Smartfish sent us their Whirl mouse with Comfort Pivot to take for a spin. The site claims that “the Whirl™ Mini’s patented ErgoMotion™ pivot system makes your mouse feel like it’s ‘floating on air!’” They’re really just trying to point out that the unique design allows it to pivot at a full range of angles for optimal comfort.
It’s All In The Wrist
I spend about 12-15 hours a day on a computer and almost all of that involves mouse interaction. I have my home office, but will often work from the couch, so a wireless mouse for my laptop is ideal. To put this mouse to the test, I made this my couch mouse for a few weeks. My biggest complaint about my current setup is the angle my wrist must be at in order to use a mouse. This problem still exists with the Whirl. To be fair, it exists with any of my mice on the couch and my Whirl mouse did provide some relief.
On my desk top, the Whirl proved to be even more comfortable, but at some expense. I found that with extended use, I was to get a little more used to the pivoting, but not completely. The only problem this creates, really, is that I found myself having to relearn to click without it feeling awkward and I still pivot the mouse forward when trying to click. Despite having to adjust, I found the pivot to be pretty fluid. Moving smoothly in any direction, I never felt like I was forcing it.
Additional Whirl Features
Aside from the pivot feature, the Whirl feels good in the hand and is just big enough to feel normal and just barely small enough to consider it a travel mouse. One thing I liked a lot about this mouse is that the 2.4GHz nano-tranceiver is tiny enough to lose, but tucks neatly away into a storage/battery compartment on the mouse to keep you from losing it. This is not unique to the Whirl, but definitely appreciated.
Not quite as important to this righty is the ambidextrous design, but it’s sure to make it a more comfortable choice for left-handed users. It also comes in several attractive designs for those looking to stray from the boring black mouse. The Whirl uses two AAA batteries and includes an on/off switch, as expected, to save power. I will probably use this as my travel/couch mouse for as long as it lasts me or until something better unseats it.
Conclusion
If you find your existing mouse uncomfortable to use and are willing to adjust to the Whirl, it’s certainly not a bad choice. It works well as a mid-sized travel mouse and is moderately priced at $49.95 on their web site. This is a great mouse for portable use, but I’m not ready to ditch my desktop mouse for it.
I’ve reviewed other lasers, but recently, I got another green laser pointer in the mail. This one came from SKYlasers High Power Laser Pointers and it’s not like the others because it comes with a unique feature I haven’t seen on the other laser pointers that have come my way.
The extra mile
What makes this laser stand out from the others I’ve been sent is the lock and key. If you look at the bottom photos below, you’ll see on the left is the end of the laser pointer that the key fits into and on the right is the key in use. You’ll notice that there’s three positions: low, high, and off. The ability to turn the laser off when not is use is a big plus for me, because I definitely don’t want to have a laser like this on accidentally and not notice until it becomes a problem. More importantly, I can imagine what a selling point this might be for laser-happy parents. Kids will be kids, and it helps if you can just prevent them from being able to use the laser by just locking it.
The balloon test
So how well does this laser work? To begin with, I just had to put it through the balloon test. For those unfamiliar, a powerful enough laser pointer can pop a black balloon. It’s a fun way to test it, so I headed to the store and picked up a bag of black balloons. The first attempt at my office worked extremely well. The balloons were very still and I popped them from about three feet away. Unfortunately, that video got deleted, so I did it again from my house. This time, I did a big one and a smaller one, the fan was on, and I started from about six feet away. The results started without a bang, so to speak, but when I moved in to about three feet, both balloons popped without a lot of wait. That video is below.
Some laser art
In addition to the standard balloon test, I wanted to do something different for this review. In previous reviews, I lit up water, tested the distance by pointing it out into the night sky, and split the beam with diffraction gratings. With my new SKYlaser green laser pointer, I decided to try out some laser art.
To get this effect, I just set my camera on a tripod in fully manual mode and set the exposure to 30 seconds. Then I snapped a shot and “drew” with the laser by waving it around for those 30 seconds while the shutter was open. The result is what you see above and the rest of the photos I took.
