A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

Color pickers

07 January 2004

I’m a sucker for color pickers – Don Park’s Daily Habit - Mad About Colors – you’d think my site colors would look better. I’m like the bad golfer who keeps buying the latest trimetal, titanium, depleted uranium, carbon fibre club – I’m sure if I just improve my gear, my skills will automatically improve.

Luxury Watches

06 January 2004

It’s Comeback Time for Luxury Watches – I fell in love with Audemars Piguet pieces thru an advertisement and sent away for their catalog. Now that’s a luxury watch – some of them are priced at ~$400K. I concluded that, at that price, someone would cut my arm off as I walked down the street, just to steal the watch.

Wishing for scriptable devices

05 January 2004

Rael Dornfest via MobileWhack: “I’d like to see consumer mobile devices – palmtops, hiptops and handsets –scriptable” – hear hear. Not just mobile devices of course but my tivo box, my comcast settop box, etc….

Tong is looking at 19" monitors

05 January 2004

Tong Family Blog: 19” LCD Monitors – me, i’ve gone 20 now with the Dell 2001FP and I can’t go back. the display looks really great with the ati 9800 on my one machine – not quite as sharp with my oem nvidia machine. but still wonderful. A little more than rich wanted to spend but worth it. My 15” at work looks totally pathetic now.

KVMs with Audio

05 January 2004

I’m trying to find a good KVM with Audio for home use. I’ve started with this – Belkin OmniView SOHO Series KVM Switch with Audio, USB and VGA – and while it works largely as promised, it has some real drawbacks. The video and audio switching are fine. But the keyboard/mouse/usb switching is troubled – the box is basically a USB 1.x hub which is switched back and forth between machines. And this creates some problems.

  • it is usb 1.x and not usb 2.0 which creates all kinds of annoying error messages because I have downstream usb 2.0 devices.
  • the usb hub introduces latency in kb/mouse interactions which is at time noticeable in games.
  • the hub just plain drops some kb input – for instance if you hold down the control key for more than 5 seconds, the hub forgets. really bad if you are trying to select a lot of messages in your inbox for instance.

So i can’t recommend this box. I may try the PS2 model and see if it improves the latency and keyboard problems – it may since i think the ps2 switching is just an electrical switching and doesn’t try to get fancy with a usb hub. What I’d really like tho is a usb2.0 based kvm with low latency and no keyboard drops. Google points toward some usb2.0 kvms but they don’t have audio. Maybe i should just get one of these kvms and have a separate switch for audio?

Out of chicken at the groceries

04 January 2004

Stopped at PCC Natural Markets and QFC today. Not a chicken breast to be found, very little packaged chicken at all. Just odds and ends. Plenty of beef on hand tho. I’d have to say that mad cow worries are definitely affecting consumer behaviour.