New Magic Mouse by Apple

One of the perks of working at the Merrill-Cazier Library is my supervisor wants us to stay ahead on current technologies. At the library, we try to do quite a bit with Apple computers. Just recently, Apple released it's new mouse, the Magic Mouse. For those who are familiar with the trackpad on all new MacBook Pro's are familiar with the "gestures" that can be used to navigate web pages, applications, etc.

The surface is sensitive to touch. It still has the regular features of any mouse including left-click and right-click. As for actual buttons, there aren't any. There are not scrolling features. To scroll, you just drag your finger as if there were a wheel to track with. One of the features I really like is the "Swipe" gesture. You can use this to move forward and backward in iTunes coverflow, web browsers, etc.

As for ergonomics, it's fairly flat, but I like that because it's more relaxed and I don't have to "perch" my wrist like I do with other mice, or playing piano, etc. If I were a reviewer, it's give it 4 or 4.5 stars.

Upgrading my xbmc

When I first took on the challenge of softmodding my xbox, I knew that I would want quite a bit of room on the xbox to store my music, movies, etc. When you get an xbox, the stock hard drive is only about 5-8 GB big. To do this, you need to get a hard drive to replace it as well as the software necessary to clone the new hard drive. I bought a Western Digital 500GB IDE hard drive from Newegg.com. The one I got only cost $70. Once I had that, I just needed to download the necessary software. To clone a xbox hard drive, I use xboxhd maker. This is a terminal-based program that is used to format, partition, and clone the old hard drive onto the new hard drive. The tutorial that I used was found at here: http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox2.shtml. As the tutorial shows, you first need to backup the C and E drives as well as the eeprom.bin file. This is used instead of the HD password on xbox hard drives. Once you have these, you can restore your xbox no matter what happens. After that, you run a batch file that will create a linux.iso that is used as the boot disk for xboxhd maker and the necessary files to clone the hard drive. I loaded the new hard drive into a computer and fired up the boot disk and when through the instructions. After formatting and partitioning, it only took about 12 minutes to do the entire clone. After all of this, you just lock the hard drive and then swap out the hard drive into the xbox console. Voila! you have a 500 gb HD in your xbox. It was interesting using old tools like Midnight Commander and such to clone a hard drive. Looking at what I have now, I somewhat do have an old computer that you hook up to your TV. Feels like those old Commodore computers.