While you should always be careful with the more powerful laser pointers like this one, they can be a lot of fun and can also be highly useful. Some colleagues are using lasers to map their robot’s surroundings on a virtual laser grid. Others have built laser harps, and the list goes on.
Conclusions
The laser pointer I was sent is truly too much for what I did (and will do) with it. At about $300, it’s not the one I would normally buy, especially since I don’t have any of my own advanced projects that require a 150 mW. If you do, this is a great laser. For the rest of us, this is not the only laser they sell. Skylasers offers a good variety of lasers from much less powerful laser pointers that start in the $40 range to some serious hardware upwards of $600. This laser seemed like it was good quality and it came on every time I tried it. Comparatively, it’s about $80 less than one competitor I previously reviewed and the same price as another. I’d rather have it black in exterior color, but for the price, I’d have to say the locking feature makes this one my favorite so far.
Over the years, lasers have become more and more popular not only in science, but also for techie projects, music videos, and just playing around. So far, I’ve already reviewed the green laser that TechLasers sent me and the one I received from WarnLaser and later gave away to one lucky reader. This week, I got my hands on a couple more lasers from WarnLaser, but they weren’t sent to me. These lasers were sent to Team Ningu, who are going to use them as part of a low-cost, hobbyist-level LIDAR for terrain mapping, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation in the RoboMagellan contest. The guys in Team Ningu are super smart and should do some awesome things with it. If you remember, I posted about how Radio Head used lasers for their music video. They used lasers for 3D environment mapping, and that’s what Team Ningu plans to do on a much smaller budget. In the meantime, they loaned me the lasers for my geek-a-riffic Christmas laser review.
How do lasers help with mapping?
There’s a few ways to answer this, but I’d like to focus on the application at hand. The lasers send out beams that hit obstacles and everything else surrounding the device doing the mapping. The image below used a larger number of lasers in a device that rotated very quickly to generate a detailed 3D map of its surroundings.
Team Ningu has a budget with less zeroes on it, so they’re doing something different. Instead of an expensive device, they’re be using diffraction to split a single beam into multiple beams. The beams are then picked up by video and locations stored. All of these points recorded end up forming a 3D map of the surroundings, effectively allowing the vehicle to avoid any obstacles in the way…. as long as it works. But these guys should have no problem with it.
What else can these lasers do?
I wanted to do something a little different with these lasers than I’ve done in previous reviews, so I was excited to find that WarnLaser included balloons to pop. That’s not all they included. the WarnLaser package included two lasers, a couple laser stencils (a “No Smoking” sign, and a “Call Me” graphic”), balloons for popping, and a jersey (who knows). I popped balloons using both the green laser and the red one. The green one popped the balloon so fast that I wasn’t ready and was visibly startled by it (feel free to laugh) and the red didn’t take long, either. I tried the different laser stencils with and without the diffraction grating and I tried the diffraction with and without the stencils.
I had a lot of fun with these lasers and I can’t wait to do a follow-up post with Team Ningu showing their vehicle in action when it’s a little further along.
Those of you who have been paying attention know that I posted a review of the green laser that Warnlaser sent me. Then I followed that up with a contest to give away my green laser, and all you had to do was comment, favorite, tweet, or stumble for entries.
There were only a handful of entries, but I still saw some avid participation. It should be noted that there were a lot of comments on various photos, on Flickr, when only comments on the single laser photo counted as entries. So here’s the breakdown of entries:
Comments on either post (12):
Comments on the one Flickr photo (3):
Fav on Flickr photos (2):
Tweeted post (2):
Stumbled post (8):
As always, I headed over to random.org to pick a winner:
Our winner is MarixD. Get me your address privately and I’ll send your new laser out.
Don’t worry. If you didn’t win this contest, I’m sure I’ll have another very soon. If you can’t wait, check out some of the other cool contests around the web:
- Kid Tech Guru is celebrating 3 months of blogging with over $400 in prizes
- MiniSpace.com is also giving away a Macbook Air in their design contest, which I will be entering for sure.
There’s tons of contests out there and lots of free stuff to be had, so search the web for them, or just subscribe to my blog and I’ll mention more when I do another contest.
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