And this wasn’t just a flash of discoloration.  It hung around long enough for me to take a picture – in fact, it hung around until the next round.  And that black box on the left isn’t something hanging over my tv, it’s a graphical glitch.

They really need to fix the lagginess in gears.  The lag, as well as other issues (such as the game terminating for everyone when the host leaves), would be circumvented if they let the game switch to a new host the way Halo 3 does.

And I hear that RRoD’s are uncommon for Elites, too.  The towel trick helped for a little bit, but as with my first console, it’s kind of stopped being effective.

I am a twitter user.  However, I am not a twitter user in the traditional sense.

Twitter is supposed to be used to provide updates on what you’re doing in your life.  I personally feel that it’s kind of pointless to use it that way.  No one really cares about when the last time I took a shit was.  Really, no one cares about what you do in your real life on a day-to-day basis, and you can only pretend for so long that people do.  That’s also why I dislike personal blogs in general, and why I don’t do frequent updates on this site.  Unless you’re someone famous, no one gives a shit about what you had for breakfast this morning, how many hours you slaved away at work, or how many lines of cocaine the ugly prostitute you picked up under the bridge on the way home from work did.

What I do use twitter for, however, is a sort of mini-blog.  I read a lot of news sites, and many times, I’ll come across a particular piece of news that I want to bring to attention – but I don’t have either the time or the inclination to write an actual post about it.  So I’ll post it in twitter with a couple word comment.  My username on twitter is xiphux (big surprise).  You may have noticed that my twitter feed is actually embedded on the right sidebar on this site.  Or you may not have.

I don’t really follow anybody, don’t have anyone I know following me, and don’t talk to anyone on twitter.  Mostly because I don’t know anyone else that uses twitter.  The occasional @replies I’ll get are junk; they come from ad services that crawl twitter for key words and reply trying to divert your traffic to a certain site.

However, I got a response today that wasn’t complete junk.

My original tweet went as such (links will have their full links instead of the tinyurls):

“fuck overpriced monster cable http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/15/monster-cable-still-evil-will-allow-monster-mini-golf-to-exist/”

Almost a day later, I got a reply from – guess who – Monster Cable.

“@xiphux Chris, would you mind seeing our point of view? There are a lot of false statements out there: http://www.monstercable.com/monster_truth/”

Now obviously, this is part of the new trend of companies trying to jump in on web 2.0 trends such as twitter and facebook as a way to interact and directly support their customers.  Clearly, what Monster was doing was scouring twitter for any mentions of their product in a negative light, and replying, trying to direct people to this “Monster Truth” site they have about their litigation of Monster Mini Golf.  (more on this topic further below)  It’s pretty obvious from taking a look at the MonsterCable twitter account’s timeline.

In case you were too lazy to look, the Engadget article I linked IS ABOUT THE MONSTER TRUTH SITE.  Clearly, I had to have known about the Monster Truth site to have posted the Engadget link in the first place.  I know that in reality they probably didn’t even visit the link I posted, but there may have been a slight unintentional implication that I saw an anti-Monster site on the net and just jumped on the bandwagon of hate, without bothering to read any of the content in the article.  I have a personal beef with Monster (I’ll discuss further below), so I responded a bit snippily:

“@MonsterCable You are treating me as some sort of idiot that has not done his own research already and cannot form his own opinions. Stop.”

It was kind of a test to see if there was anyone at the other end of the line, or whether they just spammed pro-Monster messages on twitter.  I did get a response, actually:

“@xiphux Sorry Chris, we’re not trying to insult you or treat you badly — just hoping your opinions have been formed after seeing both sides”

I ended up firing back one last reply, clarifying my first irritable response:

“@MonsterCable You also linked me to the site that was itself discussed in the link in my tweet; of course I’ve seen it. Hence my response.”

Curiously enough, their attempt at damage control backfired here.  I posted a link to the article about monster once, and forgot about it.  I would not have posted anything here.  But the contact on twitter actually got me to write this post, so in the end, they got the opposite effect.

I kind of hate myself for descending so far into the social networking melting pot of shit that I had, of all things, drama on twitter.  Or even a talk with someone on twitter.  But Monster Cable is a company whose practices really irritate me.

