With shockingly tall stature and non-traditional curves, vertical mice require some adjustment to use. But the purported payoff, if you're to believe mouse-makers, is greater arm, wrist, and hand comfort due to a more natural hand position.

The Lift puts your hand at a 57-degree angle with the desk and in a handshake-like position. There isn't hard evidence proving that a vertical mouse can alleviate issues like carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive strain injury (RSI). Logitech is also careful not to make any strong promises beyond stating the mouse "takes pressure off the wrist while promoting a more natural forearm posture throughout the day."

The point is, your hand does have to rest on something. Right now, for my "horizontal" mouse, my wrist rests about 15 to 20 degrees, on a cushioned pad projecting up from the mouse pad. To move my current mouse, I just twist my wrist joint left or right without moving my arm. So whether one actually needs a vertical mouse, or just better wrist support with a current mouse, really remains to be seen.

See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/logitechs-lift-is-a-vertical-mouse-thats-easier-to-grasp/

#technology #logitech #ergonomics #hardware #mouse

The smart home company Insteon has vanished. The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now, despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee.

A proprietary protocol can often mean your device is a useless paperweight if the company which owns it goes bust. Open standards like MQTT however mean other support exists to continue using your devices, for example, on Home Assistant and other open smart home services. More and more we are seeing companies close down, leaving consumers stranded, so it is imperative to instead choose to buy products which support open standards.

See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/shameful-insteon-looks-dead-just-like-its-users-smart-homes/

#technology #openstandards #smarthome #MQTT #IoT

The Power Supply Unit (PSU) is a critical piece of any desktop. It plays an extremely important role in supplying power to your entire system. Yet, power supplies are often overlooked and aren’t discussed as frequently as some of the other star components like the processor or the graphics card. The power supply unit also determines your system’s reliability, and it saves the parts in case something goes wrong. It’s safe to say if you’re not buying the best power supply, then you’re essentially putting your expensive PC parts at risk.

A PSU should probably easily last twice as long as two CPU replacements, so it is probably worth spending some extra money on. I can also see why Corsair is rated so well, due to its modular cable design and also the very long warranties.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/best-power-supply-pc/

#technology #PSU #powersupply #hardware

Reticulum allows you to build very wide-area networks with off-the-shelf tools, and offers end-to-end encryption, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable packet acknowledgements and more.

Reticulum is a complete networking stack, and does not need IP or higher layers, although it is easy to utilise IP (with TCP or UDP) as the underlying carrier for Reticulum. It is therefore trivial to tunnel Reticulum over the Internet or private IP networks. Reticulum is built directly on cryptographic principles, allowing resilience and stable functionality in open and trustless networks.

It can be used over practically any medium that can support at least a half-duplex channel with 500 bits per second throughput, and an MTU of 500 bytes. Data radios, modems, LoRa radios, serial lines, AX.25 TNCs, amateur radio digital modes, ad-hoc WiFi, free-space optical links and similar systems are all examples of the types of interfaces Reticulum was designed for. An open-source LoRa-based interface called RNode has been designed specifically for use with Reticulum.

No kernel modules or drivers are required. Reticulum runs completely in userland, and can run on practically any system that runs Python 3. Reticulum runs well even on small single-board computers like the Pi Zero.

Reticulum should currently be considered beta software. All core protocol features are implemented and functioning, but additions will probably occur as real-world use is explored. There will be bugs. The API and wire-format can be considered relatively stable at the moment, but could change if warranted.

So 3rd part apps can be built which use this networking stack to communicate. One such example is LXMF, which is a distributed, delay and disruption tolerant message transfer protocol built on Reticulum. Nomad Network is an example of an off-grid, encrypted and resilient mesh communications platform. The Android, Linux and macOS app Sideband has a graphical interface and focuses on ease of use.

See https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

#technology #networking #security #privacy #reticulum

It can keep tabs on the status of the connected controller, pool pump and chlorinator. This provides not only a more convenient solution than physically interacting with the pool equipment, but the ability to create automations that runs the pump for a duration depending on the temperature.

Features:

• Visualizes the status of the thermostats, pump, chlorinator, circuits, and schedules.
• Allows you adjust the thermostats and toggle circuits
• No physical connection to your LAN
• Supports over-the-air updates
• Easily one-time provisioning from an Android phone
• Integrates with MQTT and Home Assistant
• Accessible as a webapp
• Protected with IP68 waterproof case and connectors
• Does not require a power adapter
• Open source!

This device was tested with the Pentair SunTouch controller with firmware 2.080, connected to an IntelliFlo pump and IntelliChlor salt water chlorinator.

See https://github.com/cvonk/OPNpool

#technology #opensource #swimmingpool #smarthome #homeassistant

SDR-Control is a full featured iPad App to operate your Icom Transceiver at home or from around the world without additional hard- or software. But yes it is limited to working with your Icom IC-705, IC-7610 and IC-9700 transceivers, mainly because these radios have Wifi or Ethernet interfaces with their own server service running, instead of the usual USB found on other Icom radios. USB interfaces are not supported, and this is likley because the app is remotely connecting in from the Internet, through the home router, and to the WiFi or Ethernet device running on that network.

SDR-Control comes with integrated FT8 and FT4, nothing extra required. It also has UDP Log submission, call lookup, worked before, and both QRZ and HamQTH lookup.

What I like most (if I could use the app) is there are no recurring fees or subscriptions to use it, and it can be used across multiple iOS devices.

See https://roskosch.de/sdr-control-ios/

#technology #amateurradio #hamradio #Icom #SDRControl

LOL yes today's youth won't know what punched paper tape storage was used for. We also used it with punched cards back in the heyday of mainframe computers. Most will remember punched paper tape being used in teletype machines, but in fact it was already used as far back as 1725 for controlling looms, and from 1842 for automated pianos.

So whilst it is quite true many won't have a need for this, it is nice to know that we can now read in punched paper tape from a USB interface.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/04/16/paper-tape-reader-self-calibrates-speaks-usb/

#technology #retro #papertape #storage

When one thinks of online games, they typically think of competitive games, but co-op games also exist, and they are the perfect titles to play with friends and family that aren't interested in competition. This is why Android Police have compiled the best co-op games currently available on Android, a perfect round-up for all of you searching out titles to play with your partner. Best of all, this is a constantly-updated list, now even larger thanks to two new games added in the latest update. So if you've been on the hunt for some awesome co-op titles to play with your friends or significant other, then today's co-op round-up is for you.

See https://www.androidpolice.com/best-mobile-co-op-games/

#technology #android #gaming #co-op

Steam is a video game cross-platform that Valve created. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and expanded to include games from third-party publishers and now boasts a library filled with thousands if not tens of thousands of games across all gaming consoles. In fact, Steam Launcher installs pretty easily on most Linux distros, and often straight from the repos with no extra fiddling required. Remember that you can activate Proton driver support inside Steam Launcher to also play most advanced Windows-only games.

What I like about using Steam Launcher, is that I buy once, and can play the same game on Windows and Linux, and there is built-in support for playing most Windows games on Linux. So nowadays I buy exclusively through Steam.

See https://www.linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-steam-launcher-on-ubuntu-22-04-lts/

#technology #steamgames #linux #gaming