Siggy’s Rants

Yeah, yeah. I know I promised a review of a printer I had recently bought, but I’ve been busy. Keyboards are easier to review, anyway! Up today is the Cherry G84-4100.

This little mechanical key switch keyboard is very interesting in case because of its extremely small form factor. To put it in perspective, it has a length almost exactly that of a standard letter sized piece of paper and just over half the width.

Here are some statistics from the official website.

	-	Uses mechanical keys from our ML series with high-precision key action; small physical dimensions: Keycaps arranged in 18 mm grid, Exceptionally space-efficient, Lightweight, LED indicators for Num Lock, Caps Lock, Scroll Lock
	-	Reliability: MTBF: 170,000 hours
	-	Individual keys have long service life: 20 million key operations

They aren’t kidding when they say lightweight and exceptionally space-efficient. Anyway, on to the pictures!

This is definately a no-nonsense keyboard, here. It lacks the multimedia buttons that plague most current non-professional keyboards and has only the bare essentials. The keys are extremely uniformly spaced and not a single inch is spared. Even the LED indicators aren’t given any extra room up top. So much space has been saved that F11 and F12 share their position with F1 and F2 and the numpad has been moved to the position most laptops use. I don’t use the numpad too often, so the function key will likely never be used except for those rare occasions where F11 and F12 have to be used.

The keyboard itself is made in the Czech Republic and conforms to all major standards. No real surprise. You can see that the keyboard itself is a relatively low draw device at 100mA, as well.

Again, very little space has been wasted in this keyboard’s design. At the bottom, there’s only barely enough room for the screw holes and at the top there’s a tiny bit wasted because of the space the LED indicators take up. The internals aren’t really that exciting, but who usually opens their keyboards anyway?

On the back, you can see the individual solider joints for the mechanical switches. Overall, the PCB is very professionally made without wires strewn everywhere. No sloppy joints and very solidly built. Of course, Cherry’s logo graces even the internals as can be seen on the bottom of the PCB.

And finally, to the thing that makes this keyboard so special. The individual mechanical keys use Cherry’s black stemmed linear switches. Rated at 20 million depressions each, they’re built to last. The linear switches have no snap to them and are relatively quiet. When depressed, the switch is uniform all the way until they bottom out, giving no indicator of when they’ve actually actuated.

Because of the limited space, the actual stroke distance is kept low, so it doesn’t take much to depress each key. Personally, I like it just because it doesn’t take a heavy touch to activate each key and, once trained over a period, I’ve been able to type without bottoming out the keys. There is a bit of a learning curve, however. Coming from a full sized keyboard, my hands have been constantly misaligned, despite the raised F and J keys to help touch typists. It doesn’t take long to get used to, however. After only a few days, I’ve regained most of my typing speed and have actually improved slightly.

Overall, I’m very impressed with the Cherry G84-4100, despite its rather boring name. Elegant, compact and, most of all, designed with reliability in mind. Its compact size has won me over and it’s saved me quite a bit of desk space!

I found a nice item on eBay very recently. It’s a Dell keyboard sporting mechanical key switches instead of the traditional rubber dome crap. I couldn’t really dig up a lot of information on the keyboard itself, but I can say that it’s a pleasure to type on. Not as stiff as my Model M, but not as light as a typical keyboard. The feedback I get is very satisfying.

Time to stop talking and post some pictures!

Front and back. Nothing really special here. This is after I’ve cleaned it up a bit. A little bit of alcohol and a cotton swab works great for this.

Notice the channel for the cable so you’re not screwed on cable length no matter which side your computer is on. It may be hard to see, but a lot of the letters have been worn and are faded. Everything except function keys and special punctuation have suffered this fate. Time to crack this baby open!

Nothing really special looking here, though you can tell that the internals take up a LOT less space than what the external casing would imply. I’m thinking of modding this little baby into something that saves quite a bit of space…

Let’s get a closeup of one of the switches, shall we?

As you can see, each key is given its very own little mechanical switch. Very novel and very tactile.

And a closeup of the label on the back.

The P/N and S/N are indeed blank. No trick of the camera there.

Well, there you have it! Overall, it’s a very tactile keyboard, though not as clicky as a Model M. It’s a pleasure to type on and it still feels like it has many years left in it.

Recently, I decided to get rid of the hassles of wireless and bought a corded mouse. Not just any corded mouse, however. I purchased a shiney new Razer Copperhead!

Before I add any nice pictures of the product, let’s see what the company says about its technical specifications.

• 2000dpi Razer Precision™ laser sensor
• 32KB Razer Synapse™ onboard memory
• 1000Hz Ultrapolling™ / 1ms response time
• Seven independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
• On-The-Fly Sensitivity™ adjustment
• Always-On™ mode
• Zero-acoustic Ultraslick™ Teflon feet
• 16-bit ultra-wide data path
• Up to 45 inches per second and 20g of acceleration
• 7080 frames per second
• GlowPipe™ non-slip side rails
• Ergonomic ambidextrous design
• Ultra-large non-slip buttons
• Gold-plated USB connector
• Seven-foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
• Approximate size: 130mm (length) x 66mm (width) x 41mm (height)

Impressive for a simple periphreal, eh? The one I purchased happens to be in Chaos Green, though it also comes in Tempest Blue and Anarchy Red. And now, time for the pretty pictures.