There are two aspects of Monster Cable’s business strategy that bother me.

The first aspect is their prices.  Monster Cables can be hundreds of dollars for a single cable, when other brands will sell the same cables for under ten dollars.  And don’t believe any of that shit about the fancy connectors, single pieces vs soldered connections, etc.  They’re the same cables.  In fact, Monster Cables sound the same as coat hangers.  In other words, a cable is a cable – it doesn’t matter what kind of fancy shit you do to it, it still fundamentally works the same way and therefore getting cheap cables will be exactly the same as getting expensive cables, and anyone that tells you otherwise is either:

• experiencing the placebo effect
• lying
• an asshole
• all of the above

Monster Cable also has an unholy union with Best Buy which I also dislike.  Best Buy almost always exclusively carries three brands of cables:

• Monster
• Dynex, Best Buy’s in-house shit quality brand
• Rocketfish, Best Buy’s in-house slightly-less-shit-quality-than-Dynex brand

Anytime anyone comes in and asks for a cable, the salespeople will give you the most expensive Monster cable they have.

“You need this cable.”

“Oh yeah?  Well, you need to eat a dick.”

It happens all the time with most Best Buy customers, who don’t know anything about Monster’s prices, and assume that 3 feet of HDMI cable always costs $100.  You need to (aside from just grabbing it yourself) specifically ask for a non-Monster cable.

The other problem with Monster is that they’re litigious bastards.  They sue any company or anyone that uses the word “Monster,” claiming they are protecting their trademark.  Some of their targets have been (from Wikipedia):

• Snow Monsters (a kid’s skiing group)
• MonsterVintage, small used clothing store
• Monsters, Inc., an animated feature film
• Monsters of the Midway, a nickname of the Chicago Bears football team
• Fenway Park’s Monster seats
• Monster.com employment website
• Monster Mini Golf

They’ve sued hundreds of companies, solely for having some form of the word “Monster” in their name.  They’ll say they haven’t sued many of these companies.  They’ve only shaken them down for a settlement out of court by threatening a lawsuit.  At that point it’s an issue of semantics.

This is not protecting the trademark.  None of these cases would hold up in court.  You are just shaking down people using lawsuits in an RIAA-like fashion.

How is it that Delta Airlines, Delta Faucets, and Delta Dental coexist?  It’s because claims of trademark dilution only apply when you are in the same industry and there is a risk of confusion between the two companies.  No one is going to confuse Delta Airlines with Delta Faucets – one is an airline and one is a faucet company.  Just like no one is going to confuse Monster Cable and Monster Mini Golf – one is an audio cable company and one is a mini golf chain.  Monster is a dictionary word.

They also tried suing Blue Jeans Cable for producing a cable that infringed on Monster Cable’s patent.  It failed miserably.  Really, the cables were similar in that they were RCA cables, and that’s it.  What they didn’t realize was that the founder of Blue Jeans Cable was a federal litigator for many years, so he essentially gave them the legal equivalent of a “shut the fuck up” and at the same time pointed out that they were using a Bermuda holding company to avoid federal taxes.

Monster’s most recent target has been Monster Mini Golf, and many people on the internet – including myself – have been upset at the way Monster is shaking them down.

There’s no reason for me to reiterate the whole story here.  The first Engadget article in my first tweet (the “fuck overpriced Monster Cable” tweet) has links to the backstory.  And you’ve seen Monster Cable’s “truth” page in the reply I got.  So I’ll leave you with a last link to Monster Mini Golf’s response.

I have one.  More on it when I have time.

According to this story, Comcast has started monitoring blogs and Twitter for complaints about its service.  I just hope they’re doing the right thing and finding these mentions through a Google search or something, and not monitoring the private traffic of Comcast customers.  My hate for Comcast is generally hard to form into eloquent writing (it’s usually along the lines of expletives), but I figured I’d give it a shot in case Comcast is reading.

I recently went through my site and deleted a great many of my old posts that I felt were no longer accurate/applicable/pertinent.  One such post was a “comcast sucks” entry (my second entry about comcast at the time) that somehow ended up being one of the top page hits when doing a search about crappy comcast service.  It was an informative rant about certain methodologies Comcast used back in 2002, but not anymore.

