I was wrong about wireless mice

I continue to lag behind in posting to this blog. But I have carried around some guilt for the past week or so, and I need to get it off my chest: I was wrong.

Not only have I been wrong about wireless mice (and keyboards, I suppose)... not only have I refused to use them... but I have been steadfastly vocal about my preference for corded mice and keyboards. And not only that, but I have even kind of made fun of those people who used wireless mice and keyboards, particularly when they couldn't use their computer because their battery had died. It was my perfect moment to chime in and say "That never happens to me, because, you see, I use a cord!"

And it all just sounded so right. But I had recently -- and gradually and maybe even secretly -- started recognizing the value of portable mice that came with their own little USB receiver. The design of these things over the last few years has gotten really good.

Actually, let me backtrack for a minute, and get back to the point of this blog -- which is my switch from Mac to PC. I need to say, for the record, that I have not liked Apple mice for a long time. No, it has nothing to do with the one-button thing -- which, these days, is mostly a myth anyway. Apple mice have left click, right click, scroll will, side click, all sorts of stuff. But I have not liked the last several mice that Apple came out with.

On the other hand (no pun there... move along), what I have really liked was Apple's constantly-improving trackpad. I never got the standalone trackpad for desktop use, but whenever I used my MacBook Pro as a laptop, the trackpad was all I needed. And when I plugged in an used it as a desktop, I just used the Apple keyboard and a PC mouse. Yes, I've used PC mice for years. Because they've gotten really good, they're readily available, they're cheap, they feel right, etc.

So, that's the back story. Now back to today. I do not have the MacBook Pro. I now have a PC laptop -- actually two. The ThinkPad that I bought several weeks ago, and an HP laptop that I got last Friday for work -- and which I have probably not even mentioned on the blog. Shame on me for that. I need to do a dedicated post to announce the PC that I'm using as my primary.

So anyway, back before I started this job, but after I had turned in my Apple, I was using my ThinkPad quite a bit. And I despised both pointing devices. It has a touchpad and it also has that little red eraser-looking thing in the middle of the keyboard. They're both okay but neither is very impressive. And it makes one long for something that I never longed for with a MacBook: a mouse.

So one evening, I found myself at Walmart, buying some school supplies. And I ran across a reasonably-priced wireless mouse -- a Logitech. There was a slightly cheaper one that used two AAA batteries by a company that I have never heard of. But the Logitch only takes one AA, and it's a brand with which I am familiar, so I bought it.

From there, it's your typical plug-and-play story: Opened the package, plugged in the USB thing, turned on the mouse, and started using my computer like a human. Sigh of relief. I love this little mouse, I do.

It didn't take me long to realize how silly it would be if this mouse was wired. What have I been thinking? So anyway, I'm sorry. I was wrong. There's nothing stupid or silly about wireless mice. I was wrong. I have seen the light, and it's a little LED inside my wireless mouse that will change color to let me know when I need to change the battery, before it goes bad.

Sigh of relief.

The First Success

It was almost a week ago that I last posted on this blog. Since then, I had a weekend, followed by four glorious days off, and all to myself. I stayed busy enough on those days that I didn't think too much about the transition. However, I used my ThinkPad quite a bit. I just wasn't thinking too much about not having a Mac, which is the whole point.

I said in my last post that I would write about my first success. At this point, I'm not even positive what I was talking about, but I think it was the fact that I got a usable backup of my Mac files before turning in the Mac on my last day. And it was as easy as just buying a new drive. I happened to be at Walmart last Thursday night, and I spied a 500 GB drive for $49 -- a Seagate drive. Thought I didn't give it much credence at the time, and it wasn't the reason I bought it, the label specifically said something about supporting both Windows and Macs. This is basically true for every drive made. But this one took it a step further.

First, the default formatting for this drive is NTFS, not FAT32. NTFS is way better than FAT32, for a lot of reasons. But it still can't be read natively on a Mac (except in read-only mode). The software that comes on this drive includes a Mac driver for NTFS that allows read-write access to NTFS. So I installed that driver, rebooted (yes, rebooted on the glorious Mac... sorry for what I said before about Windows and reboots), and then mounted the drive in read-write mode. Then I simply dragged my home directory (over 130 GB) onto that drive and, after making sure it was going alright, I finally had the peace of mind to go to bed.