The two sides of the Razer Copperhead are completely symmetrical down to the buttons, 7 in all. At first glance, the side buttons didn’t seem as if they’d be very comfortable at first. Luckily I was wrong as every button except the ones on the far side are perfectly accessable and fall directly under fingers or a thumb.

The DPI on the fly buttons are, by default, on the right side of the mouse. The instructions state that the official drivers and software must be loaded for this feature, but Microsoft Vista happens to have an updated driver that allows the on the fly changing without installed software. I installed the software anyway, however, and was surprised to find out just how powerful it is.

As you can see, the software offers a variety of options such as the ability to set a small macro of up to 5 keystrokes to any button as shown by the right flyout. On the left, we have options for sensitivity, the DPI on the fly changing as well as double click speed and the option to completely turn off Windows’ mouse acceleration feature.

Under normal Windows use, the 2000 DPI setting is far too sensitive, though that’s not where this feature shines. At 800 DPI, you have a well balanced mouse for browsing the Internet, photo editing, et cetera. At 1600 DPI, the mouse begins to become an extension of the hand, allowing you to very precisely aim and fire off a round in FPS games.

At 2000 DPI, however, I found it to be a tad too sensitive. The simple beating of my heart was enough motion transferred through my arm to activate the sensor and almost defeated the purpose of insane accuracy. In games, I found the 1600 DPI setting to be most comfortable, no matter the genera.

Contrary to other reviews online that have stated that the laser sensor is inadequate for extremely fast gameplay, such as where a flicks of the wrist are common, I’ve found that I cannot get the sensor to go into a malfunction state. Try as I might, no matter how fast I flicked my wrist, the cursor always went to exactly where I had wanted it to.

Something I find questionable is the ability to change the polling rate. It’s stated that a 125Hz polling rate is the equivelant of an 8ms “lag”. Unfortunately, even updating at 125 times per second, if a game isn’t displaying faster than that, there’s no true benefit to having an increased reporting rate much less 500 or an absurd 1000 times per second. In short, a game running at 60 FPS won’t benefit from a cursor reporting in at even 125Hz as far as I can see.

In all, I give this mouse a 9/10. The mouse itself is extremely responsive and the utility program is very tweakable. I question the usefulness of a polling rate of higher than 125Hz, however, and I question why it should be a major feature. Apart from the minor squabble, this mouse comes highly recommended from me.

When I said “tomorrow” in the previous post, I actually meant “next month sometime when I can be hassled with it”. Anyway, here’s the moneyshot of my new cellphone.

I’ve been using Microsoft Windows Vista for a few days now, and I have to say that I rather like it, compatibility aside. A few things don’t work too well with it such as my printer, which HP has decided to drag their asses on making drivers for. Luckily, their “solution” is to load up a driver for a different printer in a makeshift way to avoid developing stuff for users. Way to go for cutting a few bucks, HP.

The part about Vista that I absolutely adore is the Games browser. Any installed games are placed here and it gives you a single place to run any game you have from. Luckily, Vista Business, the version I have, doesn’t come preinstalled with any of those games such as Solitaire, Hearts, Minesweeper, and the like. Just to give you an idea of what the browser looks like, here’s a shot of it in action.

It gives you all sorts of useless information that adds a cool factor to it. As a test, I even installed some older games such as Tribes 2 and Starcraft and it detected them flawlessly. As you can see, some newer games are listed as well, so the list Microsoft has is quite extensive.

One of my close friends bought me a cellphone when he heard about all the trouble I went through with the cellphone company recently. Alltel can suck on my white wang, those pretentious cocksucking assholes. Fuck them and fuck their service.

Anyway, here’s some screenshots of the modded software. Pictures of the phone will ensue tomorrow, likely.

So, I got an iPod Shuffle G2 today. It’s an extremely tiny little device!

Here are some comparisons to it to a quarter.

The audio quality is excellent and iTunes and Winamp both detect it without hassle. Talk about an excellent stocking stuffer!

Alrighty. Here are some pictures of the hard drive as well as the computer it’s in and its specifications.

First, we start off with a top view of the drive.

And then the bottom.

Here’s the computer and desk layout that will be used for most, if not all, of the components I may review.

The machine itself is as follows:

Kingwin SK-523BK

Antec TruePower 430

Lite-On SOHR-5238S 52x CD-RW
Sony DW-Q30A 16x DVD-RW

Abit AN8-Ultra

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

eVGA GeForce 7800GT

The performance results are in the previous post.

I’ve been pretty busy as of late with both classes and work, but I’ve had a chance to remote into my machine to get a couple of nice benchmarks for everyone to see. May as well pony up the goods!

As you can see, the performance is pretty nice, in all regards. CPU utilization is fairly low and raw read speeds are exceptional. Had these been even larger drives, I wouldn’t be surprised to see even higher speeds. In terms of read speed, these two drives are about on par with a 150GB Western Digital Raptor. Access times will always be higher, of course, but unless you’re running a computer in a server environment the gains will be minimal.

I should have some pictures of the drives themselves up pretty soon, so stay tuned! Unfortunately, they’re fairly plain. If you’ve seen one SATA drive, you’ve seen them all more or less. Raptor X excluded.