than a few times in Gearhead and it still amazes me what you can do with the product. By the way, I didn’t get around to mentioning it in this column, but after my USS Nimitz Mission Clock got turned loose on an unsuspecting world, I got a message from the father of a sailor on the USS Chosin asking for a clock for their mission. If you know of any other vessels that need a clock, let me know.
What prompted me to revisit the topic of Xcelsius was receiving a new book in the “for Dummies” series, namely, Crystal Xcelsius for Dummies by Michael Alexander. If you are looking to get started with Xcelsius, this book is a very good starting point.
In common with other books in the series, it leads you through the theory of what Xcelsius is and how it does its voodoo, then walks you through the basics for creating Xcelsius dashboards from Excel spreadsheets.
Later on, the book starts to provide some useful tips about techniques that help you build really useful displays – these are the sorts of things that might not occur to you until you’ve played with Xcelsius for some time, so the book really does help you become more productive quickly.
I would have liked to see more advice on spreadsheet layout, because how you plan to use a spreadsheet in an Xcelsius model can have huge implications, for example, when data items are to be shown in a table but aren’t adjacent to each other in a spreadsheet. I’m also surprised there is no discussion of creating a flash “projector” so you can use the Xcelsius model as a stand-alone application, as I did with the Mission Clock.
Those very minor points apart, if you are going to build corporate dashboards with Xcelsius and you want to shorten your learning period, this is a book you need.
No more dirty pictures
Finally, for all you people using digital, single-lens reflex cameras: If you have ever got dust on the image sensor in your camera, you will know how aggravating this can be.
For those who haven’t looked at the construction of an SLR, there’s a mirror that flips up when you press the shutter release so that the image sensor is exposed. When you change lenses, the mirror protects the image sensor but any dust that gets trapped between the lens and the mirror can migrate (actually, “will migrate” – that’s the way the laws of the universe work) past the mirror and stick to the sensor, creating blurred artifacts on your pictures. (It is worth taking a shot of a uniform gray area every few weeks and checking for dust, instead of finding it the hard way marring your otherwise Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.)
But what if you do find dust? A few months ago when this happened to me, it cost $100 (including shipping) and took a week to have the sensor cleaned. This made me wonder: What would you do if you were traveling and got dust on the sensor? I guess you would just have to kiss your high-quality happy-snaps goodbye and hope that a few hours with Photoshop could fix the problems.
Rather than waiting until you get home, there is an answer to this problem: a new cleaning system called Dust-Aid. This clever and simple solution lets you safely remove dust from the sensor yourself.
The “safely” part is crucial; as any serious digital photographer with a decent camera will attest, even breathing on the sensor fills them with horror – one scratch, one smear, one of anything that shouldn’t be there, and you might as well replace the whole camera. Dust-Aid makes do-it-yourself cleaning really easy.
The kit, which is packaged in a tin that looks rather like the design of an old Band-Aid tin, contains a wand and a pack of ultra-low-tack, sterile, adhesive foam pads. You affix a pad to the wand, set your camera to cleaning mode, and gently and repeatedly apply the pad to the sensor, thereby removing the dust. You can see the details of the actual cleaning process on the Dust-Aid site – it really is simple, and Dust-Aid has some impressive tests to back up its assertion that the system leaves no residue on the sensor. Given that and the fact the kit costs only $39.95, it is really a no-brainer to keep one in your camera bag.
Next week — well, the network world is our oyster. Tell Gearhead about your pearls.
