I’ve longed for a decent small keyboard for many spins round the sun now. It seems like a simple thing. Make a keyboard with no number pad with a bunch of keys on it suitable for a Windows computer. Simple! It should be wired with a USB connector because I don’t want to fiddle with batteries or yet another USB wireless dongle. The keys should be decent with good tactile feedback. They should also be full-sized. It should do these things and take up as little space on my desk as possible.

Enter the XGene Multimedia Mini Keyboard. Take a moment to have a look at it.

That’s it. Sitting above my Apple Wireless keyboard. You’ll note that I have different requirements for my PC keyboard compared to my Mac’s, otherwise, I’d just use one of those. So far, keyfeel is pretty solid. It requires a bit of force to type on this thing. I’ve had a couple of keys not register because I wasn’t typing hard enough. They keys themselves get a little tiny when you get out to the edges of the board. The outside right edge is bordered by home/page-up/down/end which means that they’ve shrunk the backspace, backslash and enter keys to accommodate. The same goes for the keys on the left, the tab, caps lock (now a control key) and escape keys are pretty smallish.

Backspace is probably the worst of the bunch because it’s surrounded by a home key, the equal sign, and the decades old and mysterious PrtSc, Scroll Lock and Pause Break keys. Trying to erase a mistake often leads to more mistakes and funny beeps. The backspace key should probably cover the whole top right of the keyboard the way I type.

It doesn’t get much better at the bottom of the keyboard. The space bar is small and shifted just far enough to the left that I often hit the tiny little “alt” key next to it, popping open a menu. Windows key, Context menu key, Ins and Del live next to it, all competing with the arrow keys. Yes, it is a little cramped.

We’ll see how it works for gaming though. The main keys are normal-sized so I’m hoping they won’t hinder my use of the ASDW keys. I’m already considering prying up some of the worst offenders around the edges.

Preliminary review: 3 stars.

Annoyed by the inability to see more than 3GB with Windows 7 32 bit, I decided it was time to enter the world of 64 bits on my PC. I had to flip a chipset option to allow memory remapping through the northbridge controller. Having done that, my memory performance is no longer the bottle-neck on this machine. That honor falls to the lowly hard-drive. Maybe I need an SSD.

taking delivery of a tube of Arctic Silver. In its very own box.

The goal

See how much I can improve my LGA775-based system for $500. The motherboard is getting a little old, but they’re a pain to switch. Jumping up to a more modern i7-powered board is going to be a much pricier proposition and probably require completely new guts. Power-supply and motherboard. Plus, I’d probably feel more compelled to look at a 5000-series ATI card or comparable Nvidia. The whole prospect of going up to an i7 was more of a hassle (and money) than I really wanted.

The parts list

• Intel 3.06GHz Core2Duo E8400 (Wolfdale)
• 4GB Corsair XMMS DDR2 RAM @ 1066MHz
• MSI 9800GT graphics card

Installation was shockingly easy, and once again I had nice thoughts about my Lian-Li PCV600 case. It’s not the quietest, but it sure is nice to work in.

The biggest issue I had was the RAM. My BIOS firmware was a couple of years (!) out-of-date. That it was able to use the processor at all was a bit of a surprise. At boot-up, my machine sat on the ASUS logo screen but wouldn’t go any further. There were no extra beeps during POST so it seemed to be working. On a hunch, I pulled the new RAM and put my old, crusty RAM back in and that got me into the OS.

There’s something vaguely troubling about flashing your firmware with a tool that looks like Winamp from 1998. Telling me it’s connecting to ASUS’ servers in Taiwan is always exciting. What are they installing? Am I a new node in a botnet? Windows Defender didn’t complain though, so it must be safe!

After updating, I was able to put my new back RAM in and was rewarded with Windows telling me I had 3 whole gigabytes to play with. I reran the Performance tool, and this is what I got.

Yup. A whopping .1 increase, thanks to my marginally faster RAM.

