psyche

So, the obligatory post-25th post. I hesitate to call it Christmas, as that was dubious from the start, what with its fusion into Pagan festivals and all. Anyway, I came out relatively unscathed, with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, a 250GB HP external Hard Drive, a new Nokia 6131 and Command & Conquer: The First Decade - and yes, I preordered Tiberium Wars.

I updated Psyche - for the first time in a while - with some Tiberian Sun stuff and made some aesthetic changes to Science and some more significant (but still aesthetic) changes to About, so that’s all good. I’d like to pick up an Intel iMac and boot Vista in order to run Tiberium Wars, but I’ll see what rolls over at Macworld and check out Leopard before I finalise my choices. I need to get good at Yuri’s Revenge so I can challenge Elliot, damn it!

Anyway, you know the deal. Tiberian Sun is a beautiful game.

Logitech MX RevolutionFor the record, I’m on an old-ish 17″ PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.8. The installation was … well, non-existent - in a good way. I put the mouse into its power cradle and left it charging for a couple of hours after unpacking it. I downloaded the Logitech Control Center (there was no Mac software in the box) and wandered off somewhere… and then sauntered back and checked it out. I plugged the RF dongle into my USB port, slid the slider on the underside of the mouse to the “on” position, and voilà, the mouse was working! I hastened to System Preferences, wherein I increased the sensitivity, configured some options etc. although I might add that my global settings are almost the same as the default ones as they were well thought out. Basically, the mouse is perfect apart from the absence of a left-handed version, which means nothing to me but everything to, say, my brother and my dad. Anyway, the only oddity I encountered was in Jedi Academy (don’t laugh) when I found that switching weapons with the primary scroll wheel always caused me to suddenly look upward. So far I have no explanation - it’s probably something to do with the way I’ve configured the controls in JKA - but until I can eliminate this I’ll use the left/right tilt function of the wheel. Phew. Once you configure the speed you’d like the SmartShift wheel function (the scroll wheel basically goes into a frictionless spin when you spin it at a certain speed) it pretty much becomes a better and more convenient (and fun) version of page up/page down. The mouse is great - works well, was easy to set up, is easy to configure. Unfortunately there’s no left-handed version… hmm… that’s economics for you.
Nokia 6131
Once again, no Mac software or USB cable out of the box - shame on you, Nokia! However the phone is good. It’s not Series 60 and therefore all my crap from my old 6260 is, well, non-transferable. It also takes a microSD card (which I haven’t got yet) - and I thought miniSD cards (which the 6260 took) were small! The font for the clock thing on the outside is really bad. Anyway, this is progress towards a really good Nokia clamshell, but until then, looks like Motorola have that market under control. How’s that KRZR thing doing?

Pax