A new infrared 3500DPI sensor forms the core of an updated Razer Deathadder and an updated Razer Salmosa, the Razer Abyssus. Their predecessors were good mice, with some small issues.

The original Deathadder is Razer’s best mouse in my opinion. It has a great sensor which tracks very well on a lot of surfaces, is capable of tracking at high speeds, has DC and NDC firmwares and has no acceleration or other side effects when set up right.

The Salmosa has received little love from Razer. 1 driver update, no firmware updates and only the default DC firmware available.

Salmosa

So let’s talk a bit first about the thing the new mice have in common, the 3500DPI sensor. It’s not as good as the trusty old 1800DPI sensor used in the Salmosa and Deathadder-new. It has a lot of issues tracking on cloth mousepads, some more than others. Ironically, it’s pretty bad on the Razer Goliathus.  If you like to play on cloth pads, don’t buy an Abyssus or a Deathadder-new.

Deathadder-new

With that out of the way, a bit about the Deathadder-new. It’s pretty much exactly the same as the old one. It has a nicer braided cable, replacing the very thin plastic wire from the old one, which was prone to breaking internally. That’s basically all there is to this new Deathadder. If you have an old one, keep it, if you want a new one, try to find an old one. The changes are not worth the upgrade and extra costs.

Deathadder new, or old?

Abyssus

Compared to the old Salmosa there isn’t much new either, but at least the 3500DPI sensor doesn’t have drift control. The hardware buttons to switch DPI and mouse refresh rate are still there, but the 500Hz option is gone. The scroll wheel is the worst I’ve seen on a Razer mouse. It feels cheap, makes a weird noise and is definitely not as good as the Deathadder or Imperator scroll wheel. Just as with other Razer mice there are a lot of reports of squeaking mouse wheels on the Abyssus.

Abyssus

For some reason I still like the Razer Abyssus. It’s really light and small, easy to throw around. Great for people looking for a finger grip mouse. The buttons are easy to press, I’d rankthem like this (easy -> hard to press): Boomslang CE2007, Abyssus, Deathadder, Imperator

Razer’s past 5 years have been quite succesful. Clearly becoming a leading gamer’s brand that pushes the envelope. The hugely succesful Diamondback, using a temporarily Razer-exclusive sensor, showed Razer was back in business after their crappy first optical mouse, the Viper.

Following the Diamondback was an OK laser mouse, the Copperhead, and the awesome Deathadder, Razer’s first right-handed mouse. It was a great upgrade for gamers looking for the next best thing. The very good Avago 3688 sensor, with 1800DPI and very high maximum speed, guaranteed excellent tracking and is still one of the best sensors available. The familiar ergonomic shape pleased many coming from Logitech’s aging MX5xx line and Microsoft Intellimouse series.

The Deathadder was released over 2 years ago and is still very popular. Recently a newer 3500DPI version was released, which I’ll be reviewing soon as well. (Early verdict: Not as good as the old one.)

Imperator

This review, however, is about the Razer Imperator.

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A week ago I got a new phone, the HTC Hero.

It’s an Android based phone so it’s easy to customize and there are a lot of great apps available for it.

However, HTC’s default firmware is a bit sluggish. Luckily there’s a solution. It takes 5 minutes and besides speeding it up, it also ‘roots’ it. ‘Rooting’ an Android phone allows a user to do basically anything he wants with the phone.

Here are the steps (by Paul of MoDaCo)

- Download the custom ROM, and copy it to your SD card (modaco 2.2 core)
- download this file (http://content.modaco.net…copatchedrecovery-1.0.zip) and extract it to your PC or mac
- open a command prompt to the directory containing the extracted files
- type the following commands (prefix each command with ./ if you’re on a mac)
- adb shell reboot bootloader (wait for device to reboot into bootloader)
- fastboot boot cm-hero-recovery.img
- Select ‘nandroid backup’ from the menu to do a backup
- If you copied the custom rom as update.zip, select ‘apply sdcard:update.zip’, else select the option below.
- all done

I’ve been struggling for quite some time trying to get 1080p content to play smoothly on my MythTV pc. I managed to get good playback of 720p files by compiling mplayer myself and using a recent version of the closed source nvidia driver.

Playing back 1080p content however, was still a problem. I was never able to get smooth playback with mplayer. Only the xbmc videoplayer could play 1080p smoothly on my system. XBMC is not an option due to the WAF, it has to be something that runs from MythTV.

Fooling around with coreavc-for-linux (I love CoreAVC on Windows) got me nowhere. Recompiling, tweaking and updating mplayer/nvidia/xorg, nothing seemed to work.

