Logitech R500 Laser Presentation Remote

I have the Logitech R400 Laser Presentation Remote and I love it. So when I noticed that the R500 was released I looked for an excuse to get one. Unfortunately, since the R400 is so good, I had a really hard time of coming up with an excuse, until I was driven to the brink of madness by a user who doesn't know the difference between "press" and "hold".

Whenever I let others borrow my R400, they have a really difficult time of figuring out all the buttons. It's just not obvious for some people that the right-pointing arrow button with the bump on it is the next slide button, and the left-pointing arrow button is the previous slide button. And let's not talk about the start/stop slide button and the blank screen button. And with all the keys placed close together they keep accidentally pressing the wrong button and gets totally lost and confused. And as mentioned above, what always drives me crazy is that I like to set my key repeat rate really fast, and they often press and hold the next slide button and end up on the very last page then exits the presentation. Gah!

The R500's three separate, giant buttons really helped with the wrong button problem. The huge button with the right-pointing arrow is instantly obvious that it's for going to the next slide. And to my greatest surprise, the R500 no longer has the repeat button problem. Powerpoint slides will only change when the change slide buttons are pressed and then released. It doesn't change immediately when the buttons are pressed, but rather changes when the buttons are released, and if you realize you made a mistake or changes your mind about changing slide, just keep holding down the button and the press will be canceled. (Note: not true, see paragraph below.) No more accidentally going through multiple slides with a long press. I feel a lot of thought must've gone into designing this feature and after using it for a few minutes it became second nature to me. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this I have a bad feeling that the users will be confused again, especially since the slide change action happens at button release rather than button press.

One other difference is that the R400 sends out PgUp/PgDn keypresses to the computer, while the R500 sends out Left/Right keypresses. A side effect of this change is that when using the R400 to change pages in PDF documents, in can scroll until the very end. The R500 couldn't page down to the very end since the Left/Right keys only changes pages but won't scroll to the very end like PgDn does.

Oh, since the R500 has less physical buttons, the start/stop slide and blank screen functions can only be enabled by installing a driver (Windows / MacOS only) and holding down buttons. But I think for most users the driver installation would be unnecessary and press and hold will only confuse more people. Ooh, I just realized what I wrote above about holding down a button to cancel the press is actually hold down for second function. Yeah, I'm totally sure that so many people will be confused by this. Therefore, installing the driver is totally not recommended.

Even though the USB dongle is now tiny compared to the one on the R400, the R500 supports Bluetooth connectivity which is a really nice plus for computers that no longer have standard USB ports (Macbooks) or for mobile phones. Reviews on the net says there's frequent disconnect with Bluetooth but I had no such problems. Another change is the R500 uses a single AAA battery vs. two on the R400. Probably shorter battery life. Oh, and no power switch on the R500, so if you leave it in your bag, accidental presses could shorten battery life. Another tiny difference is that the laser on the R500 is "less stable" than the R400's. Probably not noticeable for most people, but I noticed with cheap laser pointers or low powered laser pointers, the laser point tends to flicker or drift, and the R500 does this, but as I said, not really noticeable and most people probably can't hold the remote that steadily anyway.

The one drawback I found is that the R500's plastic body and buttons feel really cheap. I don't really care for so called "premium" leather body products, but the R500 just feels cheap in the hand. As for the buttons, if I have to make a comparison, it's as if the R400 has high quality laptop style keyboard keys, while the R500 has cheap calculator keys.

Fake Logitech Wireless Presenter R400

I've been looking to buy a Logitech Wireless Presenter R400 since my ex-boss stole mine. The R400 is like the pinnacle of the PowerPoint remote since it does everything so well without any fuss, and it's backed by a well-known brand. I briefly considered again getting the R800 with green laser and vibrating alarm, but the few times I used green laser pointers in my presentations, the overly bright green laser only served to annoy my audience.

Anyway, if you've looked at online shops selling the R400, you might've noticed there are tons and tons of cheap "genuine" R400's. I found a shop selling one slightly cheaper than retail, and it showed the packaging with the Logitech logo, and it has hundreds of feedbacks claiming the shop is really good and the product is genuine. All the signs point to it being fake, so I bought one immediately.

Well, I couldn't lose anything. If it's fake I'll just return it, if it's genuine I've got myself a good deal, so here it is. Oops, I forgot to take a picture without the outer wrapper, but it says Logitech R400 on the box, and it has the old Logitech logo. Hundreds of online shops show this genuine blister packaging. Inside the plastic shell it still looks fine, but once unwrapped...

Comparing to a genuine R400. All images has the genuine on the left and fake on the right. I lost my original R400 when my ex-boss stole it. The one pictured in this post is a new one I just bought from an authorized dealer at list price after the fake one turned out to be, well, fake. Click the images to see close-ups.

The genuine one has better plastic and all the silk screening on the buttons as well as the buttons themselves are well-aligned. The genuine one has somewhat shinier plastic on the buttons, but the rest of the body feel similar.

