The Four-eyed Journal » Usability

Ergonomics and proper posture in using a laptop

jhay — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:26:32 +0000

Okay, so it takes a little while to get used to Firefox 3′s new “Awesome bar”, and now I’m beginning to agree with the remark of commenter minor‘s wife that the new address bar in Firefox 3 could cause some added eyestrains because it spits out huge chunks of text every time you type in a URL. Still, congratulations to Mozilla and to all Firefox fans, it’s reported that we reached 8 Million downloads for Firefox 3 on Download day.

Which means there are now 7 Million users who will have to grapple with the new address bar of FF3, it’s a usability issue that I hope will be addressed in the next versions of Firefox.

Speaking of usability, ergonomics and health issues with regards to using computers and laptops, today I’d answer what friends have been asking me every time they see me using a full-sized mice with my laptop. The trend is that with desktops you should use full-sized mice while if you’re going to use a laptop and not bother with its track pad, you would use one of those mini-mice which is half the size of the regular ones, hell there are even micro or pocket-sized mice that could easily fit in one’s underpants. Case in point, Carlo’s new mini-mice for his Asus Eee PC. Cute but not for me.

I for one did not follow this convention. Simply because my right hand is too big to comfortably use a micro-mice. See the photo below?

That wireless mini-mice given to me by my uncle could easily be hidden underneath my hand, if my hand were a lot hairier it would look like a tarantula that has caught a small mice (the animal) for dinner. So I went out and bought a full-sized Optical Mice by Logitech. It’s twice the size of most mini-mice but it saves me a lot from painful wrist and finger strain or what’s properly called as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Asides from taking care of our hands and wrists, which I think are one of the most important parts of a blogger’s anatomy, Manav of Technospot.net reminds us of the importance of using good posture in using our computers, especially if your work or lifestyle involves using it for long periods of time.

By my reckoning, it’s written for those who use desktop computers as these are much more common and configurable because the monitor and keyboard could be adjusted separately for greater comfort.
On the other hand, for laptop users like, our situation is a bit different thus our setup is also a bit different.

A set of good ergonomic tips in using a laptop can be found in the website of The University of Ontario:

Shoulders should be resting at your sides, elbows bent to 90 degrees and wrists straight. Tilt the screen to reduce neck bending and any glare.
Make sure you use a light touch while keying and mousing.
The armrests on your chair should not obstruct arm movements as seen in the picture to the right.
Can you use secondary function or short-cut keys instead of the mouse
Consider the tasks you will be working on. Raise the screen to eye level when reading lengthy documents (consider using the mouse for scrolling) or lower the keyboard to elbow level for intensive keying.
Consider using the laptop as a stand alone CPU with an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. If the notebook screen is large, raise the entire computer to eye level and use an external keyboard and mouse.
If you are working at a table that is too high for proper keying, try tilting the laptop towards you using an empty binder. Reclining your seat slightly will help to improve arm postures. Tilting the laptop will also help to raise the screen closer to eye level.
Take a break from your laptop. Do you have other jobs you can work at for a bit that don’t involve using a computer? Several short breaks, where you can change your posture, is recommended over one long break.

Other sites offer more tips in proper and healthy laptop usage but I don’t have the luxury of having a secondary LCD monitor to plug in to my laptop to achieve that eye-level setup recommended when reading documents from the computer. For now, I’ll just adjust the height of my gas-lift chair when needed.

Please, return the ‘Edit’ comments link

jhay — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:28:23 +0000

Or make it more obvious. A few days back, I spent nearly an hour looking for the ‘edit’ link in the comments management section of WP 2.5. Sadly, and I almost panicked, I found it someplace I least expected – by clicking on the name of who made the comment!

My initial reaction I recreated in the graphic below:

Why was the ‘Edit’ comment link placed on the name of the comment author? It sure beats me and conventions of using WordPress. Surely though, the guys behind WordPress had a reason for it to be like this in WP 2.5. One of the developers of WP explains both with clarity and sense (highlights are mine):

This sort of mirrors how post edit links work. To edit a post (or a page), you just click the name of the post. That is quite intuitive. I learned that behavior in about a day, and now the old way of clicking the “Edit” link seems strange. I’ve not had the same experience with comments. I think the problem is that comments don’t have a title, like posts do. The title is an obvious click target. It is (generally) unique, and it is a natural answer to the question “which post do I want to edit?” (oh yeah, this one!) Clicking the comment author is not intuitive. You don’t want to edit the comment author, you want to edit the comment. The comment author is often not unique, and doesn’t really work as a “handle” for an individual comment.

Thanks Mark! Thank you for shedding the light of wisdom and common sense on to this issue. I’m sure all the other WP users out there who experienced the same issue will agree and even support the idea of returning the ‘edit’ comments link or at least making it more obvious in the next version of WordPress. I hope it will be WP 2.5.1

There are a lot of good and welcomed changes in WP 2.5, sadly though this little detail is perhaps among the not-so-good changes.

Do you agree? Or do you like the new way of editing comments just at it is?

Frustrated with the Brother printer

jhay — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:57:10 +0000

What’s your brand of home printer? That’s basically the question in Yugatech’s current poll of the week; “What’s your Home Printer of choice?”

