Gaming mouse review: Razer Abyssus

I’ve had the Razer Abyssus for a couple of months now, making the switch from my Logitech G3. I bought it along with a SteelSeries Kinzu just so I could test them both out, but mostly because the Kinzu didn’t work with my Icemat, I stuck to the Abyssus.

Some facts to start off – the Abyssus is a wired USB laser mouse that can run at 800, 1600 or 3200 DPI (I really like that they put in a switch for the different DPIs at the bottom of the mouse – I hate accidentally hitting a button beneath the scrolling wheel that will fuck up my aim). It’s ambidextrous, so it works for both left- and right-handed people. There are only three buttons – left, right and middle (mouse wheel), no thumb button or anything like that. It’s very light-weight – the lightest mouse I’ve tried yet.

The mouse is very responsive and very accurate. It can stop working somewhat randomly with my mousepad if I don’t clean it often enough, but that’s not a big minus for the mouse. The buttons feel good – I’d like the mouse wheel button to be a bit easier to press down, but it’s OK. The left and right buttons had a tendency to double-click when I didn’t want them to when the mouse was new, but that seems to have gone away with time. Maybe it’s something that got fixed with wear or my fingers adjusted to whatever they have to do to avoid that behaviour, I’m not sure.

The light weight and low profile makes it ideal for RTSes like StarCraft. The shape is also comfortable for a palm grip, so using it for FPSes has also been a success for me. The only thing I’d say is a direct drawback is that the feet are really small, which means it’s a tiny bit wobbly on hard surfaces. I’m also not sure how well most glidz fit onto them – I haven’t dared try. The feet are quite smooth, but I would still prefer to stick some teflone tape on without having to worry too much.

All in all, I’d definitely recommend this mouse for someone who wants a simple, robust mouse that works well for all genres. This obviously isn’t the mice you’ll want to get if you need 10 buttons to bind macros to, but that’s clearly not who Razer was aiming at with this one.

Shining – Blackjazz

Now here’s an album that caught me completely off-guard. I can’t even remember how I first found out about the Norwegian band Shining, but their 2010 album Blackjazz certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. It’s already been on several “top 10 Norwegian albums of 2010″ lists and has caught a lot of wind in the metal community. Their old stuff is actually kinda hard to get a hold of, but what I can tell you is that they’ve been focusing on modern jazz. Then, recently, they cooperated with Enslaved, and this is pretty much the result of that cooperation.

Blackjazz is hard to describe. Saying it’s black metal with jazz elements (or the other way around) is dumbing it down too much. It’s like Shining took the two genres, merged them, and the result was something completely different from anything I can really relate to. There’s been metal bands messing with jazz – Atheist, Cynic, Meshuggah – but this takes it to a whole new level. The closest thing to this I know of has to be Fredrik Thordendal’s Special Defects – Sol Niger Within, which is a really big compliment to Blackjazz.

I think there are three defining features about this album that makes it so fascinating. The first is the wide array of instruments and effects being showcased. Every instrument (vocals, guitar, bass, drums, sax, keyboard) gets their moments to show off during the album, but they also complement each other in constantly new and really creative ways as you listen your way through. It sounds a tiny bit like some of Devin Townsend’s stuff, just taken to an extreme level with a more serious face.

It’s hard to describe this album, or even put words as to why I hope you’ll give it a listen. Shining has taken bits of jazz, metal and their own pure creativity and forged something completely original. All the pieces are familiar but make up something unknown and different. The sheer ingenuity showcased in Blackjazz is stunning, and I hope people will listen to it, be confused as hell, and then give it repeated listenings out of sheer curiosity until they “get” it and fall totally in love with it.

1349 – Demonoir

I’ll have to do catch-up with this year’s releases since I’ve been so lazy about writing. First up is 1349′s Demonoir!

If you read my review of their last album, you know that I wasn’t too impressed. This time around they captivate me much more. In the heavy songs, their signature “fast, but slow” riffs are back and creates great contrasts with their high-tempo parts. Also unique to this album is that the band chose to make every other track a short ambient interlude to lead up to the heavier songs. This works well – Revelations of the Black Flame had a lot of good atmospheric ambient stuff, and that experience shows off in these new tracks.

Compared to their first three albums, the tempo has still been downpaced, though. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the thing I really enjoyed about 1349 was the way they could throw tremolo riffs at me non-stop without sounding monotonic or repetitive. I wouldn’t say their new approach is dumbed down, but it seems like when their music alternates between ambient and heavy riffing, it creates an excuse to not be as creative in your riff-writing. The sound is still distinctly 1349, just less so – even the guitar sound itself sounds less crisp than before, so even when there are some interesting riffs, it’s somewhat hard to hear them as anything else than constant churning.

