Cav's Place

Last night, at 2:53 AM GMT, the signal confirming that New Horizons has come out of hibernation for the final time before its Pluto encounter was received. Of course, in itself that wasn’t a major event and there was little cause for concern, seeing as the spacecraft has spent most of the time since its January 19, 2006 launch in 18 hibernation periods, occasionally waking up to check systems and test various procedures, but the event’s importance is given by what comes next.
After the instruments and systems will be thoroughly verified over the coming weeks, the encounter phase will begin on January 15 and last until some time after the July 14 flyby. Then, after the team will take a well-deserved break in August, the data will be downloaded and analyzed, the problem being that the bit rate that can be achieved from such a great distance is so low that the process will take several months at best. As such, on top of the fact that this is the main factor limiting the total amount of data that the spacecraft will be able to gather, it will be an exercise in frustration to wait for every little new piece of information, knowing it was obtained months before and any hardware or software glitch that may appear during that time may cause data to be altered, corrupted or completely lost.

But this is a post that, due to difficulties with my Internet access, I have to write without being able to search for any additional information, so I guess I’ll stop here for now, especially since I’ll also need to figure out how to post it under these circumstances. After all, the important part will come over the course of 2015 and we’ll be well into 2016 before all the data will be downloaded, so there will be much more to say then, when it’ll all start to ever so slowly trickle in.

Like I was saying last week, my new mouse does seem to have some of the scroll wheel issues that have plagued the series, and while testing it more thoroughly I was at one point able to make it fail to scroll almost half the time. It very rarely does it in normal use, with the finger in the typical position one’d expect it to be when using a right-handed mouse and applying a moderate amount of pressure, and when it does happen it’s not a problem while browsing or reading a document, but an issue obviously exists, it’ll likely get worse and it would be bad enough even now if I’d be using the wheel in games. Since I don’t, however, I decided I could live with it for a while as long as the warranty problem also described in last week’s post was resolved.
The problem with that is that I sent a support message to the shop I bought it from last Friday and received no reply. In addition, on Monday I sent an e-mail to the importer, and while the reply I received confirmed that the mouse has a two-year warranty and pointed me to the service that will perform any repairs if needed, the service request form available on that site did not have ROCCAT among the supported brands, one of which needing to be selected for the request to be valid, and after pointing this out I have received no further reply. As such, on top of simply feeling ignored, I was more than a little concerned that I was being taken advantage of and had purchased an item known to fail, which the shop and the importer had agreed to get each other out of servicing when required.

That’s pretty much where I was Wednesday evening, when it became obvious I’ll need to actually return this mouse in order for anyone to take me seriously. Of course, I had specified in my e-mails that I will do so unless the warranty issue will be solved to my satisfaction, but with every day that passed I was hoping more and more that I won’t actually need to. I mean, in terms of the features it has, the customization options available, the size and shape, the feel of the material most of it is covered with, the button placement or the scroll wheel’s feedback each time you scroll, it’s just about perfect for me. The software has room for a few improvements I likely wouldn’t even have thought of if it wouldn’t have been so good to begin with, but other than that, the only thing that doesn’t feel quite right is the fact that the button above the wheel, which I went back to using as middle button in the standard Windows profile as well, requires significantly more force to push than any other, and I’m already getting used to that as well.
In other words, I can say that this mouse pretty much ticked all the boxes I could think of and invented new ones, so the thought of returning it for a refund and quickly grabbing an A4Tech X-718-BK instead, as that was the “fail-safe” I had set for myself, was becoming increasingly disturbing. Even if the store in question claims to accept returns after up to 31 days, I had to act quickly or I knew I would end up feeling quite rotten when I eventually will return it, or even wanting to simply risk keeping it regardless of the lack of any replies and the resulting potential warranty issues.