In a nutshell, it was a study of the way Comcast distributed IP addresses.  At the time, Comcast used to require you to buy an extra IP address for each additional computer you wanted to connect to the internet.  It was a few bucks a month for each address – it doesn’t sound like a lot, but the more connected devices you have, the more it adds up.  Back in the days when home router-firewalls were not the common household devices seen today, Comcast used to lie and say that their service would not work with routers, only computers directly connected – therefore, you had to pay for extra IP addresses.

A router is a computer in a box.

When dealing with customer support on the phone, I used to lie and say that my computer was directly connected, and work around instructions – for example, instead of “rebooting my computer,” I’d log into the router admin page and release and renew the WAN IP address.  However, when they sent people out to fix something at my house, they would always disconnect and bypass my router, even if it was a completely unrelated issue and it was working just fine with the router.

The test was just some experimentation with what IP address Comcast assigned you by DHCP, depending on what device you had connected to the computer.  It was found that connecting a router and repeatedly releasing/renewing would give one IP address over and over, but connecting a different router or a computer directly would immediately change that address.  A certain computer would always get one IP, a different router would always get another.  Therefore, the IP address was given based on the machine’s MAC address.  (This test was actually a pain in the ass since most cable modems cache the MAC address of the device connected to it, and will not work if you just connect a different device with a different MAC address.  You have to power cycle the modem by leaving it with the power disconnected for 30 seconds to 1 minute)

However, after some time they realized that people aren’t idiots, and stopped trying to screw people out of money for extra IPs and maintain a facade that routers are the problem.

I have a couple of other miscellaneous stories.

Way way back in the day, Comcast used to use static IPs.  They would issue one static IP for each user.  At some point they decided to switch over to DHCP, and sent out a letter telling customers to switch over to DHCP, and how to do it.

At the time, I was living in my mother’s house, where we had gotten the letter, so I knew to switch it over.  My dad, however, had just moved and did not get the letter for whatever reason.  So when they finally cut out the gateways serving the static IPs, his internet went down and he did not know why.  He called tech support and dealt with them for hours, without getting it to work.  Finally, I went over, switched him over to DHCP, and everything worked fine again.  Took two minutes.

The tech support people apparently did not know anything about the switch, or they would have checked to make sure he was using DHCP.  Why, exactly, would you implement such a significant structural change in your system without telling the tech support people that were going to be dealing with the repercussions of that change?  Do you want your tech people to sound completely lost?

Not only that, but he had to endure brilliant suggestions such as “flip the network cable around.”  As in, you have one end plugged into the modem and one plugged into the computer, flip it so that the end formerly plugged into the modem is now plugged into the computer, and vice versa.

Are you serious?  It’s a bi-fucking-directional cable.  It’s either connected and it works, or it’s not connected and doesn’t work.  Flipping the cable is not going to make anything work better, it’s going to make you look like an idiot.

Another story comes from this last spring semester at school.  I was living in a dorm with university internet service, but I used to spend every day at a friend’s apartment a block away.  He had Comcast.

For some reason, the performance of his cable was really shitty.  Connections would intermittently drop or pause traffic every now and then.  With web pages it was not a problem since HTTP connections generally only last a few seconds.  However with constant connections, it was impossible to maintain a good quality of service.  For example, playing a 5 minute Halo 3 match online was almost impossible.  Either there would be a big drop that would kick us out in the middle of a game, or there would be so many pauses and hiccups in the traffic that the lag made it impossible to play.

It was not a LAN issue, as we tried direct connection and router, with the same results.  It was also not a signal level issue, as the modem was connected as close to the wall as possible, before any splits to TVs.  Upon talking to apartment staff we also found that the cable to the room splits off directly from the tap (as opposed to having a cable running down the hallway and splitting off for each room).  Plus, the cable modem’s perceived signal level was within acceptable range.

We called in the Comcast tech support guys several times – each time being completely unhelpful.  They would come in, test the signal level and find it acceptable, and then shrug and leave.  We had to specifically ask one time for a replacement cable modem – it didn’t help the issue, but it was a test they should have done on their own (checking if the modem was faulty), rather than just saying, “not my problem.”

