Microsoft finally released the Surface Power Cover recently, and it was worth the wait.

There is only one downside: the keys aren’t backlit, like the standard Touch and Type Covers. I can’t imagine why they did this, since the set of people who want significantly more battery life and don’t want a backlighting option has to be pretty small.

Physically, it’s twice as thick and twice as heavy as the standard Type Cover, giving my Surface Pro 2 more of a netbook feel to carry, but not unpleasantly so. It came with a warning label telling you to make sure you have all the latest software updates before attaching it, but since I preordered mine the moment they flipped the switch on the Microsoft site, I got it the day before the official release date, and the firmware updates didn’t show up until the next day. It worked fine, though, and after the update, the battery levels were tracked separately.

How well does it work? Well, I just finished 45 minutes on the elliptical with a ripped Bluray disc playing, at 2/3 volume and 100% brightness, with WiFi turned on. The system reported that I had just over 15 hours of battery life left, and based on how the Pro 2 has performed the past few months, I believe it.

So, right after Christmas, I caught the brief window where the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 was back in stock in my preferred configuration (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD), and bought one, along with the only keyboard cover that was available in a non-hideous color, the first-generation Touch Cover. Since they still haven’t released the Power Cover that gives you real keys and an extra 50% battery life, I made do with that for a while, and then got a good price on the second-generation Type Cover at Amazon Japan.

[Note: for the last few releases, it’s been a lot less painful to switch keyboard types in Windows; you used to have to hack the registry when you had US Windows and a Japanese keyboard, now you can just add the correct layout and manually switch. It still can’t auto-detect different keyboards the way the Mac has been doing for a long time, but it’s progress.]

There are a few quirks that have been discussed in the many reviews of the Surface Pro, but it’s genuinely good hardware, marred only by the immaturity of Windows’ handling of high-resolution displays. Basically, every piece of software that isn’t rebuilt to use the (apparently-incomplete, at least that’s why Adobe says they’re having so much trouble) HiDPI APIs will be scaled to make the text readable, and this breaks all sorts of layouts. For many applications, your choices are “big and fuzzy”, “way too small”, and occasionally “missing most menus and dialog text” (yes, that means you, FontExplorer Pro). “Way too small” is particularly annoying with a touchscreen, but the pen and trackpad have the resolution to handle tiny targets. And the problem goes away if you connect an external HDMI display.

My only complaints about the keyboard covers have to do with the trackpad. First, there’s no way to shut off tapping. There’s an app that claims to offer this feature, but it simply doesn’t work on the Pro 2, and there’s no hint of an update. On any tap-enabled trackpad, I’m constantly mis-clicking while trying to move the pointer across the screen, and it drives me nuts. They’re just too damn sensitive about the amount of pressure required to “tap”.

The second problem with the trackpad is that it often doesn’t work if you plug a USB device in. Because Microsoft’s own USB/Ethernet adapter is a 10Mbit USB2 device, I bought a third-party USB3 gigabit adapter that also includes a 3-port hub. It works great, but if I plug in the adapter and then wake up the tablet, the keyboard cover doesn’t get enough power to run the trackpad. Reverse the order and all is well.

Typical battery life is 8+ hours, unless I’m playing Skyrim, in which case I get a bit over 4. It never gets uncomfortably warm, and the fans are nice and quiet. The two-position kickstand is a nice upgrade over the first-generation Pro, and makes it possible to play Skyrim in bed on a lap desk. The speakers are quite loud for a tablet, and better than most laptops I’ve used.

It’s fantastic for Illustrator since the last update, but until Adobe gets the resolution problems sorted out, Photoshop is annoying to use, both because you need a hack to make the icons visible, and because the 64-bit version has issues with the Pro 2’s graphics drivers. Lightroom is fine, and InDesign is reportedly working well, too. [all of these being the pay-to-play CC versions, which is a rant for another day. Let’s just say there are some cranky pros out there annoyed by a combination of incompatible changes and workflow-crippling bugs]

The “app” market is, as expected, filled with iPaddish crap. I’ve deleted most of the apps that I’ve tried, and I haven’t found a lot of good ones to try. If I had to choose between a standard Surface and an iPad, I’d buy the iPad and complain about it; instead, I get to enjoy the Pro 2.

How do I feel about Windows 8.1? It was designed for a tablet, works well on one, and sucks elsewhere. There are some compatibility issues compared to Windows 7 (VPN software, assorted third-party drivers, etc). On the little netbook I upgraded, I needed to hunt down a Start-menu replacement to make it tolerable; not good, just tolerable.

