Replace your mousecable

I recently tried to purchase a Logitech LS1 mouse from Logitech. After not hearing from them for 3 weeks, I ordered the same mouse at Dynabyte and got it within 5 days. Suddenly Logitech woke up and sent me another LS1 mouse. Because they don’t react to mails or calls, I had a spare LS1 to play around with.

I decided to replace the long, rigid cable with a short supple one. Here’s how you can do that, too.

Philips Wake-up Light review

With the “Wake-up Light”, Philips has taken the “dawn simulator” from “alternative/hippie” to “trendy”. Cleverly marketing it as simply a pleasant way to wake up, making it available in many stores and adding “trendy” pricing, Philips has a lot of people looking into one of these. But is it worth the money?

Philips Wake-up Light HF3461/01 Manual

For some strange reason, Philips doesn’t provide you with a manual when you buy a Wake-up light. For those of you who want to download the full manual, you can do so by browsing through the directory at:

http://www.p4c.philips.com/files/h/hf3461_01/

The filenames are a bit strange, but looking at the last three letters in the filename will generaly give you a manual containing the language you can read. (“fra” for France, “nld” for the Netherlands, etc.). The Manuals describe the models HF3451, HF3461 and HF3462.

Funny detail: After downloading the manual and opening it, it says “Read this manual carefully before using this device”.

Irritating “Features”: Philips Matchline TV

Okay, I have to get this out of my system. It is something I’ve been complaining about for months, and it is really an example of the utter dumbness of some product designers. What am I talking about? Simply turning on my TV.

I have this very nice big heavy 100Hz 4:3 Phillips Matchline TV, which I bought 8 or so years ago. For that time, it was a feature-rich TV which could store all kinds of user settings through on-screen menus, and keep them stored even when the power went out. A few weeks ago I noticed a new TV at a friends house has the same “feature” as my old Matchline. You can’t turn it on!

What happens? Monday evening, you are done watching TV and use the remote to switch it to “Stand By” mode. Before you go to bed, you walk by the TV and hit the power button to completely turn it off. Now on Tuesday, after dinner, you decide to watch TV. You walk to the TV, hit the power button, and what happens? The TV goes from “off” to “Standby”. What complete and utter IDIOT designs a TV which goes to “standby” after turning it on with the power button? It wouldn’t surprise me that a junior programmer was showing off his l33t skills by remembering the state of the TV before it was turned off.

So, after 8 years of introducing the wierdest features to TV’s, the usability labs in this world have still not found the most obvious feature to a TV: Turning it on.

Real guitar game: Guitar Wizzard

No, I’m not a guitar player, but I noticed this cool post on TUAW where the “Guitar Hero” game has been taken a notch up. TUAW reports that the guys at www.musicwizard.com have built “Guitar Wizzard”, a game with which you can learn to play popular songs on a real guitar. From what I can see in the video, this looks way less frustrating than doing the same excersizes over and over to learn to play the guitar.

Okay, you might not turn in to Mark Knopfler in a week, but isn’t it a much better feeling to hold a real guitar in your hand, in stead of that plasticky, toy-like mini quitar with the bright colored buttons? And the price is about right for a game including hardware aswell.