Not only that, but one time, when the tech support guys were over, my friend’s iPhone was out on his desk.  One of the guys just picked it up and started messing around with it.  Excuse me?  That’s not your fucking property, you’d better put that shit down.  The guy messing with the phone was apparently a trainee that was tagging along to watch how a house call was taken care of, but not only was he touching other people’s property without permission, he wasn’t even paying attention to how things were being done by the real tech guy.  What would have happened if he had broken the phone, or something else?  Would the answer have just been “he’s a trainee, we’re not responsible for him?”

Those are only the stories that I remember.  I cannot even count on my fingers how many times the cable connection has dropped and left us without internet for a day or so.  There was even a period of a few months where the internet went out every time it rained.

In general, Comcast has given me the impression that everyone there, especially their tech support people, are either

1. Incompetent
2. Assholes
3. All of the above

In any technologically advanced industry (internet, computers, electronics, etc), much of what happens in tech support is still seen as “black magic” by people who don’t know anything about the industry.  It is absolutely essential, especially in the high-tech industry, that you have techs that are (aside from not being assholes, which is a blanket rule for all tech support in all industries) competent.  Granted, it’s going to be hard for those techs to impress a computer literate person such as myself, but when you have computer-illiterate people also getting the impression that your techs don’t know anything, guess what?  You’re doing it wrong.

 I also have complaints about things such as overselling bandwidth – that is, cutting off customers that fully utilize the bandwidth they paid for.  It’s unfortunate, but every ISP does this.  I know that no ISP would be able to afford the pipes they have if they didn’t oversell to compensate.  I’d complain about this if I felt it would actually help anything, but it really won’t.  That’s not the problem.  However:

Don’t say it’s unlimited.

As a Comcast customer, your bandwidth is not unlimited.  They say it’s unlimited in all the ads.  They will tell you it’s unlimited.  It’s not.  I have received notices before that I’ve downloaded too much one month, and that they’ll cut me off if I keep downloading like that in the next month – without even telling me what the limit is.  (Over a year before that consumerist article)  When they say it’s unlimited, they’re lying.  My problem is not the limit – again, I understand that the bandwidth is oversold.  I understood that when I got the service.  My problem is the fact that it’s blatantly being advertised as unlimited service when it’s really not, under the assumption that most people aren’t going to fully utilize their bandwidth.

I also have a problem with the whole BitTorrent blocking thing.  In reality they’re already being investigated by the FCC for this so it doesn’t really make sense to go into this for very long.  In case you missed it; Comcast has been actively interrupting uploads on BitTorrents.  They do this by interjecting themselves in the connection between you and the other computer, pretending to be the other computer (which, if I’m not mistaken, is illegal), and making it look like the other computer wants to drop the connection (by sending a forged RST packet; forging traffic is also illegal), thus causing your client to drop the connection.  (You can use sites such as this one to see if you’re being manipulated)  Since this is already fucked up in so many ways and has gotten so much coverage already, there’s no point in me ranting and raving about this forever (although I could).

The funny thing to me, though, is that the only part that really gets manipulated is the upload.  Downloads are not interrupted.  They’re encouraging more downloading and less seeding – i.e. hit-and-run on torrents.  With this model, BitTorrent downloaders are much more likely to become (aside from shitty bittorrent netizens with crappy ratios) heavier downloaders – rather than downloading a few torrents, then waiting and letting them seed to 1.0 or greater, then moving on to more torrents, people are much more likely to download a few torrents, stop them as soon as they are complete, and then download some more.  I know I was like that for a long time after I found out about uploads being blocked.

However, do you know what I do now to keep my ratio up?  Seed more torrents.

The RST packets that terminate the connection are not completely immediate.  In addition, as peers try to reconnect to you as you’re seeding, the connections will recover and continue (and be terminated again, and so on…).  As opposed to trying to seed a large amount of data on one really popular torrent, I try and seed small amounts of data on a large number of torrents.  Suppose my client allows 30 connections per torrent.  If I’m seeding on one torrent, that’s only 30 connections that keep getting severed and recovered.  If I’m seeding on ten torrents, that 300 connections that get terminated and recovered.  As some connections are getting terminated, others are being recovered and new ones are being formed.  I don’t have exact numbers, but guessing that one third of the connections are actually up and running at any one time (while the rest are being cut off), that’s 100 connections still going, as opposed to just 10.