Because of that, Thursday afternoon, after coming back from the dentist, where I had gotten another filling replaced, I reset the driver and statistics, uninstalled the software, removed the weights, wiped it a little to remove the few visible signs of use, then replaced it carefully in its box, with everything exactly the way it was when I first opened it, and took it back to the store. Needless to say, I couldn’t quite imagine myself actually saying something and getting the matter sorted out, but I spent my time on the way feeding my anger, so it’ll override the anxiety and at least give me a chance to say something, even if not necessarily what I had rehearsed or anything particularly rational for that matter.
In that state, and after catching the eye of a couple of security guards to point out the bag I was carrying the mouse in before tripping a few alarms as I was passing through, so they won’t call me over to inspect it themselves, I walked to the cashier and said it seems that if I send a message to support I get ignored, so maybe somebody’ll look at me if I come to return a product, and asked where and how to do that, managing to get the words out rather more coherently than I thought I would. Then I said pretty much the same thing to the two guys I found nearest to the area of the store that she had pointed me to, as nobody was where she actually said I should go.
That resulted in some confusion, as they at first thought something was wrong with the mouse, but I said that’s not why I was there, then told them how my messages were ignored and was rather amused when one of them replied that the service office is such a mess even they don’t get replies, much less the customers, so to just ignore that next time and come directly, because they’ll sort me out. Then I somehow managed to explain what the problem was, during which time one left to look for some warranty certificates and therefore was still rather confused when he returned, telling me he’s surprised such a good mouse failed so quickly, so I had to explain to him again that it didn’t fail, or at least not yet.
They were very willing to do the return even after finding the proper form to fill, even seeming to expect it as a result of a poor support experience, and also told me the warranty certificate’s irrelevant, as is the fact that the receipt says six months, since the product clearly has two years and bringing it and the receipt will be enough to have any issue that appears during that time taken care of, though they said they’re quite sure they’re yet to have a ROCCAT returned under warranty. However, one of them said that if it’ll make me feel better to have a piece of paper actually stating it’s two years, he can write it right away, and the other did just that, stapled it to my receipt and sent me back to the cashier to have it stamped again.

So I guess I committed to this mouse now, which also means I’ll get very used to a good thing and when it will fail after the two years are over I’ll need to get something similar or better, because by then I’ll probably set so many things on it and customize the buttons and profiles so well to my needs that using anything that won’t allow me to do the same will likely feel like replacing the keyboard with one with an entirely different layout and no keypad and needing to learn to type all over again. It also means I definitely dread the moment when I eventually will need to send it to have the scroll wheel issue fixed, if it’ll get worse or perhaps towards the end of the warranty period even if it won’t. However, perhaps most of all it means I’ll be worrying about it for quite some time to come, as I have absolutely no idea whether I made the right choice and feel I perhaps shouldn’t have risked buying this in the first place.

With SETI@home currently running out of work units and, according to the following technical news posts, no hope for the situation to be solved this week, I had to look for another project to fill the gap and keep my computer busy. That meant I once again went through the list to see if any “green” ones are available or I’ll have to likely fall back to some other astronomy one, like I did when SETI@home had such issues in the past. I am, after all, planning to take on a “green” one when I’ll get a new computer and set it to split the time equally between it and SETI@home, but there are always very few, if any, of those, so was wondering…
What I found was that one of the projects currently available via World Community Grid is The Clean Energy Project – Phase 2, which is searching for better materials for solar panels, so I signed up for that, by only activating it on the project list. If you want to do the same, you must be careful, since by default all the other projects are selected on your World Community Grid account and this one is not, so you’ll need to change those settings before attaching your BOINC client to the project.

