Wired up again
I always thought wireless stuff was pretty damn cool and years ago I dreamed of the day when everything I owned would be wireless, without a tangled nest of cables breeding beneath my desk.
Ah, so silly now are those dreams of youth.
Wireless stuff (mostly) sucks
I am now slowly making the transition back to everything being wired. I ditched a wireless home network a year or so back in favor of wired (I was spending too much time fixing routers and there’s the whole security thing, you know). Now I’m even back to a wired keyboard and mouse. Why? Well I’ve went through several that have had varying levels of reliability, some of the worst were requiring me to fiddle with receiver placement constantly which is a little annoying when trying to finish off a story. My latest keyboard/mouse combo has been pretty reliable but it goes through batteries brutally and the mouse had a battery rupture the other day with goo leaking all over my desk.
Wireless (whether it be networks or peripheral devices) might be convenient but I find that they really are not worth the hassle and the whole batteries-in-everything just doesn’t seem like that good of an idea. I’m not overly environment-guy, but I was churning through batteries on the keyboard and mouse every couple weeks. And given the initial costs (my wireless keyboard was more than $50, my current wired one was about $10), these wireless things are expensive.
And you know what I’ve noticed with a wired keyboard? I can type fast again! And with less mistakes. I had the sneaky suspicion that my sloppy typing on the wireless keyboard had something to do with the whole wireless thing and it turns out I was right.
Now the only wireless devices I use are my game controllers (for the 360 and PS3). The current generation of controllers function how I think all wireless devices should — they are wireless but they have rechargeable batteries that can be charged while being used! I wonder if there are any wireless keyboard/mice out there that might function that way? Even so, I still don’t know if I’d go back, at least not for my keyboard. (Of course now that I can’t blame my typing on the wireless, I’ll have to find another excuse)
I recently made the switch back to wired too. Discovered that gaming would kill the batteries pretty quick, the lag was terrible, the wireless range was short, and I can type faster than the keyboard. So it’s back to the 10 year old keyboard. It still works just fine.
Even though I use rechargeable batteries I find that they wear out and accumulate over time. I think I will revert to a wired mouse too.