I have been using the Mele Fly Sky Air Mouse for about 2 months now. So far, it is great. I have only needed to recharge the mice twice each (I have two of them). When the mouse gets low on charge, the mouse starts to jump around but is mostly usable. There are times when a key would not work on the keyboard, but I think that may have been related to having a low charge (I don't use the keyboard frequently). I love having the volume buttons on the remote. Not all of the buttons map to Android keys, however. I have run a test so I have all the key codes for the remote side of the device. I will post them at some point. The device packs light so I was able to bring it with me when I brought my MK802 to a family member's house. I have had a few people try it out. Most have struggled with it for a few minutes, then got the hang of it. Most people struggle with the fact that is not a Wiimote, but it acts like one. Before my cousin tried it out, I specifically told him he didn't have to point it at the screen. He still pointed it at the screen. He caught himself doing it 3 times.
The sensitivity in a device like this will always be a battle. The only time I find it difficult to use is when I need to pinpoint a small button on the screen. It can be difficult to hit the bulls eye. You can get very close, but moving it that few pixels (yes, you saw that right, pixels on a 1080p TV) to get it from thumbs down to fullscreen in the Youtube app can be problematic. I blame this more on the app then the mouse; I have blogged about those apps before.
On to the feature requests. I have ordered them from the nice to haves to the most important essential changes.
1) The Home button doesn't take you to the home screen
I use Android with this mouse. I understand the fact that this mouse was designed as a generic USB HID device, but it would be nice if the Home button acted like the Android Home button. This isn't essential for me, because I tend to stay in one app 90% of the time, but it would help. On a related note, the Mute button doesn't actually mute. It does send a keyboard event, so Android apps can intercept the Mute button.
2) Mouse wheel
Scrolling up and down can be a pain. Using the drag gesture doesn't work well with large lists on this device. Having a mouse wheel could help drastically. I think one would fit on the left side of the remote, just to the left of the DPAD. It would stick out the side of device. You can then use your left hand or your right index finger to scroll the wheel.
3) Swap Enter and Left Mouse Click.
The Enter button is above and to the left of the DPAD. The left mouse click is inside of the DPAD. The natural flow if you are using the DPAD is to hit the button inside of the DPAD. What you will find is that you end up selecting something totally different because the mouse was over one button while the highlight from the DPAD is over another. This is unnatural. My wife and I have gotten used to it, but it needs to be swapped
4) Add media buttons
I absolutely need the ability to pause, play and skip on the remote. Right now, I have to move the mouse to the on-screen pause button. This is slow and requires effort to hit the button. If I could request one feature for the next version of the mouse, this would be it.
I have been searching for a fast way to scan a large collection of photos. While in Microcenter purchasing Christmas gifts, my wife noticed the Pandigital Photolink One-touch Scanner. It was only $30. At that price, I was very skeptical, since the $100 Xerox didn't work at all. For $30, though, it was cheap enough
to take a risk.
When reviewing various scanners, you tend to get a feel where the problems occur. For sheet feeding scanners like this one, a real fear is blurriness caused by the picture rotating. This occurs when you don't feed the picture in straight and you adjust it while its scanning. The next fear has to do with scanning directly to an SD card. If you scan to an SD card, you never have an option to review the pictures. This is also what makes scanning with devices faster. After you scan one picture, you are ready to scan the other. You don't have to worry about scanning areas, cropping or slight rotation. The device should take care of that for you.
I decided to scan about 5 pictures, then check the image quality on a computer. I was very happy with the results. The scanner only scans at 600dpi, so don't expect super quality scans. The guide that you put the picture against worked well, so there were no slight rotation problems. It chose the correct scanning area. My litmus test succeeded.