Since that default selection is caused by the project’s system requirements, I would point out that those RAM requirements are exaggerated, as I haven’t seen one work unit use more than about 180 Mb, and currently I have two processing that use about 150 Mb together, though the exact amount varies significantly in time, as does the amount of time required by each work unit. On my old Core 2 Duo E8400 running at the standard 3.0 GHz, I had them complete in anything between three and 13 and a half hours so far without any showing up as invalid, though the listed estimated computation size was similar, so there’s no way to know. The only clear thing is that the project can use a few Gb of disk space if you allow it to download and process multiple work units at once and it will keep your drive rather busy quite frequently, so if possible you may want to set the BOINC data folder on a drive that’s quiet and separate from your primary one, to reduce the performance impact if you allow it to run while the computer is in use.
Check the tutorials on the Clean Energy Project site for how to change settings to let it do that if interested, as by default it’ll only download one work unit at a time. In fact, you may want to check those recommendations either way, and also, if you want to pick a limit for the number of work units that can be downloaded at once, keep in mind that each will be processed by a single CPU core, but also that World Community Grid tends to set relatively short deadlines for the results. What I see right now is ten days.

If any of this sounds interesting and you don’t already participate, you should also keep in mind that, while some projects allow you to register straight from the BOINC client, World Community Grid does not, so you’ll need to register there before attempting to attach to the project. In addition, version 7.4 of BOINC seems to have brought back a bug that existed quite some time ago, before version 7, and which prevents attaching to World Community Grid from the BOINC Manager due to the fact that a user name is required instead of the e-mail address. As such, you should either install, or stick with, an earlier version, or use the command line option, taking the account key from your World Community Grid profile. Remains to be seen when they’ll fix it to no longer require such workarounds.

Meant to write this yesterday, but couldn’t even get started, so here it is now. Admittedly, there are a few more things I can add to it because of this, one of them quite worrying, so it’ll end up bigger than the relatively quick post it was initially meant to be, but hoping not too big, because in that case I’ll find myself stopping again and having to continue tomorrow, especially considering the Europa League matches this evening, and I definitely don’t want that. Don’t know what this week’s second post will be as it is…

Last weekend, I ordered an APC Back-UPS ES 700VA, since it was on sale and the UPS I had needed replacing soon anyway, as it clearly only got this far because it was replaced under warranty at the start of 2013 and either way I remember that the last time the power failed it said it’ll need to shut down the system in two minutes after less than 30 seconds. And interestingly enough, though I expected it to be delivered with some delay, since the sales the shop had generated a large amount of orders and I saw people complaining already, I actually got it on Monday.
That meant I could let it settle while I attended the public meeting which was supposed to mark a restart for the United We Save movement, then plug it in and leave it like that until Tuesday evening, when I actually moved the old one out and plugged my computer into this one, which surprisingly fit inside the desk as well, even though when I measured it seemed like it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, I still can’t seem to be able to unplug the network switch from the power strip, which is a problem I noticed quite some time ago, and I don’t dare pull until something comes apart, so at the moment I can’t plug that into it as well, despite the fact that there definitely are enough battery-powered outlets. Plugged the speakers into one of those not connected to the battery, however, since there’s no reason to want those to stay on if the power fails.

Another thing that was on sale, at another shop, was ROCCAT Kone XTD, which was the mouse I had my eyes on for the day I’ll have to give in and replace my old Logitech MX518. Had the original Kone in my sights ever since first seeing it in an issue of the now-defunct Level magazine which I had purchased for the game it came bundled with and followed the series over the years, as my MX518 was purchased in 2006 and had been acting up since 2012, requiring me to first reconfigure some buttons around the start of 2013, then to revert the changes a while back after another button failed but the one that had failed first appeared to have fully recovered, and lately to just keep struggling with the wheel, which I couldn’t reconfigure to anything else and was increasingly difficult to persuade to work.
Well, this other shop had their sales in their physical locations only during the weekend, but a few products had the sale extended for a few days afterward and therefore had the discounts visible on-line as well, and this mouse was one of them. Now, of course, it’s terribly expensive for a mouse and the sale worked out at 15.9% off, so not too much, but the first thing I noticed was that it was suddenly being reported as out of stock by all shops I was checking except this one, so the manufacturer is probably not sending any more for a while, probably to boost sales of the new Tyon, and they had a few left over and wanted to get rid of them as well and it was probably a good time to grab one. Incidentally, the UPS I bought also seems to be going out of stock just about everywhere these days.