The Real Deal

Well, those numbers may not be stellar, but there’s a significant boost in processor performance. Playing Dawn of War II felt noticeably zippier last night with no slow-downs or hitching as I’d experienced before. I was able to increase my resolution from 1600×1050 to 1920×1200 with improved framerates. The machine feels a fair bit snappier.

This is a fairly subjective measurement, but without bothering to go through the whole XBench rigamarole, this is what I get. Was it worth it? You bet!

A quick search found this superuser suggestion to install the Synaptics touchpad driver from the Ubuntu repository. Searching in the package manager turned up libsynaptics and gsynaptics so I installed them both.

Before this would work, I needed to create a file according to the instructions found Kogan Agora Netbook blog:

sudo vim /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

Once opened, it needed to have the following as its contents:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

I have no idea of that version number is correct, but this allowed me to move on. Additionally, in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I added the section (via sudo vim):

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
EndSection

after rebooting (or logging out, or restarting X), you can then run gsynaptics from gmrun or the terminal. Even better, assign a new entry to the OpenBox menu to execute gsynaptics from a System menu item labeled Touchpad. Once you have that, you can decrease the sensitivity of the touchpad, add and tweak acceleration values and modify tapping behavior. It works really well and has radically reduced the number of accidental mouse actions. This tweak alone has made the Crunchbang netbook experience much much better.

Dell Mini 10 with Ubuntu – touchpad issues – Super User.

Out of the box, Cunchbang is a fairly minimalist desktop environment, using Openbox and Tint as the desktop and window manager.  A bit of tweaking to get menu sizes reduced and it takes up even less space on your desktop. Since vertical space is at a serious premium on this thing, the biggest challenges were getting Firefox and Thunderbird configured to make the most of the tiny screen.

On Firefox, I’m using Full Screen (not necessary in Firefox 3.6, of course), Tree Style Tabs and a combined menu and toolbar to clear up some pixels. Reduced font-sizes from the default make browsing more manageable even when I’m not in full screen mode.

Thunderbird 3.0 was a bit trickier. In the advanced preferences pane, under the config editor, set mail.tabs.autoHide to True to get rid of the tabstrip if there’s only one tab showing. I also found the header area in the message pane was taking up a lot of room, so I installed the Compact Headers extension to take care of those. You will need to disable compatibility checking through Nightly Tester Tools or the config editor to get it to work with Tbird 3. (Thanks to wswmk in irc for the tips!)

Whether I could live with this as my main portable is another matter. The trackpad on the thing is pretty poor, requiring a really light touch to tap-to-click. There are no real buttons on it, but the two bottom corners act as left and right mouse clicks if you press the trackpad down — it clicks. Because the pad itself is so sensitive, this invariably moves the pointer off of your target and you’ll get a misclick. Even more amusing is the right-side scroll wheel. If you’re on the desktop in Crunchbang, this is interpreted as a “jump to workspace” action, randomly skipping you through your desktops. It took me awhile to realize I was doing this accidentally and that it was a feature.

Other interactions between OS and hardware are pretty good. With the exception of networking. Connecting to a wireless network is a bit of a crapshoot. I can connect at home on a wirless G network with WPA2 passphrase, but it takes too long to negotiate initially. I could not connect to my parents’ network after multiple attempts and they have a basic WEP passkey. I installed wicd as my default network manager after failing with Network Manager and it seems a little better, but still slow.

In short, networking in Linux still kind of sucks.

But sound works! And the included A/V apps in Crunchbang are decent if not awesome. VLC works really well and after struggling with SMB to get network shares working, I can even stream stuff off of my fileserver. Also includes Rhythmbox and Audacity among other open source audio-video apps. No Songbird though?

Overall, it’s a fun little machine to hack around on. Screen’s probably too small to do any development, but works just fine as a little internet toy or writing machine. That it’s entirely an opensource software stack helps too. I wrote this post on it, and genuinely like the keyboard (after flipping the Caps Lock and CTRL keys). It sure is portable.

Not wanting to fry another graphics card, I decided a new case was in order. I really liked the case I had, a Lian-Li PC-V1200 — now replaced by the PC-V1100? Hard to tell because like all “high-end” products, their website is particularly awesome. Anyway, I remembered seeing another case that had a drilled front and back similar to the PowerMac/MacPro design.