As said above, the bodies feel quite similar, so that's a good thing for the fake one if you just want a cheap PowerPoint remote and don't care much for quality. There are many really cheap "R400-style" presenters being sold without the Logitech logo, but this is being sold as a Logitech R400, so I'm calling it a counterfeit. Notice my genuine one has the new Logitech logo that they started using around mid-2015.

The laser covering of the genuine one is curved and shaded. The fake one is flat and clearer so you can see the hole behind the covering.

The power slider of the fake one is really difficult to slide, and the shape of the switch doesn't quite fit inside the cutout so you can see a bit of green there. On the fake R400, the red sticker that's supposed to be shown when the remote is off is missing.

The battery compartment look similar except for the text, but the springs are lower quality on the fake one, and the batteries don't sit so well. Oh, and the fake one doesn't come with batteries. The genuine one has the newer R-R0008 part number while the fake one has the old R-R0004 part number. The fake one is missing a serial number.

The battery covers look similar, but the genuine one is shiny inside while the fake is matte. The battery cover of the fake one doesn't fit quite well and will fall inside if pushed too hard. Funnily enough the two battery covers are incompatible with each other.

The USB receivers look very similar, but the genuine one is shinier. The fake one appears to have markings that look used, but it came that way.

They come with different storage bags. This is just a difference with the year of production. Older R400's also came with the pouch on the right side, while newer ones have the low cost cloth pouch. The fake R400 comes with the old style pouch, but it feels rough compared to the genuine one that my ex-boss stole.

And finally, this is what a current genuine Logitech R400 packaging looks like. Even though the Logitech website still shows the old logo, but they're being sold with the new logo and new style packaging. And instead of being called wireless presenters, they're now called laser presentation remotes.

Slave to PowerPoint

PowerPoint remotes are one the most ovepriced things on the planet. I could get a whole set of wireless keyboard and mouse for less than the price of a wireless remote with three buttons. Sure, I get an integrated laser pointer with the remote, but laser pointers are such cheap things they shouldn't bring up the price of hte remote.

I do quite a bit of presentation these days, and it's always a pain to hover over my notebook to advance to the next slide instead of being able to walk around and mesmerize the audience with my charisma and wit. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I discovered a Chinese-made wireless remote in a local shop that doesn't cost several arms and legs. Surely enough, the first one I got had stiff buttons with bad contacts that took several presses to register a single press. I took it back to the shop and got a second one. The second one still had stiff buttons (I realized then that's how it was designed), but at least each press would register correctly, so I was actually very happy with it. It's a really simple remote with just three buttons: PgUp, PgDn, and laser pointer. It doesn't even have a power switch, but the buttons are stiff enough to not be pressed accidentally. (Funnily enough, I discovered Amazon.com sells this particular remote here.)

However, PowerPoint remotes are like crack, so after using the cheapo remote for a while, I finally ended up with the Real Thing (tm). The Logitech Wireless Presenter R400. There is also a more expensive "Professional" Presenter R800 with Green Laser Pointer and vibrating alarm. But I tested some green laser pointers and they only proved to be a distraction.

Officially, the Logitech R400 (and R800 as well) don't work with Mac OS X. The reason is quite simple really. The presenter is seen by newer Macs as a regular keyboard, but the buttons on the remote are hard wired to send out F5/ESC (start/stop presentation), "." (blank screen), PgUp, and PgDn; which are the standard keys for PowerPoint for Windows. The remotes are not magically designed to work only with PowerPoint for Windows, they just happen to be mapped that way because those key presses are the de-facto standard, which is why they work fine for Windows and even Linux. But OS X people prefer different keyboard shortcuts, so for Keynote or whatever other OS X apps that don't follow the Windows style standard, you can either change the default shortcut keys using Keyboard Shortcuts from System Preferences, or re-map the remote to send the correct key presses. This post and KeyRemap4MacBook (great name!) teaches you how accomplish this.

In fact, even though I do use Windows and PowerPoint, I still need to remap the F5/ESC key since it's such a pain in the butt to accidentally press the start/stop button during a presentation, and then accidentally press it again to start my presentation all over from the beginning! (They should've at least made it Shift-F5 to resume presentation from the current slide.) The solution is to use HID macros, which can detect key presses originating from different keyboards (or really HID devices) and re-map them accordingly. So I can re-map the F5/ESC on my R400 to send out something besides F5 and ESC, without messing with my actual F5 and ESC keys.

Oh, while writing this, I discovered that Epson finally has 64-bit USB display drivers for their projectors. They used to only have 32-bit drivers. Using a USB cable to connect to the projector is far better than connecting using a regular VGA cable.

Death by PowerPoint

Yesterday I gave the very first presentation of my group's work progress in front of all the department heads at the very first company-wide meeting headed by my new boss. The idea is that all department heads should know what other departments are doing and know the direction the company is headed, especially during these troubled times. But really, who cares what the IT guys are doing, as long as they can view their nudie pics, watch YouTube, and check mail?

