The last time you bought a computer system, how much attention did you pay to the quality of the mouse and keyboard? If you’re like most computer users, the answer is probably “Very little.”

Most of us simply accept the mouse and keyboard which come bundled with a system. But when you think about it, it’s those two components, together with the screen, that are really the most important for everyday computer use. It is via the mouse, the keyboard and the screen that we interact with our computer and thus our comfort, enjoyment and even our health are dependent on the quality of these three devices.

Admittedly, I’m something of a fanatic when it comes to mice and keyboards. That comes from spending anything up to 12 hours a day on the computer and having experienced times when my arms, neck and back all suffered from poor equipment and poor work practices.

So I was intrigued to give the Smartfish Whirl Laser ErgoMotion mouse a really good tryout. After all, how could I resist a mouse with an “anti-gravity comfort pivot”?

A strange looker

The Whirl comes in two sizes; the Mini is suited to portable computing while its larger sibling – the one I tested – is best for desktop use. Both models are wireless and include the convenient stumpy, compact USB transmitter which has become common.

When you look at the Whirl Laser from the side, it looks like a mouse mounted on a pedestal. ‘Ungainly’ is the word that comes to mind. When you first start using it, ungainly is how it feels. But only at first. The mouse itself feels comfortable enough under your hand, either right or left, but the gravity-defying, pivoting action takes some getting used to. The Whirl keeps your hand elevated above the mousepad and as you move it, your hand rocks around the central pivot point.

It’s that constant movement which is supposed to alleviate stress in your hand, wrist and arm.

Does it work?

The only way to really test a mouse is to use it for a solid length of time. A day or two is not enough to tell how comfortable it will be in the long run. So I delayed writing this review until I’d had the Whirl Laser under my hand for over a month.

After the first day, I was ready to return to my trusty Logitech Laser which, coupled with my favourite wrist rest (an ergoBeads Wrist Cushion from IMAK), has been my go-to mouse over the long haul. But I persisted with the Whirl for several days more and, by the end of the first week, I felt almost as comfortable with it as with the Logitech/wrist-rest combo.

After a month of use, I’m equally at home using either the Whirl by itself or the Logitech with the ergoBead bag, which is high praise. Most importantly, I can use the Whirl all day in complete comfort.

At $US49.95 the Smartfish Whirl is reasonably priced for a quality mouse and a worthwhile investment if you care for the well-being of your body. The Whirl Mini costs $49.95 as well.

Smartfish also makes a somewhat pricey ErgoMotion Keyboard which I’m looking forward to reviewing down the track. It’s hard to imagine anything making me want to ditch my old, indestructible, unergonomic Northgate keyboard (does anyone remember them?), but I have this funny feeling my body may love me for it.

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For over a decade, I used a sticky notes program from 3M called Post-It Software Notes. It was easily the best program of its type, with neat, colourful, resizable notes; excellent organisation via memoboards; a great search facility; reminders/alarms; network note sharing; and printing and email support. The only things it lacked were password protection for private notes and a way to export notes to other programs.

Several years back, 3M introduced an “upgrade” which essentially destroyed an almost-perfect product. The update replaced the neat little notes with bukly windows, reduced the flexibility of the program, slowed performance, and failed to remedy the lack of password protection and export capability. Not since Lotus hobbled the wondrous Lotus Organizer has any company so successfully sabotaged its own product.

I junked the update and kept with the old version of the program. Unfortunately, that old version couldn’t handle the move to Vista and Windows 7. So I embarked on a hunt for a decent replacement and eventually, after trying almost a dozen competitors, I stumbled upon Notezilla from Conceptworld.

Notezilla

Notezilla has all the features I loved in Post-It Software Notes plus password protection and very flexible support for exporting and importing notes. It lets you place notes directly on your desktop, attach them to a particular document, program or website, or organise them neatly in memoboards you can view and manage through a Notes Browser.

Here are some of the other things you can do with Notezilla:

• Attach files and insert images into the notes.
• Insert clickable links to files and websites.
• Create Checklist notes, with each line preceded by a checkbox.
• Lock (password protect) individual notes or entire memoboards.
• Create large notes with basic formatting such as numbered lists. This makes Notezilla a quick alternative to using Notepad.
• Tag and star notes, and then use the filters pane in the Notes Browser to show only those notes matching your search criteria.
• Designate a “note zone” on your desktop, where newly created notes are corraled.
• Send notes via email or to another computer on your network.
• Pin notes on top of other windows.
• Skin and colour notes.
• Hide or display all notes.
• Roll notes up, sort them and have them laid out automatically.
• Count words and characters in a note (right-click the note and choose Statistics from the context menu).