Shopping around online, I found a PC-V600 case listed at NCIX.com in BC. For whatever reason, I had it in my head that this was an OK company to deal with online, and put in my order for a black V600. That was on a Sunday night. Monday rolled around and I checked the status page a few times. I believe it was on Tuesday night that the status was finally updated with a credit card validation error, asking me to call them. I had given them a different phone number than what the bank had, no biggie. The customer service guy assured me that the order would be processed the next day.

The day came and went, my order was shown as “verified” and payment was processed.

Days passed…

A week later and still no shipment. I used their online support form to write a “hurry up and ship my case or I’m walkin’” message. I watched the clock, waiting for 9:30am PDT to roll around then commenced a campaign of phone calls to their support staff which I eventually got a hold of. It went something like this:

<me> “Hi, where’s my case?”

<NCIX> “That case isn’t in stock. It’s back-ordered.”

<me> “That’s not what your ‘online availability’ says on your web catalog.”

<NCIX> “That doesn’t always get updated.”

<me> “Kind of useless then, isn’t it?”

<NCIX> “meh!”

<me> “Thanks for telling me!”

<NCIX> “. . .”

<me> (speaking slowly and loudly now despite the other’s excellent grasp of English) “DO. YOU. HAVE. ANY. IN. SILVER. ?”

<NCIX> “I don’t have a SKU for that.”

<me> “DO. YOU. NOT. HAVE. A. COMPUTER. IN. FRONT OF YOU??!!”

<NCIX> “It’s in a different system.” (I can hear him filing his nails or something, possibly chewing gum at the same time. I imagine him making a wanking gesture to his customer service pals and mouthing, “I’ll be able to go for a smoke in five”)

<me> “LET ME LOOK IT UP FOR YOU”

I proceeded to look up the SKU for the “Customer” “Service” “Rep” on HIS OWN WEBSITE and relayed it to him over the phone. He told me they had one. I asked him to prove it to me by shipping it. He said it would take a day or so for them to process the order change and it would be shipped shortly after that. That would be excellent, I gagged, and hung up as a droplet of hot oil begin seeping out of my forehead just like Zorg when he was talking to the sphere of infinite evil in The Fifth Element.

I waited.

I received a shipping notification a few days later. A week after that, my case arrived. Ordered June 22nd. Arrived July 11th, 20 business days later. Had I not asked them why I had no case, I would likely still be waiting for a back-ordered black case and taking the side panel off my PC to enjoy an exciting game of Never Winter Nights 2. I will not be ordering anything from them again.

In any case (har), the new box is very nice, a little loud with all the fans spinning, but it keeps my chips nice and cool. Also, it looks bitchin’.

THE END

1. iTunes connectivity – it already hooks into the iTunes Music Store via wifi, why not allow it to browse and playback music from shared iTunes libraries on the LAN? I would love to be able to access my music or friends’ music when I’m visiting and don’t have a laptop around. Syncing tunes wirelessly and sharing tunes would also be fantastic additions.
2. Internet Radio – having the ability to access the same channels you can from iTunes would be huge and really broaden the amount of media you have immediate access to.
3. Podcasts – same as above, being able to browse the podcast directories or subscribe to feeds would be awesome, especially when on the road and not connected to a computer.
4. Airtunes – playback to a home audio system with an Airport Express or AppleTV hooked up to it. The remote control is the media.
5. TV shows – being able to download tv shows or movies from the iTMS would be a really cool addition.

Like I said, these are probably obvious ideas. I’m not saying that the device is crippled as it is, far from it. It works really well and the integrated software is quite impressive. Having a full IMAP client and calendaring software that I can sync with my desktop is pretty amazing. Hopefully Apple doesn’t keep the capabilities limited to downloading content from the iTMS and at some point adds some other options for getting music onto (and out of) the device. I can’t wait for the SDK to land.

listening to: Weird Fishez by AmpLive from the album Rainydayz Remixes