Years ago, my future father-in-law gave my then girlfriend a bag full of pictures. I think it was a compromise on him buying her a scanner; She was supposed to scan all the pictures. She never did. Eventually, she saw the pain I went through to scan all my high school pictures using a flatbed scanner. It took me weeks, and a lot of the pictures were slightly rotated. This discouraged her even further. After my litmus test, I decided to scan her father's pictures. I expected to spend an hour here and an hour there for a while to get them scanned. There were 8 envelopes. Some were single rolls while others were multiple rolls. It took me about an hour and a half to scan ALL the pictures. At that point, the $30 paid for itself already. After scanning a picture, you only have to wait about a second to scan the next picture. When I first started scanning, I tried to feed the next picture too fast. The orange light blinked red to tell me it wasn't ready yet. I found that if you move the just-scanned picture to a face down pile, that is enough time for the scan to complete. When I say a second, I really do mean a second. Once you get into the groove of scan, put into pile, scan, put into pile, you will find that you make progress really fast. I am planning on flying to a family members house in the coming months. I will be bringing the scanner. The goal is to scan as many pictures as I can; hopefully the entire collection (well, the ones less than 5 inches wide at least).
There are some limitations for the scanner. The one I got only accepts pictures that are 5 inches wide, max. The box advertises supporting a max for 5x7, but it will support longer than 7 inches. I think it just advertised that to make it easier to understand to the end user. I had a 5 inch tall panoramic that scanned just fine. I don't know the actual max length. Its better for advertising to undersell than oversell. 600dpi is good enough quality to look at. You can put it on a big screen TV if you have family members over to look at a bunch of them. The device was designed so you can scan directly to the SD card that a digital picture frame uses. I understand that a lot of people want higher quality. At times, I want higher quality too. This scanner is great for scanning your entire collection (that is less than 5 inches wide), so that you can more easily pick which pictures you want a scanned in a higher quality. When someone asks for a higher quality, you can find the picture and scan it with your flatbed.
If you decide to purchase this product, I recommend that you do some price comparisons. Normally I post the Amazon link directly to the product because it is the cheapest price. In this case, I'm posting the Amazon link to show you what it looks like, and so you can read more reviews. I purchased it from an actual store for less than 1/2 of the Amazon price. I did not find it on their online site, though. I tried doing a Google search and the price ranged from $30 on Ebay to $100 on Overstock. Amazon was half way in between those prices. The exact model I got was the PANSCN04.
I read through the reviews of the scanner on Amazon. Most are positive. I did not notice the grey line problem that a few reviews reported. I did have to calibrate the device or use the protection sleeve so I don't know if that effects the scan. Below is a Tiger Direct review of an older model that only supports 4 inches as opposed to 5 inches, but they are very close.
My grandmother had collected a lot of pictures over the years. I wanted to scan the collection, but there were a lot of pictures. I only have a flatbed scanner, which takes a long time to scan pictures. I decided to find a feeding scanner so that I can spend as little time as possible scanning the pictures. I settled on Xerox Xtravel 600 dpi travel scanner. The reviews were mixed, but some people speculated that they weren't reading the manual. They stressed that you must read the manual before doing anything.
I purchased it thinking that if I read the manual, it should be fine. I started having issues immediately. The Windows XP machine didn't like the scanner. I tried to use my Linux laptop without success. The scanner would scan, but all the images would be really dark. I couldn't get it to calibrate. Finally, I tried a Windows 7 machine, and I had the same issues that I had with Linux. I had similar issues to some of the reviews, and I did follow the instructions. This leads me to believe that the product is just crap.
I purchased the scanner in July of 2012 for $100. I just checked today, and it is selling for around $150. Amazing that the price went up for a product that doesn't work.
I have been converting all of my avi files to mp4 files. For the most part, everything has been going well, but I have been running into issues from time to time. I see sporadic errors in the ffmpeg output about not being able to render a frame. When I play that movie using the MK802 bundled HD player, I run into an issue. Part way through the video, I hear a pop, the video freezes for a fraction of a second, then the audio sync is off about 1/2 a second. The pop does not cause the file itself to have audio sync issues. If you rewind then immediately fast forward, you get right back where you are and the audio sync is fine. This tells me there is an artifact in that point of the file that causes the video player to mess up. I haven't tried playing the mp4 files in MX Player or Mplayer (on Linux) yet, so I don't know if it occurs in all players or just the bundled HD player.