Since this was the very first such meeting and everyone else are so inexperienced with doing meaningful and concise presentations, the meeting dragged on through the whole day. By the time it was my turn, it was 4 PM and everyone was already half dead.

After listening to my presentation, the boss had only two questions for me: Why do you have so crazy many projects going on all at once, and why are you doing other people's jobs? The second questions was specifically about my project about limiting Internet access using access restrictions. This is quite unfortunate as we're a manufacturing company with high-tech equipment. Many of the employees are unskilled labor that when faced with a computer, would just sit there and surf porn all day long, and our managers are too tame to tell them to go do their jobs, so it fell to IT to enforce Internet usage. Sigh.

Next project: teach users how to use PowerPoint, and do good, non-sleep-inducing presentations.

Meanwhile, SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is released.

Gooverlap

I was just using Google search like every day when I suddenly noticed that the email address normally shown in the upper right corner wasn't mine or anybody I know, and I never use web history. I wonder what could have caused this?


Been insanely busy since coming back from Singapore. My boss retired and the new boss who is still getting his feet wet are asking a lot of us to do new things that the old boss never asked us to. Such as giving monthly PowerPoint presentations of our work progress. I bet I could drive everyone to sleep with my presentation.

Remember the cow

Post-it cow, courtesy of Smiling with Daisy.

Remember the Milk ("RTM") is a web based task management / to-do list. They also provide an API for third party plug-ins that allows it to be used within other services or applications, such as Gmail or Firefox.

I created an RTM account a long time ago, but never got around to actually using it, mainly because I didn't have a portable device for carrying the notes around with me, and only using it in front of the computer was not very practical, eventhough I probably spend 90% of my life in front of my computer.

Now that I have an iPod Touch, I decided to take a second look at RTM. RTM recently released a dedicated iPod (and iPhone) application that syncs with the website, a Gmail plug-in, as well as a Firefox plug-in, and reminder bots that work with Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Google Talk. Wow! The iPod app is free, but to sync it with the website requires a Pro subscription for $25 per year.

Unfortunately, when I entered some tasks for testing the bots, I found that only the Yahoo! reminder bot actually works. Better than nothing, but it would've been nice if an advertised feature actually works. The iPod app is also cumbersome since it displays the tasks in a huge font, so I have to put in really short text, or use a lot of abbreviations. It also needs a lot of unnecessary clicks to make a task entry. For example, after choosing a due day, it should just return to the main screen, instead of having to press done each time.

RTM's own web interface also reeks of non-professionalism. The AJAX web interface is well written, but the web design is just terrible, the fonts are hard to read, and are really really small and dim on my high resolution screen. Not to mention the way task details are displayed on mouse overs, making it extremely confusing to see if you've actually clicked and selected a task, or if you're just mousing over tasks and not selecting them. I don't mind the cow logo so much, but I don't like the way they do other childish things like the toy mascots, as displaying "Woohoo!" when there are no unfinished tasks remaining, and using words like "w00t" in the official blog. It's just so unprofessional.

After doing some research, I found that a lot of people use Appigo Todo (another iPod app) instead of the RTM app on the iPod. Since Appigo Todo also syncs with RTM (only the Pro version) so I decided to give Todo a try. Todo is much more streamlined than the RTM app. The user interface is well thought out, entering tasks is easy and takes less clicks, and it displays more text on the screen. Unfortunately, Todo has to sync with RTM through the third-party API, which either works differently from RTM's own syncing mechanism, or it's just not as efficient. It takes a long time to sync tasks, and it doesn't sync in the backround, so everytime I open up the program, I have to sit and wait for it to finish doing the sync thing.

While trying out Appigo Todo though, I noticed that it also syncs with another service: Toodledo. Toodledo is also a web-based application, and it also has an iPod app available. Like Appigo Todo, the Toodledo app is also extremely well designed, and doesn't have the sync locking problem. But after giving it a try, I found that it's missing one important feature for me: when specifying a due date for a task, it only accepts a date entry and not a day or a time reference like "next Monday". The Toodledo website is also slower, and the Firefox plug-in is a side bar, and takes a long time to load.

So... despite its shortcomings, Remember the Milk, both the website and the iPhone app, ended up being my only choice. They definitely have the right idea and market penetration, but the execution is just really poor. It seems that have really good application designers and programmers who can produce excellent programs, but lack good interface designers and beta testers who can improve usability. Oh, they also seem to lack a research person, since just taking one look at the competition (Appigo Todo or Toodledo) would have improved the RTM app tremendously. Actually, they should just read their own forum and implement some of the suggestions the users have been begging them (sometimes for years!) to implement!

Anyway, I did end up paying $25 for a year of Pro access, and here's hoping that they would improve in the future.

Update: after finishing this post and before actually posting it, the RTM Yahoo! reminder bot stopped working for me. Oh, the humanity.