What actually made me decide to ask for the money, however, was witnessing a talk between my parents as I was waiting for the delivery guy to bring me the UPS and learning that they’re spending about as much as I’d spend on the mouse, if not more, on cigarettes each month, and only one of them is smoking… So we supposedly don’t have any money for anything and I cut down on as much as I could in recent months, giving up on the idea of checking out something that may look interesting when I go shopping, at most getting myself some biscuits or some bagels that were on sale as far as sweets and things to munch on go, also throwing away the plan to order some more books this year after cracking that pot, thinking those money will be needed for a replacement which, by the way, still wasn’t bought, yet we’re throwing away that much per month on something so harmful, and which I have to breathe in as well, as she keeps going to the kitchen to smoke instead of staying in her room with the door closed! In that case, excuse me, but I have a list of things I plan to get over the next few months too!
As such, I got the money and Tuesday around noon I went out, because I wanted to actually see the mouse before purchasing it, since if it’ll work well enough I’ll be spending the next several years with my hand on it. Had a route planned that’d have taken me to up to five locations, not knowing where I may still find any, and would have required a lot of walking if I wouldn’t have found it in one of the first three, but luckily, while the first two seemed to only stock lower-priced general-use mice, the third has a dedicated gaming zone and the good gaming mice were in the first shelves as you walk towards it from the entrance.
There were two Kone XTD’s there, so I had a good look at them, tried to see how it’d fit in my hand by placing it on it in the box, inspected the boxes carefully, then grabbed one and checked out, being a bit surprised at getting only a receipt with warranty terms on the back which say six months, though as far as I know the legal period that shops must cover is two years. But I know not to expect services from that store, as they say clearly that they redirect you to the manufacturer in case of warranty issues, and either way, at this price, if it’ll need servicing within six months or two years it’s the same problem. I mean, I definitely expect it to last at least as long as the MX518 did! Anything less will be quite a problem.

And this is pretty much what I’d have written if I’d have posted this yesterday, and already about twice the size I thought it’d be, so there goes the quick post I mentioned in the first paragraph. It’s also what I managed to write before the day’s first match, so I’ll need to add what I still have to add and quickly finish this at half time and then see about looking over it and making the necessary changes and additions later.

Back to the mouse, after toying with it for two days, I can say I definitely like the software and all the options it offers, though I could use a way to assign starting a program to a button directly instead of needing to assign a keyboard shortcut to the program and then the shortcut to a button. But at the moment I’m yet to think of enough actions to assign to fill even the generic Windows profile I made, and the only other one I created so far has the buttons assigned the same way I had them on the MX518, so with the shift function disabled to have a fifth button in its place, the button above the wheel as the middle one and clicking the wheel set to do nothing, so I won’t need to change any settings. When I’ll install something new, I’ll see about making another one to take full advantage of its functions in a game as well.
Yes, that means that now I’m using wheel clicking as middle button for the standard Windows profile, since on this one it seems to work without accidentally scrolling at the same time, with some care. I may tilt it while pressing, but that usually doesn’t do anything, so it’s all right. Definitely won’t work in a game that’ll use the middle button, so that’s why I have that other profile there and I am worried by the fact that the button above the wheel is particularly difficult to click, in the sense of requiring significantly more force than any other, but I’ll get used to it, the same way I’ll get used to the slightly different pointer speed and lack of acceleration, since no matter what I tried I couldn’t quite make it match the way the MX518 moved and muscle memory keeps making me miss what I mean to click at the moment. It’s already happening less than on the first day, however.
In addition, I definitely like the way it feels in my hand, the surface texture and the amount of feedback I get from both wheel and buttons, except that one I mentioned. The lights are a nice touch as well, but the cool factor already wore off and as of last night I already left them off for the default profile, only being on for the other one to make it obvious when it’s switched. I do find it rather limiting that only up to three programs can be set to automatically select each profile, however.