Notezilla costs $US29.95 and it’s worth every cent. It’s the sort of program you’ll use repeatedly every day you spend on your computer. If you don’t need all the advanced features in Notezilla, Conceptworld creates a simpler offering called Quick Notes Plus, which costs ten bucks less. Check out the feature comparison between the two. If you’re using Windows 98 or Windows Me, you won’t be able to run Notezilla, so Quick Notes Plus is the way to go.

Alternatives for cheapskates and Mac users

On the other hand, if you don’t need all the advanced features of Notezilla, rather than forking out money for Quick Notes Plus, you might want to give Stickies a try. It’s a freeware program offering good, basic sticky notes for Windows (including Windows 7).

And for Mac users, there is, of course, a Stickies program built into the Mac operating system. If you haven’t come across it, type Stickies into the Spotlight box and a couple of Stickies with instructions will appear on your desktop. Explore the Stickies menus to discover other things you can do with Stickies (such as capturing a portion of your screen and storing it on a sticky).

Tip: To render a Stickies note translucent on the Mac, click the note and then press Command+Option+T.

Stickies on the Mac lacks Notezilla’s ability to organise your notes and hide most of them from view while leaving just the most urgent open on your desktop. This is a big drawback for Stickies, because those notes quickly start to chew up your screen real estate. You can ameliorate this problem somewhat by installing Stick ‘Em Up. It lets you categorise your notes and then display only those notes from a single category. This is a big improvement over Stickies, but still nowhere near as useful as Notezilla’s approach.

Another alternative is Tomboy. Tomboy runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows. It’s an open source, freeware program. It’s more advanced than Stickies, but still lacks much of the power of Notezilla.

Related posts:

1. Removing clutter from a new computer
2. Installing Windows 7 onto a disc-less computer
3. Handy dandy computer jargon decoder

So you know about OpenOffice.org, but have you heard of Go-oo? Go-oo is another office suite, designed to be faster and offer greater compatibility with Microsoft Office formats.

Go-oo not only supports Microsoft Office Excel and Word formats, it also provides support for documents created in Microsoft’s low-end suite, Works, plus WordPerfect Graphics and Lotus Word Pro. It will run on Windows, Linux and the Mac as well as a bunch of more esoteric platforms.

Lovely Charts

Create charts – flowcharts, organisational diagrams, network charts, sitemaps and more – using Lovely Charts. This browser-based app, built using Adobe Flex, is surprisingly simple to use yet remarkably flexible. With a free account, you can create any number of charts, but you can only save one to your account. When you’re done, export your chart to a JPG or PNG graphic for printing or publishing on your blog or website.

Foxit

You can’t surf the Internet without encountering PDFs. Adobe’s been very successful in promoting its portable document format, but it’s been less successful in developing a PDF reader which makes its users happy. Adobe Reader can be sluggish and Adobe takes its own good time in addressing problems in the software.

Enter Foxit Reader. Sleeker, faster and more reliable than Adobe Reader, Foxit also gives you extras including an annotating tool and PDF-to-text conversion. It’s security conscious, too, and won’t connect to the Internet without your permission.

PDF to Word

Nitro Software provides a suite of free online tools for handling PDFs. Use PDF to Word to convert PDFs to Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf) so you can edit the content.

PDF to Word does an extraordinarily good job of conversion, preserving almost all the original formatting even in complex documents. Simply upload your PDF, select DOC or RTF conversion, and provide your email address for the resulting file. You’ll find links to Nitro’s other free tools, including a PDF Editor and PDF to Excel, on the same site.

Acrobat.com

Leave it to Adobe to design a web-based app that’s as good looking as anything you’ll find offline. Acrobat.com houses your files online and provides a wordprocessor, a spreadsheet and a presentation program with which you can edit and create documents. It also lets you convert a handful of documents to PDF format and host web conferences with a couple of people; you’ll have to upgrade your free account if you want to eliminate these limits. The programs are easy to use and Adobe includes video tutorials to get you started

Related posts:

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2. Should you install the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office 2010?
3. Staying safe online

Virgin’s MiFi 2200 gives you your own wireless hotspot, capable of connecting five devices simultaneously to the Internet. It latches onto Sprint’s 3G data network, so anywhere in the USA where you can get Sprint data coverage, your MiFi will get you online. That’s certainly not the whole country, but it includes all major cities plus a lot of out-of-the-way places as well. (Sprint has a horrible data coverage map – really nasty to use – which will give you some idea of the coverage area; it works best if you zoom in on a specific city.)