While I think Demonoir is a step up from Revelations of the Black flame, I still think the weaknesses remain. The tonality and rhythm isn’t as challenging anymore, and while this hopefully can draw more people into this great band, I just don’t think 1349 is focusing enough on their strong points.

Burzum – Belus

Burzum is probably the most controversial black metal artist in existence – in Norway, he most certainly is. Having spent nearly 16 years in prison for murder, this is his first album in 11 years, and first black metal album in 14 years.

I grew up too late to really care about the things Varg Vikernes (the sole member of Burzum) has done, but I’ve never been a very big Burzum fan, although his music is quite good. It’s not been quite my style, I suppose. However, Belus is a really, really convincing album on its own. The style can without a doubt be called classic and old-school as far as black metal goes, but there is certainly a lot of originality to be found here.

I’m not sure if I can explain this one. I have a weak spot for music that sticks to the bare basics of music-making but still manages to transcend into something more than that. That type of music is a very good reminder that you don’t need a lot of special effects and your own unique distortion to stick out, even in today’s broad array of metal music.

This album is one of those albums. With very little use of other things than the basic building blocks of metal – drums, distorted guitars and vocals – Burzum have created something new that will appeal to old-school black metal enthusiasts. This album sounds like it might as well have been made 15 years ago – that’s something that’s very rare today.

Belus very successfully creates an enchanting soundscape of droning guitars, as well as mixing in some parts that have memorable, even catchy melodies or rhythms to them. The blend is an atmospheric and sinister metal album that stands very well on its own.

I don’t think the appeal of Burzum is going to broaden with this album. In fact, it’s quite amazing how unchanged this guy’s style has remained for the past 14 years. If you’re not into black metal, this album probably won’t sell you on the genre – but if you’re into other old-school bands like Immortal, Emperor or Mayhem but haven’t checked out Burzum yet, this album should be a very good introduction.

For any metal fan whatsoever, this album is worth a listen just to marvel at how old-school yet fresh it’s possible to be in the year of 2010. I, for one, hope it inspires other bands to try the same path.

Best metal of the 2000s

A lot of people have been throwing up “best of the decade” lists, so I thought I’d take a shot at what I probably know the most about: Metal music. I’ve spent some time thinking about these entries, so maybe it’s a bit late to cash in on the “best of 2000s” trend, but who cares. I do this mostly for myself, anyway.

I do consider myself a metalhead – a very picky one, at that, and more a fan of the 90s than the past 10 years, but on the other hand I think there’s been a lot of good music this decade, so I thought I’d put up some of the bands/albums that really stuck out for me as good. These are in alphabetical order, by band name – anyone hoping for a top 10 will have to look elsewhere!

Gaming mouse review: Roccat Kone

I’m a big sucker for gaming mice, and the Roccat Kone is probably my biggest surprise. I bought it around the time when Roccat wasn’t a very well known brand, but the Kone was getting great reviews all over the place, and now it’s one of the best selling gaming mice on the market. I’ve had it for maybe six months now, so I thought I’d just dish out my opinions quickly. I’m not going to go over the feature list, you can find that somewhere else.

The good things: It’s very comfortable – maybe not for people with small hands, but it’s the most comfortable grip I’ve ever experienced. Because of this, it’s great to use – it’s easy to get a feel for. Overall, it’s simply a great mouse in regards to grip and aim with. It’s quite heavy, though, and you can’t really get it light enough to play RTS games with all that well, even though there are different weights.

The bad things: There are a lot of them, but somehow they don’t nearly outweigh the good parts. First of all, the mouse wheel. It’s very weird, it’s almost stepless, but not quite. It’s not very good. Also, it’s near impossible to click the mouse wheel without scrolling up or down – you have to be very specific and use a lot of pressure, which is a bitch when trying to open links in a new tab, for example. Mine also broke some months after I bought it – the wheel seemed to simply detach from the bit that made scrolling possible. I’ve heard a lot of other people have had the same issue, so it’s kinda bad. The drivers are also very weird. For some reason, if I put my update rate to 1000Hz, my cursor would occasionally skip to the left before skipping back to the right. I also had similar problems when turning TCU on, so I had no idea what that actually did, which isn’t exactly good considering it’s one of the advertised features. The mouse worked more than fine at 500Hz without TCU, though, but it was still annoying.