Until I tried a new version of mplayer from the Debian Multimedia repositories. The mplayer version in that repository has support for a new feature in the linux nvidia drivers that (finally) allows video decoding on the GPU.

The easy steps to get this to work:

• Download and install the new nvidia linux drivers (180+)
• Add the Debian Multimedia repository to your sources.list
• Install mplayer from the new Debian Multimedia repository
• Start mplayer with ‘-vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau’

More than a year of tweaking and tinkering made redundant by these easy steps, excellent!

I’ve been using my new Macbook for a whopping two days now, so I think it’s time to share some of my early impressions.

First of all, I’m not a typical computer user. I’m picky, opinionated and totally unreasonable when it comes to my requirements for an Operating System. Before my Macbook my setup consisted of:

• Desktop PC, Windows XP: Used for gaming mainly, also editting photo’s and as a ‘fat client‘ for Putty
• Laptop, Ubuntu: Used for work and midnight-coding. Purely a development tool for developing Ruby on Rails webapplications, accessing icanhazcheeseburger.com and other important work stuff.

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I’ve decided to join the evil empire and buy an Apple Macbook. Expect to see some posts describing why it fails during the coming weeks.

Online (previously Wanadoo/Orange) is currently testing a new modem to replace the ‘Livebox’. The new modem is a Speedtouch 706 (WL) and to prevent people from accidently breaking it or use the modem on different DSL networks nearly all administrative options are disabled.

Unlike the old Livebox, you only get limited access to forward ports and change the wifi SSID and password. Even DynDNS support, which was perfectly usable in the Livebox, is disabled.

Looking for a way to disable the built-in DHCP server and change the default IP address of the Speedtouch 706 I tried flashing the device with the original firmware instead of the locked one. However, the firmware updater refuses to flash because of incompatibility.

This didn’t stop me and using TFTP I tried forcing the flash, but again, this didn’t work.

After some googling I came across a vulnerability in the Speedtouch 780, that allows you to access any page of the webinterface, even the ones you shouldn’t have access to. Using this vulnerability it’s possible to download the modem’s configuration, change it in a text editor and upload it again.

Thanks to this vulnerability I was able to disable the DHCP server and change the symmetric NAT implementation to cone NAT. The default configuration makes it nearly impossible to play online games based on a player-to-player architecture. C&C3 and Supreme Commander are two games that use this technique to allow players to play against eachother. With the original configuration I was unable to connect to about 80% of players in Supreme Commander, now with the cone NAT configuration I no longer have any issues.

You can find instructions to download/upload the Speedtouch configuration here and you can find/replace these bits in the user.ini to get cone NAT instead of symmetric NAT:

connection bind application=CONE(UDP) port=0

connection appconfig application=CONE(UDP) timeout=0

ids config state disabled

I was secretely looking for a replacement for my trusted Canon EOS 30D. The Canon 1D Mark IIn was looking rather good. Not too pricey on the used market, decent specifications, basically the same sensor technology as my 30D.

But then I stumbled upon an ad by someone selling her Canon 1D Mark III to go full-frame. The price was good, and the camera turned out to be in perfect condition. So I spent a little more than expected, but I’m now the proud owner of the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

This thing should be great for shooting sporting events at the next Campzone, and ISO performance is absolutely amazing for indoor shots.

Wanted a new phone, my needs:

• Smartphone, whatever that means
• UMTS/HSDPA
• Not Windows-mobile

This basically leaves the Nokia N95-8GB and the Sony Ericsson w960i.

I liked the N95’s design better, and the fact that it accepts a normal headphone instead of some crappy proprietary plug.

Pro:

• Tons of features
• Quick
• Pretty

Cons:

• All plastic
• Buttons feel slightly ‘cheap’ and ‘plastic’
• Rather large compared to my previous phone, Motorola V3i
• Realplayer as the default video player application

All in all I really like this phone, among all the features, there’s even an option to actually call someone, awesome!

The second part of the Christmas gift from Razer is the Razer Piranha

The Piranha is Razer’s second attempt to create a gaming headset. You can read what I thought of their first attempt here.

First impressions

The Piranha looks like a typical headset. On-ear cups, flexible mic-boom and an adjustable headband. The Sennheiser PC150 follows the exact same recipe.

An obvious difference (at least in the dark) is the glowing Razer logo. To power these LEDs the Piranha has a small USB plug. This plug is not used for anything else, so if you don’t like the blue LEDs, simply unplug the USB connector.

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