The MiFi itself is a mere sliver of a thing, a device you can quite easily slip into a pocket. That’s what I do with it: put it in my pocket and head out knowing that anywhere I go I can get instant Internet access with a press of its power button. Even better, it provides secure access, so there’s no longer any need to worry about eavesdroppers at Starbucks or in the airport lounge.

Its battery lasts about 4 hours on a full charge, less if you connect multiple devices to it. It comes with a compact cable for recharging from an outlet or you can use the microUSB cable to recharge it from your notebook or through an iPhone or iPad charger.

(Almost) smart pricing

Virgin has done two very smart things with its MiFi: eliminated contracts and offered a truly affordable, all-you-can-eat data smorgasbord. For $40 you get unlimited data for a month. Because there’s no contract, you can buy a month of data when you know you’ll be on the road, with no need to pay any more until the next time you’re in need of a connection. You can also set up automatic top-up to keep the data flowing if you’re on the road a lot. That compares very favourably with all Virgin’s competitors.

What’s not so smart, or, at least, not so consumer-friendly, is the second tier of pricing. If you don’t need unlimited data, you can pay $10 for 100 megabytes of data over a 10-day period. That’s pretty skimpy – a few hours browsing and a few emails containing largish attachments and you’ve chewn through it. I’d rather see a more workable option of, say, $20 for 500MB or even $20 for 250MB. I guess Virgin thinks the current two tiers will force more people into opting for the $40 unlimited plan, and they’re probably right.

Taking the MiFi for a spin

I’ve been using the MiFi for about a month, around my neighbourhood in New Orleans and on the road in the back woods of Texas and New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, I really put it to the test during my wish-it-were-annual, leaf-peeping trip. With the MiFi, for the first time I was able to get Internet access at the little cabin where I stay in an area with almost no cell phone coverage, let alone data services. Sprint has no voice coverage in the area, but it does have data and so the MiFi jumped online without a problem. I connected my notebook, iPad and iPhone and one of my family connected another computer and another iPad. (If you have a wi-fi-only iPad, as one of my family members does, the MiFi becomes an even more useful on-the-road companion.) We were able to do some serious work and I really tested Virgin’s “unlimited” data claim by uploading hundreds of photos via Picasa.

Over a two week period, I uploaded around 4 gigabytes of data and downloaded around the same amount, without a squeak from the network. It’s not fast – I got around 1.2 megabits/second – but it’s fast enough for most applications.

During the New Hampshire trip, every now and then I lost Internet access and had to reboot either the MiFi or my computer to get back online. Once I had to reset the MiFi by poking a needle into a tiny hole on its back, to get things working again. But on the whole, it was very smooth.

The only time I’ve really had a problem with the MiFi was when I was initially activating it. Virgin’s servers are atrociously slow and I had to repeat the procedure several times due to timeouts. I finally got things working without the need for a support call, but it’d be good to see Virgin make this process smoother.

The MiFi has a browser-based configuration panel.

A network as well

An advantage the MiFi offers over other mobile wireless solutions is that it not only provides Internet access for your computer and four playmates, it also gives you a portable wireless network. So even if you don’t need to use the Internet, you can use the MiFi to set up an adhoc home or office network wherever you are. That makes it very easy to transfer files between your devices, print to a wireless printer and do a bunch of other network-dependent tasks.

A hot item

I snapped up a MiFi as soon as Virgin put them on the market. I’m glad I did so, because they quickly sold out. If you’re in need of an affordable, peripatetic wireless hotspot, keep an eye out for when the MiFi becomes available again; it really is a wonderful little device.

Oh, I almost forgot: the price. Given how useful this device is and the cost-effectiveness of Virgin’s no-contract data, the upfront cost of $149.99 seems like a no-brainer.

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It’s not the server’s fault, it’s the dreaded antenna problem in action.

With the iPhone 4, Apple comes oh so close to producing a truly drool-worthy smartphone. Take all that’s great about the iPhone 3GS—the slick styling, the unmatched ease-of-use of the touch interface, the App Store treasure trove. Kick it all up a notch and you have the iPhone 4.