In a previous post, I talked about converting 8MM video to AVI files burned onto a CD. Many people talk about how CDs and DVDs degrade and eventually lose data. This Christmas, I decided to copy all the AVI files off of the CDs. Luckily, none of the files got corrupted. I was able to convert all 22 files to MP4 files encoded in H264. I used Ffmpeg, which used x264. I encoded at 500kbps. Given the 320x240 resolution and the 15 fps, I could have probably gone lower in the bps, but disk space isn't much of an issue anymore. I converted the video from 3.8gb on 7 CDs to 2.3gb on a single Micro SD card. Below is the command I ran to convert. This is derived from research a buddy of mine did to get MP4 files that work on older iPhones.
Between 1958 and 1974, my grandfather made home movies with an 8MM camera. For Christmas 1996, my dad and I decided to convert those old 8MM films to a digital format to give to each family member. Our plan was to burn the videos on to CD-R's to give to the family. Although the DVD specification was created a year before, DVD-Video's didn't come to the US until 1997. We were a bit a head of our time.
Our setup was to put to tape a white piece of paper on a wall. We set up the 8MM projector to project onto the paper. We pointed our video camera (one of the big ones that you put a full VHS tape into) at the paper. Our computer had a Hauppage video capture card hooked up to the camera using an RCA cable. The computer had a state of the art Pentium 150Mhz processor in it.
Although it was a lot of horse power for the day, real time encoding of video was a problematic task. I did a lot of test recordings using various software and codecs to find the right mix that would allow us to encode in real time. We settled on R Bartick's RBCap using Intel Indeo 5. We encoded 320x240 video at 15 fps using 1101.0 kbps in yuv410p colorspace.
We encoded 22 movies into 3.8gb of data, split into 7 CD-Rs. This was a time when blank CD-R's were $1.50, and came with jewel cases. We got a discount for buying 100 blanks for $100. We had to make 7 sets so it was worth it. At this time, CD-R drives were 1x, and were very sensitive. The screensaver going on was enough of a CPU spike do disrupt the burning process and turn the CD into a coaster.
In a lot of previous posts, I have talked about having video performance problems and Youtube connection issues. There was some evidence that suggested that both were related to having overall network issues on my home network. It seems like some video formats could not use the hardware decoder if there was streaming issues. Also, Youtube seemed to buffer and hang a lot, on both HD and SD modes.
While traveling for the holiday's, I brought my MK802 with me. In a previous post, I talked about how my family really enjoyed the technology. This event did give me an opportunity to use the device in another network to see what issues occur or disappear.
As far as video performance, AVI/XVID files on the SD card were still not using the hardware decoder in MX Player. That didn't seam to be an issue, though. The software decoder was able to handle the load. MX Player still could not play HD content, though. I had to use the bundled HD Player. This made it a bit awkward, because depending on the type of format I was about to play, I had to switch between video players. This caused people to be a little confused, but as long as I was the one that was controlling the device, everyone was fine with it. All local videos did play fine, however.
Next, I fired up the Youtube app. I tried playing an HD video, but it wouldn't play. The buffering progress bar wasn't moving. I switched it to SD and the buffering bar started to move, but it still took 30 seconds before a video started. This was worse when a commercial would play because it took 30 seconds for the commercial to buffer, then another 30 seconds of silence for the video to buffer. This could an issue with the Wifi at the house, though. The WiFi signal was kind of low there. I fired up Wifi Analyzer on my phone and discovered that 4 WiFi networks were sharing channel 6. There was a 5th network on channel 7, but none above that. There were 3 networks below channel 5 but their signal strength made it seem like they were farther away. The local WiFi was strong enough that I could stream Pandora with no delay, however.
This leads me to believe their might be something wrong with the networking on the MK802. My buddy has an MK802 and he doesn't seem to have the problems I do, but he hasn't done as much as I have with the device. I'm waiting for the opportunity to test it on another network.