Oh, and how did I pay for it? A friend sold off a bunch of my old Magic: The Gathering cards on eBay. Just a handful of high-value cards paid for the tablet, keyboard, gigabit adapter, HDMI adapter, and a new Bluetooth mouse, with money left over. We still need to go through the rest of my cards and put them all up as a big batch. And then see if anyone wants to buy a big batch of INWO, black-border Jyhad, XXXenophile, etc…

Fitbit has started a voluntary recall of the Force fitness tracker, due to people experiencing allergic reactions. Initially, the reactions were thought to be caused by indifferent cleaning practices leading to sweat and grime buildup, but they’re now thinking it’s a combination of allergies to the nickel content and to the glue used to bond the wristband.

I’m betting on the glue, because while I haven’t had an allergic reaction, mine developed a strong, foul odor that definitely wasn’t due to lack of cleaning. In fact, the Japanese Type Cover 2 that I bought for my Surface Pro 2 arrived with the exact same odor, although not quite as strong.

I started an RMA to have mine exchanged for a new one, but when they said it would take 4+ weeks to process, I decided to see if I could deodorize both the Fitbit and the Type Cover myself. I was successful, so I canceled the RMA a few days ago.

My weapon of choice was a pound of activated carbon, purchased in the fishtank aisle at the local pet shop. I buried them in the stuff for several days. For the Fitbit, I taped over the display and the charging port (being sure to cover the two small holes for the altimeter), and for the Type Cover, I taped a paper towel over it.

Fitbit is working on a new model, and I hope that in addition to switching materials, they come up with a new clasp design that’s less likely to catch on clothing and pop open.

My health has been… peculiar for the last several months, and it’s quite frustrating to be repeatedly told that the latest round of tests came back negative. Generally good, since it means that the most comprehensive physical I’ve ever had says that the major systems are working perfectly, but it means that we still didn’t know what’s causing the problem that’s left me horribly short of breath and both physically and mentally fatigued.

When we finally got around to the sleep clinic, the take-home sleep study came back “inconclusive” after two weeks, and they scheduled an in-lab study two weeks later, with results coming two weeks after that.

Several of my friends have been Fitbit fans for quite a while, so while this was going on, I pre-ordered the new Force model, which in addition to steps and stairs, tracks sleep time and disruptions (based on movement during the night). It also has “social” features like auto-shaming, which I will never be taking advantage of.

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I was in two large Costcos this weekend, with their displays all set up for the holiday season. The only camcorder they stocked was the GoPro. Everything else was a digicam advertising 1080p HD video support, in one of the usual form factors. Up to 42x optical zoom, although for the most part the ISO rating didn’t go high enough to compensate for the f/6-ish aperture at the long end.

For all the trash talk about the iPhone killing off the digicam, it looks like the digicam killed the camcorder first.

Jeff Atwood and Weyman Kwong are making a sturdy programmer’s keyboard with silent mechanical keyswitches. While I enjoy the ear-shattering clatter of my current mechanical keyboad, I’m less fond of the shoddy physical construction and poor multi-keypress handling (and, of course, I’d swallow broken glass before dealing with the assholes at Matias ever again), so this is definitely on my must-buy list.

Emacs 23 adds line-move-visual, on by default, which changes the behavior of previous-line and next-line commands to take you to the next row on the screen. That is, if your line wrapped because it was too long to fit in the window, Control-N takes you to whatever position in that line happens to be one row below the current position.

This is the way the NeXT-derived widgets in MacOS X implemented their “emacs-like” editing, but it’s not the way Emacs has ever worked, which makes it a baffling choice for a default behavior. Especially since it breaks keyboard macros for line-by-line operations, something quickly noticed by users (update: actually, the official release notes don’t even mention a tenth of what they changed; you just have to guess, apparently).

So, using Emacs as an actual text editor now requires, at minimum:

(defun set-auto-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(setq-default initial-major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
(setq-default enable-local-variables nil)
(global-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command)
(setq-default inhibit-eol-conversion t)
(setq line-move-visual nil)

[and why didn’t I notice when I installed it on my laptop several years ago? Because I reverted to the vendor-supplied Emacs at some point (I no longer recall why), and the Linux distros on our servers only recently upgraded to it]

Fast Design magazine writes a puffy little piece on the decline of wood in consumer electronics design, filled with quotes about the mystical and spiritual qualities of this natural material that make it ill-suited to modern use.

Commenter Bradley Gawthrop calls bullshit:

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Wood stuff hasn't been made at scale by craftsmen who whisper at trees in a very very long time. Go to a Thomasville factory and see for yourself. It's treated like any other industrial material, it's just more expensive.

The reason electronics engineers don't use wood is because it's poorly suited to the product. It's not rigid in thin cross sections, it doesn't hold tight tolerances well over humidity changes, it's expensive to procure (especially in China), and manufacturing with it is expensive, not because it requires hand craftsmanship (it doesn't) but because all wood manufacturing is subtractive. it can't be molded and cast and extruded the way glass and aluminum and plastic can be. It arrives in unpredictably sized slabs which have to be milled and milled and milled again until you reach the desired shape.

Also, we manufacture all this stuff in China, where they don't even have enough timber for their own domestic use.
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