In the end though, it’s really just trying to fight back against bullshit traffic management techniques.  As if the bandwidth limit calls weren’t enough, they had to target BitTorrent traffic in addition.  I also like how they lied about it for a while.  And by like, I mean hate.

I hate the fact that the HD channels have been overcompressed to get more “bang for the buck” to fit extra channels in each QAM.  HD content is already compressed to not be enormous, and any retard that knows anything about compression can tell you that lossy compressing already-compressed content causes massive degradation of the quality.  HD cable/satellite is already limited to 720p/1080i right now, so degrading it even more is approaching SD level.  What are you going to do next, Comcast?  Charge me an extra premium to see un-fucked HD content?

There are so many reasons that I hate Comcast.  I’ve hated them ever since I’ve had them, since before they were even bought by Comcast and were just called @Home.  If it wasn’t for the fact that they have a monopoly on my area and can screw me over as much as they want (and proudly admit it, too), I’d be with a different ISP.  Since the internet is probably abuzz with everyone posting their own Comcast horror stories now, they’ve probably got their hands full, but I’m curious if they’ll try and respond to this.  Maybe they’ll learn that not all their customers are fucking idiots they can just screw over.

I’ll be the first guy switching to Verizon FiOS as soon as it’s available in my area.

In case you missed it: the iPhone activation servers were acting up all day for all current iPhone users trying to activate the 2.0 firmware released today, as well as all the buyers waiting in line for the iPhone 3G that launched today, leaving many many people with unusable phones (in many cases, their only phone). The exact same thing happened one year ago during the original iPhone launch. You’d think they’d have learned from their mistakes and not screwed up twice in a row, but I guess that’s expecting too much.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/11/itunes-activation-server-pining-for-the-fjords/

I have a shirt with this quote, by the way.

It’s a UNIX thing. When people comment on the shirt and ask if it’s a Mac thing, I kind of nod my head dumbly and move on, instead of getting into the details of how OSX is based on BSD.

It was really awesome for the first day.

The second day, it bricked my 360.

The 360 would lock up during the startup screen most of the time. Sometimes, the startup logo would not display at all. Sometimes, I got the Red Ring of Death (three blinking red lights on the ring of light around the power button, with the upper right one not lighting up). Sometimes it would boot properly, but as soon as any 3D rendering started in any game (for example, loading up a saved game in Bioshock), the system would freeze, or switch to displaying static, or switch to a blank screen.

Surprisingly, Guitar Hero kept working (during the times I could boot up the 360). Since Guitar Hero II was just ported from the PS2, the graphics aren’t demanding at all, which I think is part of the reason why it wasn’t freezing. Although doing anything more complex than just playing the game (for example, pulling up a dashboard blade over the game) would freeze it.

Fuck the Red Ring of Death.

“Just send it in to get replaced!” is what you’re saying. Here’s the problem: my 360 has been cracked open and modified. I didn’t do it, someone else did. But I never got any burned games for it, so in reality, all the mod was good for was screwing me out of warranty replacement.

So here I was, with a bricked 360 that couldn’t do anything, no warranty replacement, and not enough money to buy another one. So what was the next step?

The towel trick.

If you don’t know what the towel trick is, I’ll explain briefly here. What you do is you take your RRoD 360, wrap it in a number of towels (about 3 is good), or a heavy blanket, or anything like that that keeps in heat really well. You have to make sure to cover all vents, including the top and bottom, the sides, and the back. Then you leave the 360 on, heating up inside these towels, for about 25 minutes. If the machine shuts down (you can tell by the color of the light on the power brick), turn it back on again and continue to bake it until time is up. Then, unwrap your 360. There should be only two flashing red lights instead of three (meaning an overheat error). Let the machine cool down for 15 or 20 minutes, about the same amount of time you baked it for. Then turn it on.

More details about the towel trick here: http://thexboxdomain.net/2007/01/15/the-towel-trick-fixes-360s/

The initial idea made me really queasy, because as I’ve mentioned before, heat is a computer’s worst enemy (and the 360 is just a computer in a box). But hell, if the 360 wasn’t working to begin with, then what’s the point of being careful with it?