The next morning I woke up and checked on the copy, and all was fine. I took the drive and plugged it into my ThinkPad, and I was able to open the files. No problem. This single act make it about a thousand times easier to turn in my Mac later that day.

But it was still hard, and disorienting, especially since I turned in my iPhone at the same time. I felt really naked after turning both of those in. In retrospect, I should have at least taken my ThinkPad to the office that day, so I would have SOME way to connect to the internet after turning in both of those devices. Oh well, live and learn. Eventually I got home to my (now) beloved ThinkPad :)

First full day without a Mac

Yesterday was a weird day. Not only was it my last day on the job, after three and a half years, but at the end of the day I turned in two pieces of electronics that probably mean way more to me than they should. My MacBook Pro and my iPhone. Back when my family was still stuck in a Sprint contract, I arranged to get one of the company iPhones. Then we got iPhones for the rest of the family last Christmas, but I just kept the company phone. I kind of felt like I should get my own phone and turn that one in, so I would have one when I left the job, but procrastination is an interesting thing.

So earlier in the week, it was my plan to just go to AT&T's website and add a line to our family plan, and order myself a phone. But I couldn't decide which phone I should get. A refurbished 3GS (cheap), a new 3GS (still pretty cheap), or an iPhone 4. Then I started researching the rumored release of the iPhone 5 and found that the consensus seems to be that it will come out in the next month or so. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that I should wait. So I decided to get a Straight Talk phone from Walmart, to tide me over until the new phone comes out.

Even though it seems like the right thing to do, living without an iPhone for a month (or six weeks, or whatever) seems like more of a sacrifice than it really is. But when you couple that with the loss of the Mac at the same time, it's really intimidating.

Suffice to say that, after I turned these things in yesterday, I was kind of lost. I activated my Straight Talk phone (a good deal, but sheesh -- what a miserable phone). Of course, I didn't have any numbers on it, and I don't know the numbers of my family members. I have them in my Google voice phone book, but I didn't have a computer! Lesson learned: I should have brought my laptop from home to use as soon as I didn't have my work laptop. I'm just not used to not having a work laptop, so I didn't think of what it would really be like while I was still at the office.

So speaking of my home laptop: it's not a Mac. I'll list the inventory of the computers I have at home:

• My first Mac, a PowerMac G4 from about 2002. It's in pieces, and it's been out of commission for a long time, but it was my first Mac and it's still technically at my house.
• Our second Mac was a 20-inch, Intel iMac. We still have it, and it dual boots, between Mac and Windows XP. I have not used it myself in a long time. My son reports that it has not been working right lately. Apparently it just shuts off when it heats up to a certain point. Who knows what that could be.
• A couple of years ago, I got a used PowerBook for my wife. It was pretty good at the time, and for what she needed, but as time went by, we realized more and more that it was not much of a workhorse. It went through one crisis when it fell off the coffee table. I got it fixed at MacAuthority. Now it seems to have an issue with the battery that prevents it from booting at all, even when plugged in. It's probably not a terribly difficult thing to fix, but I also know this particular computer is not impressive enough to even bother with fixing it. I have been in favor of replacing it with an iPad, so handle family sofa browsing needs, which is all that computer was ever used for.
• Most recently, we added a PC to the lineup. I'm almost always too cheap to buy new computers, and this was no exception. Woot was offering refurbished ThinkPads a while back, and I read up on that model (T60) and decided to take the plunge. It was only $219. Pretty hard to pass up if it's decent. It turns out that it is actually decent, and I'm using it right now.

So that's the landscape: For the next week, before I start my job, I do not have a Mac (except for the iMac, that I might try to mess with and see what's going on with it) and I do not have an iPhone. I have a crappy Straight Talk phone and a ThinkPad T60. It has a 4-by-3 screen and a maximum resolution of 1024x768. It has a terrible battery that lasts about 15 minutes, but it works fine when it's plugged in.