As of this writing, the leading choice by voters so far is HP with 26 votes followed by Epson with 21 votes. Brother is 4th behind Cannon with 19 and 4 votes respectively. I don’t mean to preempt Yuga’s analysis of the survey, I’ll leave that to his expertise and besides, the poll isn’t finished yet.

I’d just like to give an insight as to why the Brother brand is hardly the choice for home printers. This is not a full review but a summary based on the 10 months I’ve got the chance of using because it is the default printer of La Salle Dasma’s University Student Council and most of the other offices in the university.

When I joined the USC last June, it was my first time to encounter and use the Brother printer. I joked that maybe the reason why this seems to be the ‘default’ office printer of DLSU-D is because the school is headed by a La Salle Brother. (Corny ba?) Or in some occassions, I joked that that Brother brand is secretly owned by the La Salle Brothers which is why it is the default printer in La Salle schools.

Anyways, the Brother printer is a good printer in terms of print quality, speed of print-outs and functionality. The model in the USC office is the Brother MFC-425CN which is a Colour Inkjet Flatbed 6-in-1 Multi-Function Centre. Here’s a summary from its product page from the Brother, the printer, website:

The MFC-425cn is a standalone fax machine which offers a unique low-profile design, making it ideal for even the most space-conscious home environment. It uses a convenient front-loading paper tray.

The Network ready MFC-425cn offers black printing up to 20ppm and color printing up to 15ppm at resolutions up to 6,000 x 1,200 dpi, Borderless Printing, Flatbed Color Copying, Flatbed Color Scanning, Color Fax and PC Faxing (send only).

It also includes the PhotoCapture Center? feature to print high quality color pictures from the most popular digital camera media cards (Memory Stick?, CompactFlash?, SmartMedia?, xD-Picture Card? and Secure Digital? cards) with or without a PC.

Like I said, it’s a good model. But as what the title of this post says, I’ll not buy it for home use. Why so?

All for one, and one for all

Ever since the all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier/kitchen sink-type of printers came out, I had this little paranoia based on this trend: when it gets broken, it’s cheaper to buy a new one instead of taking it to the shop for repairs which could worsen things and increase your expenses. So in an all-in-one platform, if one particular part suffers a failure or screws things up, it could kill the entire printer. So I stuck to a regular stand-alone ink-jet printers from HP and bought a separate flatbed scanner. Besides, I don’t need a copier in a home setting?

All for one, and one for all…also for the ink

The Brother printer uses 4 individual ink cartridges: Blue, Yellow, Magenta, and Black. Here’s the thing that we hate the most about the Brother printer: once any of the ink cartridges runs dry (usually the black ink), the printer stops printing all together! Even if the other cartridges still have plenty of ink in them, it would just not print at all.

What ever happened to the color-substitution/mixing trick that most other printers have? My HP and Lexmark printers can still print out documents and photos even if one ink cartridge is empty, all it does is to substitute with the remaining colors available, even mixing them to almost match the missing color hue. This feature saves up on ink and does not put our work to a standstill.

But not the Brother printer. It refuses to cooperate with us and screams out for a replacement ink cartridge. True the student council has some deep pockets but we intend to use it for more productive things like scholarships instead of printing out memos and letters to feed the redundant, snail-paced and absurd bureaucracy in DLSUD.

Am I being too harsh?

Or maybe this particular model of Brother printer was really meant for office use and not in our homes because the office could afford to buy a new ink cartridge every time the Brother printer says so. Still, it could be a strain in the company’s expenses more so in the family’s pockets as well.

It’s sad that for a good printer, a fundamental flaw ruins the whole thing. Anyone else using the Brother printer?

Rant: AVG Free is cool, the way it updates is annoying

jhay — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:57:10 +0000

Hopefully, the first word on the title could’ve been a fair warning that this post is rant-off, of sorts. However, so that it won’t be a complete waste of time I’ll try to be objective and fair as much as I can. Ready?

So here we go, the very first anti-virus software I used was then PC-Cillin 2002 by TrendMicro. It came bundled for free when I got first got this PC back in 2003. Being the OC geek that I am, paranoia dominated my attitude towards keeping my PC clean and free of those nasty viruses, trojans, spywares, worms and malware. So it helped me maste the habit of scanning every floppy disk, which was then replaced by thumb drives, downloaded archives or files from the internet with PC-Cillin.

God bless the team from TrendMicro for I loved the PC-Cillin. It simply worked and worked wonderfully it did. My friends and classmates would cry out whenever a virus or trojan slips past their AV software and wreak havoc in their systems. I on the other hand remained a happy malware-free PC user.

It detected, cleaned and stopped every malware that attempted to break or sneak into my PC, worked smoothly in the background and updated itself automatically and notifying me of its successful update via a small unobtrusive bubble in the system tray. Life was good back then.

The happy days ended when my complimentary license expired and I was being nagged to fork over some $60.00 or more in order to get the newest version of PC-Cillin back then, complete with a year’s worth of monthly virus database updates. No effin way!

