Even though I’ve just started playing the game, I don’t feel this way about Skyward Sword at all. In fact, I’m finding it more difficult than other Zelda games I’ve played. There are a few reasons for this: mostly because of the precision motion control required, but also due to other changes, such as a shield that wears down over time, and fewer randomly found hearts. Playing this morning, I actually died to the first dungeon boss. While it could have been that my sleep-deprived mind couldn’t recognize patterns effectively, it’s also true that I played through Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask without ever coming close to dying.

Some Wii games certainly do have “floaty” controls, but these are games that have a broad audience (such as Wii Sports). However, most of the other games I’ve played on the Wii use the remote/nunchuck combo for a more traditional control scheme; perhaps they use the remote for pointing a cursor on the screen as well. While the Wii made broad strokes into a “blue ocean” of non-gamers, it still has a lot to offer to those who were raised on the original NES.

I’ve gone through phases in my modes of coffee preparation. Of course, my first experience was simply making drip coffee with a traditional coffee maker. My first upgrade was using a French press. After that I started buying whole beans and grinding them myself with a blade grinder. Using a French press and grinding your own beans are regarded as the most important first steps you can take to make your coffee taste better: using a French press means you have to heat the water yourself, and can get it closer to the optimal 200 degrees Fahrenheit, while grinding at home means less time for coffee beans to go stale.

The next coffee upgrade I wanted to make was to switch from a blade mill to a burr mill. The difference is that a blade mill cuts your coffee, while a burr mill crushes it. In addition, blade mills have a hard time grinding coffee beans evenly — you have to grind your beans down to a fine powder before you’ll get a consistent particle size. Blade mills can also make the ground coffee slightly more bitter, due to heat from the friction of the blades.

Unfortunately, blade mills are also way cheaper than burr mills. An electric blade mill might set you back $50, while the burr equivalent might be more in the $200 range. I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay that much for an electric burr mill, so I set my sights on a hand-operated (!) mill from a company named Hario, the “Skerton.” It was priced at a much more reasonable $40. Luckily for me, I got one for my birthday last month, so thought I’d share my experience of using a hand-operated coffee mill for the past two months.

It’s not as annoying as you might think to have to grind coffee by hand. I kind of enjoy using the mill while waiting for my kettle to boil… it adds to the preparation ritual. That being said, I only have to grind enough coffee for a two-cup French press. If I needed to brew a pot of drip coffee, I would definitely be using the electric mill.

The Skerton produces a pretty even grind… basically it’ll look like what you get buying pre-ground coffee. You can adjust the coarseness of the end result, but the mill doesn’t handle very coarse grinds very well; you’ll get some large chunks of coffee bean here and there.

The construction of the device is pretty good. The top of the mill consists of a plastic hopper with a metal crank and ceramic burr. You can adjust the coarseness of the grind by unscrewing the crank and adjusting a metal washer that controls the height of the burr. The top screws into a heavy glass container, used for catching the ground coffee. As a nice touch, Hario includes a rubber bottom for the glass jar, which makes it easier to use the mill: it sticks to flat surfaces, making it less likely to slide around.

All told, I’m happy with the Skerton so far. My electric mill has been put out of sight, and I’ve even gotten the wife to use the Skerton a few times. It’s helped me elevate my coffee snobbery to the next level.

function loadSerializedData(formId, data)
{
	var tmp = data.split('&'), dataObj = {};

	// Bust apart the serialized data string into an obj
	for (var i = 0; i < tmp.length; i++)
	{
		var keyValPair = tmp[i].split('=');
		dataObj[keyValPair[0]] = keyValPair[1];
	}

	// Loop thru form and assign each HTML tag the appropriate value
	$('#' + formId + ' :input').each(function(index, element) {
		if (dataObj[$(this).attr('name')])
			$(this).val(dataObj[$(this).attr('name')]);
	});
}

Is there a better way to do this? Let me know in the comments.

Stupid OS X trick today. Know how you can view the connection status of your Bluetooth keyboard/mouse by clicking the icon in your menu bar? Well, normally those are named something boring. Here’s how you can assign clever names to your mouse and keyboard.

Open your System Preferences and click the Bluetooth icon. You should see a list of all connected devices. Select one and click the “settings” gear icon at the bottom of the list, then choose the Rename option. That’s it! Now you can easily identify which wireless accessories are connected to your computer.

(Also, Command + Click opens links in a new tab. When I had a scroll wheel mouse, I used the wheel click to open/close new tabs, but since I’m Magic Mousing it up, I’ve had to drop that habit.)

In practice, what “open” means for Android is that each phone manufacturer will take the base OS, then try to customize it as much as possible for their devices, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other Android handset manufacturers. As far as I know, it’s impossible to remove these customizations and revert back to Google’s “vanilla” Android UI without significant hacking. The annoying thing here is that I would want to use a phone with no tacked-on cruft, but HTC, Motorola, etc. don’t provide that option.

The other problem with Android phones is that you can’t get official OS updates without going through the carrier/manufacturer. With iOS, this isn’t a big deal; Apple releases a new version, and everyone can download and upgrade at the same time. With Android, Google releases a new version, and then the manufacturers have to tailor the upgrade to fit each of their devices. Of course, this takes time, and in some cases a manufacturer won’t want to keep supporting their device, which means you are crap out of luck.

Both of these problems don’t exist if you buy one of the “official” Android phones, the Nexus One or Nexus S. But bizarrely, the Nexus phones are only supported by T-Mobile in the US (you can run one on AT&T, sans 3G data connection). Of course, that means they don’t work on Verizon’s CMDA network at all. The unfortunate conclusion is that Google doesn’t feel like giving people using carriers other than T-Mobile a choice on whether or not to user their official phone.

These three problems have prevented me from using Android, and since it looks like Verizon is going to start carrying the iPhone very soon, I don’t think there’s much hope for Android in my future.