Today is my first full day without a Mac. The journey begins. Even when I start my new job, it will be with a PC, but I assume it will be a pretty nice PC. But for now I'm stuck with the ThinkPad. I was pretty depressed about it last night, but then I decided to take control of the situation. My next post will be about the positive development that made me realize this next week will be okay.

Kernel Panic

Ah, the gods have a sense of humor. How fitting is it that my beloved, reliable Mac would give me a kernel panic on our last night together. I'll tell ya... I'm having a bit of a kernel panic myself (Mmmmm, popcorn).

I'll bail out the Mac by saying that the kernel panic was as a direct result of trying to mess with an NTFS partition. See, I can blame Windows for everything.

Very Stressful Night

I'll admit that I am massively stressed tonight. It's that feeling that you have when you're about to go on vacation, and you're stressing over all the things you haven't done yet, and all the things you're forgetting about.

Except my "vacation" is going to be long. I'm leaving my job forever, to go to a new job. So it's like I'm moving. The funny thing is that it's not leaving my job that is worrying me. My transition has been fairly good and, while I'm a little behind on everything I want to get done for work, my attention to that this week has caused me to completely ignore my personal life.

As I've said, tomorrow I'm turning in my Mac (which contains my electronic life, essentially). And at the same time, I'm turning in my iPhone. Some serious Apple withdrawal there. Don't get me wrong: I would simply walk right into an AT&T store or an Apple store and take care of it. We already have three iPhones in my family. But the problem is that the iPhone 5 is about to come out. It should be only 4-6 weeks before it comes out. It would be silly for me to get locked into 2 years with an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 4, with the iPhone 5 on the horizon.

So tonight I picked up a Straight Talk phone from Walmart. $35 a month, prepaid, and a phone that costs about $40. This will tide me over until I get my new iPhone. But man, is this time gonna suck. And I'll be going through Mac withdrawal at the same time. How lame.

Anyway, I have a long list of things I have to do. There are items for work, but the stress that I'm feeling all has to do with things like "What files do I have on my computer that, starting tomorrow, I will not have access to anymore". Because my Time Machine backup drive is formatted as an HFS Extended format drive, and Windows doesn't read it natively. So that brings me full circle, back to this latest piece of software for which I have rebooted: MacDrive. Let's see if this one can put my mind at ease.

Ah yes, the restarts

OK, this is unfair, but I'll say it anyway. While I'm certain my new work PC will be running Windows 7, my ThinkPad that I have at home is still running XP. And this evening I have restarted it about 6 times, and I'm sure I will restart it several more times.

I'll admit that Windows 7 may not suffer from the same number of restarts, and I'll also admit that I'm doing a fairly low-level thing. I installed Paragon HFS+, software that is supposed to give me the ability to read an HFS+ drive from Windows. It sort of worked, because I could browse through the files hierarchy. But it didn't matter, because all of the files were zero bytes... or at least they appeared to be.

That problem forced me into another piece of software, which I haven't tried yet. It's called MacDrive, but it does the exact same thing: it's for Windows users to be able to mount and use an HFS-formatted drive. One promising thing about MacDrive is that they specifically mention Time Machine drives as something it handles. One concern that I had about Paragon HFS+ was that there was something in particular about the Time Machine drive that it couldn't hack.

Anyway, when you're installing and uninstalling software that works at this level, I guess you have to expect some restarts. So I'll stop complaining about that now.

My Piano Problem

To continue the introduction, I'm also a recreational piano player. I love playing the piano, and I use my Mac to do it. I have a nice USB MIDI keyboard, with 88 weighted keys, and I plug it into my Mac, and use two nice pieces of software to play it. One is GarageBand, and the other is a lovely piano application that I found in the Mac App Store. Neither works on Windows, of course.