The new phone gets full marks for elegance. It replaces the rounded edges of its predecessor with straighter sides and a trimmer profile. The slight reduction in width makes it more comfortable to hold for those with smaller hands. Front and back, the phone is encased in glossy aluminosilicate glass, touted to be ultra-durable. Running all the way around the rim is a stainless steel band housing the phone’s antennas. Those antennas boost the phone’s base signal reception, but…well, more on the antennas later.

Apple has doubled up on the phone’s cameras, adding a VGA-quality camera on the front and beefing up the back camera to 5 megapixels. A surprisingly effective LED flash can be used both for stills and when you’re taking video in HD with the back camera, while having two cameras is particularly handy when you use FaceTime, Apple’s take on video phone calls. FaceTime is decidedly slick in action, but as it currently requires iPhone 4s and a wi-fi connection on both ends, its usefulness is limited.

The ‘retina’ display itself is drop-dead gorgeous. Cramming 326 pixels per inch into a 960-by-640 pixel screen produces a crispness you’ll spot immediately. Apple has also improved the iPhone’s audio quality—something desperately needed—by adding a second microphone and using dual-mic background noise suppression. You’ll really notice the difference on FaceTime calls, but the improvement in quality for regular calls is still not enough to make this one of the phone’s strong points.

Powering the phone is Apple’s A4 processor, the same processor you’ll find in the iPad. It’s zippy and provides a noticeable performance boost both when launching apps and in the satisfying responsiveness of the touch interface. Earlier iPhones feel sluggish in comparison. Round it out with a small-but-significant bump in battery life, a three-axis gyroscope, which opens up new opportunities for motion-controlled apps, and roomy 16GB and 32GB memory options and the hardware looks pretty good.

And then there are those antennas, so neatly and so fatally housed in the metal band. I could easily reproduce the signal-loss problems which have been widely reported. With a strong initial signal, the signal drop didn’t cause any difficulties; but in locations with poorer reception, holding the phone oh-so-naturally for a left-hander caused dropped calls and regular freezes in data downloads. Encasing the phone in any type of cover eliminated the problem completely.

So there you have it: A beautifully elegant, invitingly equipped phone with a nasty defect. If you plan to encase your phone, then the signal issue goes away. But it’s hard for me to recommend a product which is demonstrably flawed; and not merely flawed, but flawed in a way which affects its central purpose.

Bottom line: All that beautiful work undermined by a signal flaw.

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But…it’s scary as all get out, too. After moving my website to WordPress, I soon came to realise that while it’s great to work with, it is peculiarly vulnerable to disaster. The way WordPress dumps most of your content and settings into an SQL database (come on – how many of you really understand that database?), then combines that with core code, theme code, plug-in code and your own media and other uploads; that makes for a dog’s breakfast when it comes to protecting your site from a meltdown.

Oh, there are plenty of options for backing up your system, such as VaultPress and the DB Manager plug-in – some of them back up the database, some your files, and some even back up everything. But when it comes to restoring all that stuff…well, then you’re heading into the WordPress twilight zone.

The trouble isn’t with backing up and reinstating the database or the core files or your own files; the trouble comes when you try to restore everything including all the settings for each of your plug-ins, the correct page links, the comments on your blog entries, all the nitty gritty details and linkages which took you for ever to perfect in the first place.

Once I realised the peril of working with WordPress, small things started to terrify me. The banner across the top of the WordPress dashboard saying “WordPress 2.x.x is available. Please update now” would paralyse me. I’d seen one of those small .x.x updates completely screw up a crucial plug-in before, should I risk this update now? And when WordPress 3.0 was urged upon me – not just a bug fix but a major update! – I decided the wisest course was to ignore it for as long as possible. Even though I had plenty of backups (really, I was over-backed-up using three different systems to get some sense of security), I had yet to find a single tutorial, codex or solution which gave me confidence I could restore my site if disaster struck during the upgrade.

So I ignored the update banner each time I logged in. But it nagged at me.

Could it be?

And then I discovered BackupBuddy. Backup and restore for WordPress. Backup everything, restore everything. Backup and move it all to another site. FTP support, Amazon S3 integration. Oh my, it sounded like this was it.

I was wary. I started reading  support forum messages and noticed that some people were having problems. A lot of those problems were host-related; in particular, GoDaddy appears to be a nasty piece of work in many ways. I don’t use GoDaddy; I use 1and1, which is mostly smooth as silk but it does have a few quirks when interacting with WordPress.

I read reviews, and found a few more problems. But some of those reviews were pretty old (why don’t people date ALL their blog posts?), and it was clear from other comments that the BackupBuddy people have been putting out revisions on a regular basis.

