Merry Christmas!

[FortNinety]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvsy11PHxM

How was everyone's Xmas? My Secret Santa didn't drop the bail as I had feared; got Inglorious Bastards on Blu-ray (which is gonna look hawt on my SD tv, lol) and a new wallet! Also ate like a fucking pig. Everyone else?

Anyway, I got just 30 minutes left to play Christmas NiGHTS.

[dmauro]

My new mouse:

[pilot]

I got a Snuggie. It is the leopard print one.

[isfet]

i got some gift cards and some $$$ towards a new PC that i'm planning to build (or buy...not sure on which i wanna do yet).

oh, and LOTS of leftovers, so hurray

[dmauro]

It's a shame I can't bring one of my brothers PCs back with me. He has at least one or two that he'd like to sell for really good prices.

[FortNinety]

Hey Joe, get a Mac, lol.

But seriously, I'm getting a MacBook from my dad when I go visit him in Feb. To off-set the guilt of accepting a present that is once again an olive branch for being a difficult parent (which I'm used to by this point, but never for something this expensive), I'm helping him clean up the apartment. Which has seriously 30 years of junk built up. Looking forward to the work-out! Just hope I don't inhale some nasty spore that's lethal after decades of gestating.

Anyhow, was originally going to ask for a Dell Mini 10 so I could hack and put OS X on it, but in the end, I'd rather have something that has a bit more horsepower under the hood (apparently the thing chokes playing YouTube vids in HD... though YouTube sucks in general in OS X), plus the latest design is something I actually like (generally speaking, once Apple comes out with a hardware design that I actually dig, it lasts for just one cycle).

[The Drunken Samurai]

i got a hangover and a family argument and almost $100 in cash

[dhex]

dmauro - lemme know what you think of that, and also if it's bigger than the mx518, which i use now.

got a cookbook, a book of primers from the wire mag and the baby tenori-on matrix synth from thinkgeek.

liam got tons of shit.

[scratchmonkey]

and the baby tenori-on matrix synth from thinkgeek.

Man post some impressions of that, I had no idea that there was a knockoff being made.

liam got tons of shit.

Word on that. Our house is basically overflowing with baby-related stuffs.

[dmauro]

The 518 is what I had. I would have been fine with that but my brother is convinced that I will notice the laser difference when playing FPSs. It's more or less the same size, but the nice thing is that it comes with a larger "claw" shell as my brother calls it (the one he likes, and the one pictured above with a satin finish) and a more traditional one that has a nice texture to it (officially called "drygrip" and the one I've taken to). The onboard memory for profiles seems like it could be pretty awesome, we'll see if I'm able to get use out of that for different games. Overall it's a better-looking mouse, about the same comfort level, nicer scroll wheel but harder to click scroll wheel z-axis, and it has the variable weight cartridge (4 - 28g).

I'll go back and forth with the 518 when I get back home and see what I think with a direct comparison.

[dhex]

neat, thanks.

Man post some impressions of that, I had no idea that there was a knockoff being made.

it's a cute toy and a lot of fun to play with. i might ask a friend who's far handier with electronics than i to circuit bend it. i can still rock a dremel like no one's business.

[dmauro]

I forgot to mention that the scroll wheel also has y-axis clicks for horizontal scrolling and who knows what else. Very awesome, but I think that's part of the problem for the z click because I think I am sometimes clicking it sideways when I think I've clicked it down.

[dmauro]

So I've been using the mouse and even went back and forth between this and the old one. So here are my two gripes: 1) the mx518 is more comfortable because I like to grip the mouse with my palm so the whole thing is in my hand, the g9x is built for a more precise claw grip, and 2) the damn middle click has not stopped bugging me. I'm better at it and I can always do toss grenades when I need to, but clicking links to open them in a new window should not take so much energy.

But here's what's great about it:
I loaded up the software that allows me to program the mouse's on-board memory. You can have up to 5 profiles on there, and it defaults to having 3 (general, gaming, productivity). I'm good using my gaming settings for everything though I think. But since you can make any button trigger a macro, I might end up taking advantage of those different profiles like that. You can change what every button does (except for left click, scroll up and down, and the profile button on the bottom of the mouse), and there is a macro manager/recorder. So that is a total of 8 assignable buttons for you to play with. I tried making the left and right scroll button on the mouse wheel "generic buttons" so they would show up as buttons 6 and 7 on the mouse, but I couldn't get MW2 to recognize them.

I also started playing with the weight tuning system. Right now I've got two 7 grams and a 4 gram in there (4 total slots) and that works really well with 1800dpi. You can have up to 5 dpi settings between 200 and 5700dpi  (I've got it at 1000, 1500, 1800, 2500, 4000 and usually use 1800 but definitely swap around depending on what weapons I'm using). And swapping through the dpi settings is much easier than on the mx18. The buttons are just below the left click so you just draw your index finger back. And the three lights show you which setting you are on. With the mx518 I almost never changed my dpi because without a weight system the high dpi was just way too much and the low setting was for sniping which I don't really do. Oh, and you can also independently set the x and y dpi if you're so inclined.

Now here is a really great feature in case I want to plug this into my Mac Mini: you can set whether to use OS Native speed an acceleration, or you can set it yourself. Since OS X uses a broken acceleration curve, it would be interesting to see if you can fix it with this. You could then make an OS X profile and when you plug it into the Mac, it would just work thanks to the on-board memory.

Being able to change the color of the LEDs is a pretty nice touch although I'm sure I'll never change it from the blue I've got it on now.

You can change the USB polling rate of the mouse. You have six options between 125 and 1000. (the mx518 is set at 125).

And finally, you can change the speed of the mouse wheel horizontal and vertical scrolls.

I'm kind of going back and forth right now with the two shells. I like the bigger one because I can almost sort of palm it, but since this isn't made for palming, the smaller one actually makes a lot of sense and I like it's grip texture also.

I just looked up the price of this thing. I can't say I'm surprised at the $100 price tag with all these features. It's definitely improving my aiming game in FPSs. Having a higher dpi with a heavier mouse (and being able to find the perfect balance for me) is like, for your console only people, going from the loose joysticks of a dual shock to the higher resistance, higher sensitivity joysticks of the 360 controllers.

[dmauro]

I also forgot to mention that there's a button on the bottom of the mouse that allows you to change between clicking scroll or free scroll for the scroll wheel. I didn't think I would use free scroll, but I'm finding it much more comfortable for web browsing.