Today I had my first success. I found a product called Mixcraft, from a company called Acoustica. They make what seems to be the closest thing to GarageBand for Windows. I plugged it into my PC (oh yeah, I do have a PC laptop that I picked up refurbished on Woot a few weeks ago). It worked right out of the box with my keyboard. The latency was not good, but the website had some instructions on how you can tweak the buffer settings to get the right balance between quality and latency. I was also happily surprised to see the abundance of really nice sounds that the software has built in. And the price tag is nice too. You can demo it, but it only costs $79 or so to buy it. So this crisis was averted. The piano sound is not quite as nice, but this will tide me over for now, and I might end up liking this better, because it supports VST instruments, which GarageBand does not. So that means I can eventually buy the nicest software piano available -- particularly when I get the work laptop, which is sure to have smokin' hardware specs.

Now it's time for me to work on the second challenge... reading an HFS+ drive from Windows.

The Beginning

Tomorrow is my last day at my job, and I will turn in my gorgeous, unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro, having been a Mac user since shortly after OS X came out, about 10 years ago.

A week from tomorrow, I will start my new job, and I will be given my new Windows laptop. I will be working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. I am excited about the job, but about switching from Mac to Windows, I am scared.

Why am I scared? Because the Mac is where I'm comfortable. It's where I'm productive. And I'm going to have to get as productive and comfortable as I have been on the Mac.

I'm also scared because I've been here before. I once switched from Windows to Mac. That time it was on my own dime. I dropped $2000 on a new PowerBook and then, of course, had to learn to be productive on it. The difference between then and now, though, is that OS X was a very new platform. The operating system didn't perform very well and there wasn't a lot of software available for it. Switching from Mac to Windows 7 will not have that problem.

And it's not like I've never used Windows before. I'm functional in Windows. But I'm not as comfortable, or as productive, as I have become on the Mac. This is partially because of things like knowing where the keys are and being familiar with the feel of the hardware. But it's also partially because -- well, I'm a Unix guy.

Apple made a brilliant move by switching to a Unix-based operating system. Many thousands of geeks like myself switched from their attempts to run a Linux-based desktop or laptop and found a new level of productivity and comfort. I am one of those. I switch between my lovely user-focused Mac applications and the Terminal, where I find true greek success.

So this blog is where I plan to document the journey. Lots of people switch from Windows to Mac. That's not a story. But seldom does an extremely satisfied Mac user leave the platform to return to Windows.

I'll answer one question: Why not just buy my own Mac? Well, I technically own three Macs right now. One of them is decent, one of them is completely disassembled (it was my first), and the third one is really on its last legs. The decent one has some sort of video card issue that I have yet to troubleshoot. I might figure out what's wrong with it and start using that at home, and I might end up just buying a new MacBook pro. But first, I need to try Windows for a while.

Here's the main issue: Even if I buy a Mac for myself to use at home, I am definitely going to be using Windows at work. And work is where I need to be most comfortable and most productive. And if I'm living in the Mac world at home and only using Windows at the office, I could perhaps become resentful of my Windows life and, therefore, my job... and that would be bad. In order to become comfortable and productive on my work machine, I need to make sure that's all I use -- at least for a while. I need to give it the old "college try," and then I can make a decision about whether I want to use a Mac at home or not.

Oh, one final point. Tomorrow I'm not only turning in my Mac. I'm also turning in my iPhone :) Can you believe it? Now I wish I had turned it in a long time ago and gotten a personal iPhone. My wife and kids all have iPhones. But as long as I had one that work was paying for, it was easy to just keep it. Well tomorrow it gets hard. Because I will be without an iPhone and without a Mac.

I'll do a final backup of the iPhone onto the Mac, and then do a final Time Machine backup of the Mac onto my personal (thank goodness) backup drive. And of course, the backup drive is formatted with the HFS+ filesystem, which (of course) cannot be read by Windows, by default... which brings me to my first challenge. Getting Windows to be able to read an HFS+ drive. If I can't solve that problem, I will have to make a copy of all of the data (or at least the stuff I'll need right away) onto an NTFS-formatted drive, preferably before I turn in the Mac... in which case, what the heck am I blogging for, when I should be copying files like mad?