Monday, January 23, 2012

Ratcheting up the scroll with my Logitech mouse

With the PC that gets used by the family, we use a wireless Logitech mouse. It’s the VX Revolution. It’s a few years old, but it has all the functionality that we need.

vx-revolutionI was using it tonight and the scrolling was, for the lack of a better word, wrong.  The wheel usually scrolled with a nice ratchet.  You moved the wheel, and you would feel a nice soft click as it scroll.

Tonight, it had stopped clicking and the scrolling was too sensitive.  You would scroll down a page and when you lifted your finger off the mouse wheel, it would roll back a tiny bit.  This would cause the page on the screen to jump back a bit.  It was very jarring and annoying.  What did I do to this thing and how do I fix it?

On my home dev box, I have a Logitech MX Revolution.  Kind of like the big brother to the VX.  On the MX, I could switch the wheel between the free spinning mode and the ratchet mode by clicking on the wheel.  That didn’t work on the VX.  I tried playing with the Logitech SetPoint utility that allows you to tweak the mouse settings.  No dice, nothing jumped out.

When in doubt, see if there is an updated mouse driver from Logitech.  I had 6.2 installed, the current version is 6.3.  So I grabbed the general Windows 7 setup exe for SetPoint and installed.  And that’s when the Logitech driver fell down.  Their all in one installer installed the 32 bit driver instead of the 64 bit driver.  Usually that’s not a huge deal, but it looked like they installed the 32 driver AS the 64 bit driver.  It crashed as soon as I loaded it.

OK, back to square one.  I uninstalled the newly broken driver and when back to the Logitech site.  Sure enough, I saw a link for the 64 bit only version.  I grabbed it, installed it, and it ran with out crashing.  It didn’t let me change the scroll wheel behavior, so I was back to square one again.

When in doubt, RTFM.  I took a peek at the user guide for the VX, from the Logitech site.  Guess what gang, on the bottom of the mouse, there’s an oddly shaped switch control.

OddlyShapedFigure 1 – An oddly shaped control

It’s hard to see in this picture, but the smooth circle at the top right of the switch puts the mouse into free wheel mode.  The gear shape at the bottom left, puts the mouse in ratchet.  Somehow the switch had been changed to free rolling mode.  I flicked back to ratchet mode and life was good again.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

An open letter to Newport Television

This is a copy of an email that I just sent to Newport Television, owners of WXXA-FOX23

Please forward to Michael DiPasquale, Vice-President/Asst. General Counsel at Newport Television

Dear Mr. DiPasquale,

I am a Verizon FiOS subscriber in the Albany, NY area.  I have noticed that you have pulled WXXA-FOX23 from Verizon FiOS TV because your carriage agreement expired on January 12, 2012.  My understanding of this is that your company, Newport Television, and Verizon could not come to an agreement over the rates.

As someone who watches WXXA, I am one of your customers.  As such, I would like to share my opinion.  I don't know the details of your carriage rate negotiations, but I think you should settle with Verizon. 

I don't want to pay more for a channel that I can get over the air (OTA).  The FOX network programming that I watch is mostly available via the FiOS Video On Demand (VOD) service.  I won't get to see the show when it airs, but I'll see it within a week.  And it will be commercial free.  I like my DVR, I watch TV on my schedule. 

With your channel being OTA only, the only time I'm going to watch it is going to be for sports. I liked watching the FOX23 news, that was one of the few shows you had my attention through commercials.  And that was the same for FOX sports.  I can put up with the annoyance of switching to the OTA signal for the sports, but for the rest of your coverage, I'll just skip it.

FiOS coverage is still small in the Albany area, but the areas with FiOS availability tend to be the higher income areas.  We are the people that your advertisers want to reach.  You have better access to the subscriber numbers, but I would expect that you are no longer available in 10,000 household in middle to upper middle class neighborhoods in this area.  If I were an advertiser with you, I would be negotiating for a lower rate on commercial air time.

I don't know the detail of your negotiations with Verizon, but if you are asking for a higher rate, I really think that you should reconsider your terms.  I don't know the state of the local economy is in Kansas City, MO; but it's not that great here.  Please consider this during your negotiations with Verizon FiOS.

sincerely,
Chris Miller
Slingerlands, NY