But the towel trick worked. The 360 booted up, and I was able to play Bioshock without locking up the machine.

I’m not entirely sure why the towel trick works. I didn’t invent it, and hell, that’s the last thing I’d think of when trying to fix my 360. But I think it may have something to do with resetting the chips or hardware inside. Perhaps there’s some kind of equivalent to a CMOS in a computer, because when it started up again, the internal clock was reset to November 2005.

Now, this is definitely a temporary fix. The night I first did the towel trick, I had an epic 8 hour Bioshock session right after. The next night, it also worked properly for several hours. Two nights after the towel trick (yesterday), it was bricked again. So I performed the towel trick again, and it works ok, and I played Bioshock for a few hours right after the trick. However, I am pretty certain I’ll have to do it again. I have heard that some people only do the towel trick once and never do it again, but I suspect mine is beyond that level of minor issue, because I have to keep doing it. But at least it gives me a partially working 360 to keep me occupied while I save up for a new one.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a hardcore Linux geek, and is probably astonished. Well, the intel imacs can triple boot OSX, Linux, and Windows, so your point is moot. Macs are essentially PC’s in pretty cases now.

However, I did decide to switch to OSX as my operating system. I will deal with that aspect in another post; this post is specifically for the hardware aspect of the iMac.

This is one of the new Aluminum/Glass iMacs that was released earlier August. In fact, I specifically waited for the refresh before buying. It’s a 24″, 2.8 core 2 duo, 4Gb ram, 750Gb hard drive (because I definitely need that to store all the stuff I had on the 3 320Gb hard drives in the old desktop).

It is a triple boot system – OSX, Vista, Linux. Well, it will be; I have it partitioned to support all three, but I only had the time to install Vista alongside OSX. Getting Linux working on the intel mac hardware is not 100% straightforward, so I decided to save that for when I had more time (i.e. not packing at the same time). Most people don’t like Vista (myself included), but I don’t have any more valid keys for XP, and I don’t really want to have to reinstall if/when vista becomes standard and XP is obsolete. Besides, I only use it for games anyway.

The form factor is nice, for a 24″ computer. It’s cool that there isn’t a separate tower, but that doesn’t really make a 24″ screen any easier to carry around.

The 24″ screen has a native resolution of 1920×1200, which means it supports 1080p. I’ve only seen very minimal stutter on certain 1080p anime rips, and none on others. For example, a 1080p rip of an episode of Moetan (a magical girl anime) doesn’t stutter at all because it’s only 2d animation. A 1080p blu-ray rip of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (which has tons of detailed 3d graphics) skipped a little bit during the really detailed 3d parts. Then again, there are other factors involved there, such as cpu power for decoding the h.264 encodes, video card power, etc.

It’s really quiet, which is a far cry from all my other computers, which sound like turbines. However, with so few fans, it makes me wonder about the lifetime of the computer, or, more specifically, the lifetime of the hard drive. The thing runs fairly hot, because there’s not much cooling (fans, airflow, etc). And, as most overclockers know, heat is a computer’s worst enemy. It will cause CPUs to miscalculate and cause kernel panics, damage hard drive platters and eat data and cause bad blocks. I can put my hand on certain spots of the computer and have to take it away after a few seconds because it’s so hot. I can feel the ambient heat of the machine when I put my hand a foot away from it. And this makes me uncomfortable because the hard drive is dead smack in the center of everything. CPUs can survive some heat, you just let it cool down again. But once a hard drive develops bad blocks, they never go away. I have learned my lesson from failed laptop drives, though, and have backup scripts that keep copies of my data on my server, so it’s not as big of a worry as it would have been without. However, I haven’t played any games yet. I will eventually, but I’m afraid of how the load will bake the internals of the computer.

The video card: All of the new imacs besides the lowest model come with the ATI Radeon HD 2600. Mine has 256Mb VRAM; I think most of them have that. Unfortunately, this is the budget $99 ATI Radeon that gets half the benchmarks of the equivalent line of NVidia Geforces. They don’t allow any video card upgrades in the imacs. I don’t play that many games, and when I do, they’re usually not the top-of-the-line games, but still, it would have been nice to have been able to get a more powerful card. Then again, it goes back to my concerns of baking the internals with heat; more powerful video card means more heat.