So I began to search for alternatives to the PC-Cillin brand. Something that would be as tough and powerful on nasty viruses, worms and other malware but not on my empty pockets. The world of free anti-virus softwares was introduced to me, and very much to my delight if I may add!

The first free anti-virus software I used was aVast from ALWIL software. It was effective and powerful to keep my PC clean and safe plus it’s totally for free. Unfortunately, one issue I discovered about it is that it doesn’t delete the old anti-virus database files. The updates were installed and stored in its installation folder. This was something relevant and made a lot of sense. However, as the months went by, I noticed that the free hardisk space was shrinking. After some snooping around, I found out that it was aVast’s virus database files that were what’s hogging up my free hardisk space. Whenever it downloads new updates, the files are installed and stored in the hardisk. The older files are stored as well. Eating up hardisk space and burdening my PC.

So aVast went out the windowS XP. (No pun intended ) It was replaced by Grisoft’s AVG Free Anti-virus. It worked like the others before it, robust, powerful and quite reliable in keeping nasty malwares out of my PC. The anti-virus database files have been regularly installed while the older files were deleted or over written so it doesn’t eat up that much server space. I loved AVG Free and continues to do so today. Well most of the time.

Everything seemed so ‘perfect’ until something popped-up. Literally. Everytime AVG Free would update itself over the internet, a window would pop-up, download the files needed and install them later on – in another window that pops out.

And that is what’s really annoying. Regardless of whether you’re blog-hopping, creating threads in online forums or even if you’re an ordinary student just typing out his project, a pop-up window will appear and notify you with the update process which is mandatory of course if I ever wanted to keep my PC clean. Which is why there’s only one button clickable on that pop-up window, the ‘Cancel’ button. Again, why would I cancel updating my AVG Free? This is really annoying for it disturbs work sessions, creative processes and blog-hopping.

Why the Grisoft team used a pop-up window instead of a small, unobtrusive bubble in the sytem tray is beyond me. But guys!?! Why a pop-up? Why?

Cyber-shot or a Walkman phone?

jhay — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:00:15 +0000

This was an interesting question that was asked to me by Anel, one of the most hardworking and friendly USC scholars as we spent the afternoon talking and joking around the USC office with the other officers and members of hardworking committees.

His question again was; “Kuya, anong mas maganda: Cyber-shot o Walkman phone?”

Obviously, he’s interested in getting a Sony-Ericsson phone when has saved enough money for it. To Anel, going for a Sony-Ericsson phone is good choice. Sure there are a lot of great phones by Nokia but almost everyone else has a Nokia phone.

More on that on a future post, let’s go back to Anel’s question. Judging from my past experiences not just with Sony-Ericsson phones (the K800 is my very first SE phone and I only had 4 phones in all my life) but also with mp3 players, my near-Spartan preference on usability and reading lots of blogs about mobile phones, I did not give Anel a straight answer, rather I laid down the basics of why one would choose either a Cyber-shot phone or a Walkman phone.

Cyber-shot phones are:

For digital photography novices and enthusiasts – a Cyber-shot phone is almost, if not the equivalent of most entry-level standalone digi-cams today all thanks to the years of experience and know-how of Sony in the field of digital photography. You can choose from the basic k550i at 2MP, to the mid-level K800 & K810i at 3.2MP to the latest upcoming K850i at 5MP the Cyber-shot collection is perfect for the digital photography enthusiasts or the plain camera whores.
No need for another imaging device – since your digi-cam is merged with your mobile phone, there’s no need to lug around another device though it’s small enough to fit in your pocket, it’s one less device you have to worry about being stolen, lost or broken when you’re on the go.
More than a camera phone – it’s a photo-lab of sorts. Cyber-shot phones have built-in technologies to improve your photos and give it a professional touch. Image and Video Stabalizers, photo editing, various camera modes for the right lighting and conditions. Plus the basic connectivity options like Bluetooth, Infra-red and Internet are available to share your photos on the go.

Walkman phones on the other hand are:

For the music addict – everyone recognizes the Walkman brand from Sony, so the Walkman phones are media players to reckon with. It has powerful front speakers, can handle the 512MB Memory Stick Micro for 470 or so songs plus nifty music technologies to provide a better listening experience. It may not have the capacity of an iPod or a dedicated mp3 player, but can you or do you really listen to all 4,000 songs in a day?
It’s all in one device – this I highligthed before, no need to carry with you another mp3 player or even a fragile iPod nano, all the music you love to listen to are in the Walkman phone, along with your messages, emails, photos, contact numbers, organizer and games.
More than a music player – it’s your mobile beat box cum DJ turntable. It’s packed with nifty musci technologies like “Shake to shuffle” – just shake your Walkman phone to change the song. It’s also a personal trainer tracking how long you’ve jogged, how fast are you going and keeping it all in a progress chart.

But just like what Anel realized, it all boils down to your personal preferences. If you’re into digital-photography or camera-whoring take the Cyber-shot phone. If you want to wet your taste for music while on the go then pick any of the Walkman phones. Either way, Sony-Ericsson has phones to suit your every need and taste.

What you fellas? Which would you go for? A Cyber-shot phone or a Walkman phone? Or do you have other models from the other brands?