I read other, glowing, reviews and realised they weren’t reviews at all but simply sales affiliates repackaging the words from the BackupBuddy site.

So, maybe it was the balm for my WordPress anxiety. Maybe not.

Despite the doubts, I decided to give it a try. I bought a license, downloaded the BackupBuddy plugin, installed it into my WordPress site and took it for a whirl.

Backing up

Backups work. In fact, I like BackupBuddy more than any of the other backup solutions I’ve used. You can back up your entire WordPress site or just the database. The backup is stored on your site, within the uploads directory, and you have the option to email it, FTP it or send it to an Amazon S3 bucket if you have an Amazon Web Services account. You can set up any number of backup schedules, have the completed backup automatically FTP or sent to S3, with the file on your site automatically deleted after it’s been sent off elsewhere.

It’s fast and, for me, it’s been problem free.

Restoring and migrating

The real test of a backup, of course, is whether you can restore it. My guess is the vast majority of WordPress users have never tried a restore. I certainly hadn’t tried before BackupBuddy appeared on the scene.

So, given that my WordPress paranoia was still pretty much intact, here’s what I decided to do:

1. Backup my main site, geekgirls.com.
2. Restore the backup to a spare site I keep for testing purposes.
3. If the restoration worked, I’d update that test site to WordPress 3.0.
4. If that all went well, I’d update my geekgirls.com site to WordPress 3.0.

When you create a backup using BackupBuddy, you end up with a great big zip file with all your core WordPress files, uploads, plug-ins and themes plus a .dat file containing your WP database.

To restore your site you:

1. Upload that zip file to the root directory of your server. You do not need to have WordPress installed in this directory; in fact, you should not have it installed.
2. Upload a script file called importbuddy.php to the root directory of the server.
3. Open your browser and point it to http://www.yoursitename.com/importbuddy.php
4. Follow the step-by-step instructions to restore the site.

Not quite flawless

I was expecting something to go wrong, and it did. On the third step of the six-step process – when importbuddy was supposed to unzip the backup file – the script stalled. I received a message saying that my host didn’t have PHP 5.2 installed nor the ZipArchive class and so it was falling back to a slower method. In fact, my host does have PHP 5.2, but it doesn’t have the ZipArchive class. Regardless, the script stalled – or at least it hadn’t achieved anything after a couple of hours, so I assumed it had stalled.

Fortunately, I’d read that this could be a problem; the solution was to unzip the backup file, upload the unzipped contents, and then rerun importbuddy.php. So, I did that and then zoomed through the entire process without a hiccough.

The test, of course, was to see whether the newly restored/migrated site worked perfectly. I loaded it up and there it was: a fully functional clone of the original. I logged into the WordPress dashboard (I had to remember to use the username/password from my original site – that had been included in the restore) and checked everything out. It looked just fine. I clicked the link inviting me to upgrade to WordPress 3.0. The upgrade worked. The upgraded site worked.

Here’s the real magic: everything worked. BackupBuddy had even accommodated the change of domain name from geekgirls.com to the test site, and every link had been migrated without a hitch.

There was one small problem, and it’s not one I blame on BackupBuddy. I use Disqus for managing comments on my blog; the comments are stored on the Disqus servers, not on mine. Those comments didn’t make it to the new site. Now, I could have tried using the Disqus sync tool to see if I could resurrect the comments, but I thought it might cause problems because Disqus is set up to work with geekgirls.com and not my test site’s domain. So I left it as is.

I returned to geekgirls.com and upgraded it to WordPress 3.0. Perfection. Except…once again, the Disqus comments. Most of them were there, but the comments had been stripped from any post I had also viewed on the test site. Checking in the WordPress dashboard, I could see the comments were still in the database, so this time I ran the Disqus sync tool and, bingo!, all my comments reappeared.

BuddyLove

So, I’m a convert. BackupBuddy works for me, in all phases: backup, restore; site migration. Those tiny missteps in the process were just that: tiny missteps, easily correctable.

Since that first test run, I’ve upgraded to a 10-site license and I’m giving each of them the BackupBuddy treatment. I’ve set up regular schedules for each site and automatic backing up to Amazon S3. I’ve tried two more test restores and, armed with my knowledge of what could go wrong, I’ve had no problems.

I am no longer a paranoid, quivering WordPress user. I am fearless and eager and can’t wait to see the next “Please update now” message. Bring it on!

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2. Resize and restore your desktop icons
3. Welcome to the new Geekgirl’s site