So, can I recommend it? Yes and no. It’s probably the best mouse for shooters I’ve ever used, but the drivers might be holding back some of the fine-tuned performance. The crappy mouse wheel is also an issue for whenever you’d like to browse the web or if you’d like to use it in whatever game you’re playing. I was able to look past those issues, but I’m a very patient and excusing man. Most people won’t tolerate that. So I probably can’t recommend it. But it’s damn good anyway.

Chromium OS – The Bright Side

The source code for Google’s Chromium OS was released today. Now, it’s clearly not meant to completely replace Windows, Linux or any other OS. It’s meant for a different market – mainly the market of netbooks, but I guess laptops and public computers could make good use of it as well. It’s not all that clear at this point, if you ask me – but this is no revolution in the OS division. More of an evolution, making a new type of OS – namely a web-based (and dependent) one.

I think there’s one idea that will stick around and probably make an impact on the regular OSes, though – and that’s the idea of integrating the web browser into the OS. In Chromium, it’s taken one step further, of course, the web browser being the OS. But let’s say Linux took this idea and made it so that you actually could browse the web and it would look like in Chromium, but you could at the same time switch to your “regular” desktop. I mean, look at the picture of Chromium’s UI. At least I would love to have the option of having it look like that when I’m browsing the web on my Linux laptop or Windows desktop. It looks gorgeous!

Many people use several desktops in Linux. What if one of them was a designated browser desktop?

Not to mention, Google is right on about more and more people using their browser and the internet for more and more these days. This idea is tapping into a completely new market, and it would only seem natural for Linux, Microsoft and Apple to follow after. I doubt they’ll be willing to just leave this market alone, after all – and I also doubt they’ll be willing to build their version of this could-OS completely from scratch. Integrating the browser(s) more into the OS, both UI-wise and performance-wise, seems like a natural progression.

This might be a bit hard to do, considering there are several different web browsers out there, but if it’s possible, it would be absolutely awesome. And of course, Windows and Apple would have a much easier time integrating their proprietary browsers into their OSes. It would be a bit of a letdown for those of us who prefer using better browsers, but let’s face it – we’re not a huge chunk of the PC market, and we’d be fine with our favorite browser still running in an old-fashioned window.

I hope I’m not completely off on this idea being realistic, because it would be really cool.

Loud and distorted sound in Ubuntu 9.10

Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop, after a lengthy period of using Windows XP. The change was welcome, but as always, making such dramatical changes to your computer is never without problems. This time it was the sound, so I thought I’d just write about my solution here, in case anyone else suffers from the same issue.

First, I’ll say that I’ve had this problem on the same laptop before, using Ubuntu 8.10 (I think, might have been a later version), but I remember being able to fix it back then by clicking random stuff in the sound settings. In 9.10, however, they seem to have stripped the sound settings window, probably in an attempt to simplify the UI. I don’t really oppose that, but I think they ought to consider adding some kind of “additional settings” checkbox for the more experienced users who, like me, like clicking on things to see if it makes other things work.

The problem was, simply, that the sound would distort and become way too loud as soon as the in-built Ubuntu volume control went over 15% or something like that. No huge problem, I could simply have stayed within those 15%, but it was annoying, especially considering I wouldn’t be able to do fine volume control with my laptop’s in-built volume buttons, which seem to increase/decrease the volume by 5%. I remembered the command for the standard Ubuntu sound mixer, so I opened the terminal and accessed it to see if I could get some useful information out of it:

alsamixer

There, I could see that as soon as the “PCM” channel went above 47%, that’s where the distortion would come in. I’m not sure what PCM is, but I assume it’s the sound card’s amplifier, or whatever. At 47%, it was a 0dB gain, right where it was supposed to be. However, the Ubuntu volume control insisted that it could be cranked all the way up to 100. I wanted it to stay at 47, then the volume control could just control the “Master” channel, which could be turned all the way up with no distortion.

Some googling revealed the possibility of un-checking the PCM channel in the sound preferences, under “Default mixer tracks”. This, however, was nowhere to be found. I assume it’s been stripped away. So, I spent a few hours looking for a config file I could edit, and eureka:

sudo gedit /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common

In the file, look for something like this:

[Element PCM]
switch = mute
volume = merge

The documentation in the same file tells me that “merge” means “merge it into the device volume slider”. This sounds like what I don’t want it to do, so I change it to “ignore” instead. Then I open alsamixer again, put the PCM slider at 47%, and reboot – and voila! It works. The volume slider seems a bit uneven, so you have to turn it quite far up to get proper volume, but I can’t really be bothered with trying to fix that.