The remote: useless, as far as I’m concerned. I’m rarely ever not at the computer, or doing anything in the room but away from the computer that would necessitate a remote.

The camera: also useless, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not so self-obsessed that I would take pictures of myself, and I don’t video chat with anyone (and don’t really want to), and I’m not an online webcam whore, so I don’t use it for anything.

The disc drive: it’s a dvd burner, but I do everything by network, so I don’t use discs at all. The slot loader is kind of cool though, and saves space.

The keyboard: this is the flat laptop-like silver and white keyboard. I got my keyboard and mouse wired because I wasn’t entirely sure if Linux could support bluetooth peripherals (especially during install, you can’t exactly install without a keyboard). Plus, the wireless version of a keyboard doesn’t come with a numpad, which is just stupid. It’s not a freaking laptop keyboard, it’s a wireless desktop keyboard. I’d also be afraid of knocking the mouse off of the desk and losing it under the couch or something if it wasn’t connected to anything.
I like the way the keys feel like a laptop’s. I’ve been using laptop keyboards and ultra slim laptop-like desktop keyboards for a long time, so I’m right at home with it. I’m a bit afraid of popping the keys off and rearranging them into dvorak as usual because I’m afraid I’d break them, though.

The mouse: I hate this thing (the Mighty Mouse) and want it to die a painful death. I’m using it because it’s new and it came with the computer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it sucks. For anyone who doesn’t know what a mighty mouse is, it’s a mouse with one mouse button that pretends to have more buttons (more on that below) and a scroll ball in it to scroll in any direction.
Pros: The scroll ball is cool. First mouse I’ve had with vertical and horizontal scrolling. Though sometimes it feels like you’re rubbing a nipple.
Cons: It’s a one-button mouse. Now, here’s the thing – Apple couldn’t abandon their one button mouse ways, but wanted to support right and left click. So instead of the obvious way of making two mouse buttons, what do they do? Have a touch sensitive system that detects whether you’re pushing the right or left side and reacts accordingly. What the fuck is this shit? Now, if it was actually clicking the left side or the right side and reacting accordingly, I could even believe that. But when you press the button, it detects whether your left finger is touching the mouse – if the right finger is touching the button but the left finger is not, it’s a right click. Otherwise, it’s a left click. Now, here’s the problem – when you have both fingers on the mouse, and you right click, you have to lift your left finger up while you press your right finger down to click. How counterintuitive is that? And when you want to middle click, you also have to lift left finger off the mouse and push the middle (scroll ball). Sometimes I feel like my grandfather, whom I just taught how to use a mouse for the first time a couple years ago, who lifts his entire hand off the mouse and pokes the button when he wants to click. Congrats Apple, you’ve created the bastard love child of a one and a three button mouse. And the touch sensitive technology is probably several times more expensive than three buttons.
There are also two side buttons (which are actually buttons and not a part of the main mouse button amalgamation), for activating Expose. The one on the right is not reachable by me, and is obviously symmetrical for left-handers. The left, on the other hand, is not really under my thumb. So I kind of have to reach up a little awkwardly to reach it. My hands are not really big, but they’re not really small either. (If I had to describe them, I’d describe them as slightly larger than average, and slightly chubby) But the other problem (which will hopefully fade with time) is the fact that the side buttons require a fair amount of pressure to activate. Now, when you’re clicking them, you need to put pressure on the other side of the mouse to keep the mouse from sliding. So, due to the asymmetrical nature of your 4 fingers vs your thumb, where does the rest of your hand logically put pressure? On the right mouse button (or where the right mouse button would be). So when you try and push the thumb button, sometimes you accidentally right click. I learned this one the hard way: I was filling out a form in Safari, and tried to activate expose by the thumb button. I accidentally right clicked. When there are no pages to go back to in the current window, the top menu option is “Reload”, which is what was accidentally selected. It reloaded the page, and wiped all the form data I was in the middle of typing.

But other than the mouse sucking my balls, and the video card being kind of weak, the machine is pretty cool.