The one thing that worries me, on the other hand, is that the wheel slipped a few times so far. It definitely doesn’t register the first scroll in one direction that comes right after a scroll with shift pressed, which I set as page up or down, in the opposite direction, and that’s quite obviously some sort of software issue, but I only noticed that after starting to test all sorts of things after the wheel simply slipped a few times, failing to scroll when I moved it, and if I was careful I could actually feel in my finger that something didn’t connect as it should have when that happened.
It happened quite a few times last night while browsing, plus once while scrolling through a text document and twice more, one after the other, while scrolling through a PDF, but otherwise I kept scrolling in both directions with varying amounts of pressure, tilting and clicking for a good ten minutes straight last night and, albeit not for so long, several other times since then, and I didn’t notice it happening again. Now I’ll need to keep pushing it these days and see how things stand, because I have 31 days to return it and, quite frankly, if there are obvious problems with it at this price, I’m tempted to do that and get back to my failing MX518 for a while longer, then see what else I can do.

Still, I definitely hope it won’t come to that, because I really like it. Plus, I guess I made a tiny additional accidental sacrifice for it, as in on top of the fact that I went to look for it in stores and actually purchased it that way instead of ordering on-line, so maybe that will count for something. I’m referring to the fact that, after leaving the store with the mouse in a bag, I put the bag under my jacket and carried it that way all the way back instead of simply holding it, and that and the sweat resulted in the paint coming off the plastic bag and ending up on my sweater. It mostly came out after washing, but you can still notice some of it, and that is the thicker sweater I have, so it may be a problem in certain situations. Definitely worth it if this will work well and last long enough though.

With politicians quite scared of what happened Sunday, those in top positions are rushing to figure out who or what to sacrifice to hold on to their own positions, meaning that some rather interesting decisions have been taken this week. As such, we must press this momentary advantage and various protests and other actions are being planned, which makes the fact that I’ve been fighting a cold since November 10 quite inconvenient. Still, I do seem better today, so I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, try to rest some more even though I woke up after barely three hours today and then couldn’t get back to sleep, and at least attend the one planned for tomorrow, despite skipping the one that’ll take place this evening.
The thing with this latter one is that, as plenty of others planned these days, it puts the resignation of the Prime Minister and Government at the top of the list of demands, and I think that may allow them to get away with it too easily when they didn’t even come up with next year’s budget plan yet and everyone’s wondering how will they pay for everything they promised before the elections. Plus, of course, the usual problem of not knowing who to replace them with, as I haven’t seen suggestions coming from activists. So I’m not exactly keen on spending an evening in the chilly rain for that right now, especially not when I already have a cold.
On the other hand, the one scheduled for tomorrow has to do with a project to build a multipurpose hall in a nearby park, so I do want to attend even though, after having repeatedly stressed that the hall will be built and harshly dismissing any and all complaints, the sector’s mayor suddenly went back on that decision and said another location will be found for it, also remembering that he promised to expand the green spaces in the sector when he was elected. However, while it will likely reduce the turnout, this doesn’t make the protest pointless, as the larger issue is precisely what he’s been doing to the green spaces, such as paving everything, killing most trees one way or another to have an excuse to cut them down, authorizing constructions in parks and so on, which means this protest has a clear, specific purpose and demands real solutions now that they seem afraid enough to listen for a little while.

I guess that’s about it right now, since I haven’t been doing much of anything otherwise. Maybe I’ll get back to playing something, but I haven’t in over a month, so I have no idea how that will go. The fact that I have once again lost hope in GOG.com after yesterday’s two releases were regionally priced and not announced as such in any way, one of them, that I actually was interested in, being flat priced at first and then switched to regional pricing a short time later without as much as a comment, probably doesn’t help when it comes to getting myself in a gaming mood either. Seriously, if anyone knows of a small shop that tries to be what GOG.com used to be, following the DRM free, no regional pricing and excellent customer support principles and cultivating a core audience instead of sacrificing it on the altar of growth, do let me know, all right?