Keylock and usability in the Palm Tungsten

My Tungsten E2 was dead in the water. It wouldn't respond to any keypresses or gestures. I figured either a disastrous hardware failure or a glitch with some of the old odd software I rely on. I was ready to try a hard reset. To do that one must press and hold the power switch -- a switch I rarely touch because it's known to fail in the T/E2.

That brought up the keylock warning dialog. Keylock had accidentally engaged, that's why nothing worked. I had only to press and hold the powerswitch to get the dialog to disable it. Press and hold turns it on.

Fascinating! Is it really a usability flaw, or more a side-effect of my use of the command buttons rather than the power switch to turn on my Palm? (I do that to avoid wear on the fragile on/off button.)

I've now disabled keylock so it never activates. It was previously set to manual activation.

Update 4/22: On reflection, I think it's a usability bug. With keylock on pressing the power button gives the message that it's on. However, pressing the other buttons that start the PDA do not produce this message. With keylock on, pressing any button that would normally power up the PDA should produce the same keylock notification message.

World's best USB drive enclosure?

I bought this USB enclosure for my work backup drive about a year ago. Not only has it worked perfectly, it's quiet, fan cooled, has a perfect rating from over 280 geeky NewEgg buyers and is still sold:

AMS VENUS DS-2316B2BK Black External Enclosure - Retail at Newegg.com

It may just be the perfect USB drive enclosure. I'm buying two more to support my home backup.

Update 6/1/06: Never fails.

I write something nice about a device and it shows some warts. See the fan update to an earlier post.

Update 9/1/06: No spin down.

This is the killer requirement, but almost all USB enclosures have this problem. Dan's Data tells us that spindown is essential for the survival of consumer hard drives. I have my laptop set to spindown drives after about 15 minutes of non-use, but I don't think the drive ever spins down in this Venus enclosure.

In summary, requirements for an ideal USB/firewire enclosure:

• drive spindown
• extraordinary passive cooling (not sure this is possible)
• high quality large circumference very quiet fan that's easy to replace (if not passive cooling)
• well designed wall wart (I prefer the ones where the transformer is a foot or so from the plug)

I'm still looking, but maybe the Network Storage (NAS) devices will be the real answer.

Update 11/16/08: This is the same drive family as reviewed in 2004 by Dan's Data. I'm looking at this because my backups have exceeded the capacity of the drives in these enclosures. So I'm looking for 1TB drives but, for the sake of convenience, will probably buy then bundled with an enclosure. Now if I could find an enclosure that spins down the drive ...

Greenspun dSLR recommendations

Phil Greenspun's recommendation for an average family photographer:

Canon EOS Digital SLR System

* Canon Digital Rebel XT (Black), $690
* Sigma 30/1.4, $400, for high quality indoor photos without flash and general photography
* Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, $690, for travel
* Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM, $670 for sports (equivalent to 300mm on a full-frame camera), or possibly a telephoto zoom (Canon doesn't make any good telephoto zoom lenses designed specifically for the small-sensor cameras, the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM, $590 is probably the best match)

Personally I'd go for the crummy bundled zoom package, the very inexpensive 50 mm Canon, the very nice Sigma 30 and a decent flash. I'd hardly ever use the zoom, and often switch the 30 and the 50.

MacInTouch: Bonjour for Windows

I've used Bonjour for Windows to locate a few network resources. Worked well, it's a good addition to an XP machine living in an OS X environment.

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

Apple released Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3, noting that the update 'is recommended for all Bonjour users to improve usability and compatibility. This update also improves start up performance of Bonjour on Windows platforms.'

Drag-and-drop disk image creation

Disk images are wonderful. This is elegant ...

Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Drag-and-drop disk image creation

... Just drag your folder onto the Disk Utility application icon—whether that’s in the Dock, the Sidebar, the Toolbar, or just in the Finder itself. Disk Utility will launch, displaying the image creation dialog. Set the type of image you’d like to create, and whether you’d like to encrypt it, and you’re set.

PDF Column selection in OS X

Command-option-select:

Macintouch: Mac OS X 10.4.6

David Barnett

If you need to select a column of text from a PDF you can do this by holding down the and keys while dragging the selection in either Preview or Adobe Reader. This trick also works in TextEdit, Mail and Stickies. This is the same convention that is used in Alpha.

I suspect it is a feature of Cocoa applications using the standard text window and PDF handling.

Yahoo! FareChase: bargains in travel

A NYT report on Yahoo's integration of a travel search into their general search utility was the first I'd heard of: Yahoo! FareChase Tools. They sound pretty interesting. I like the Yahoo Widgets integration; maybe it's time to take a more serious look at all of those Widgets (which started out on OS X).