The holy grail of Bluetooth mice

This past year my loving husband decided to get me a Bluetooth mouse for my birthday. I work with Bluetooth every day, so it may be surprising that I didn't already have my own, but I guess I was just content to use his "unacceptable" castaways. I have grown to love my MacBook track pad (the pawing action is to die for), so I don't use a mouse with my laptop very often, and I certainly wouldn't travel with a mouse, at least I haven't crossed that line yet. These details put me in a more relaxed quest to find a Bluetooth mouse than my husband whom, I have found, is quite particular about his Bluetooth mouse preferences. Anyway, this birthday present "promise" happened in January, and, until Thanksgiving night, I still had not received the perfect mouse.

You may think that this ideal mouse would involve ergonomic design or perhaps the right amount of buttons or controls, oh no! My husband had two simple requests in a Bluetooth mouse:
1) It must be rechargeable. Who would want to have to replace batteries... ever?? Ok, I can agree with him here. Rechargeable is the cheaper and potentially more environmentally sound solution.
2) It must have an on/off switch. This is where I lost interest. My needs don't require an on/off switch. My use case would be to have a recharging station that would keep the mouse charged until I used it and all would be well. Since my husband travels with a mouse, he was looking for the additional benefit of turning the mouse completely off while it sits in his laptop case so that he doesn't have to carry extra cables just to charge a mouse. These exist as you can easily find Bluetooth mice with an on/off switch.

Now the obvious problem occurs when you combine these two requirements; rechargeable and on/off switch. His arguments were valid and the technical point of view was even in line. Being able to charge your mouse and then ensure that it was ready at a moments notice was ideal, and "it's only an on/off switch, that doesn't require much engineering". But I was more pessimistic. I countered that there would be very few users as picky as him and even though it may not be a lot of extra cost, what company would add a switch if they didn't have to?

Well I am proudly announcing today that I was proven wrong. After standing in line at CompUSA for the Thanksgiving night sales, bringing home my birthday present, opening it up to charge for me to use in the morning, and then excitedly realizing that this wonder of wonders Bluetooth mouse was not only rechargeable, but (gasp!) also had a power switch, my triumphant husband trucked back to CompUSA to fight with the morning crowd and buy one for himself. We now own two Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000s.










There may be others out there with these features since ours had no documentation on the box that proclaimed the power switch, but this was a story with a happy ending so far.

Picture This

I was recently married and we have been "combining households". One of the things that we have a lot of are pictures. Digital ones are pretty easy. Most of them are already organized into folders and, given that we've only owned digital cameras for no more than the past 6 years, we can remember details to file random ones. The organization problems start with hard copies, especially hard copies that were given to me or are my husband's. These in particular tend to not have descriptions written on the back and therefore will someday be lost to the WTF? pile. Some of them we can remember the people, but not the location and here is where I would love to have a tool.

We have been able to search for information for many years . We can also search for images and videos now, but each of these searches is initiated by text. What I need is the ability to search via the image itself! How awesome would that be? Scan in and upload a picture to a search engine that could analyze the picture and at least tell you the location. "Did we take that picture in Colorado or Utah?" Even better would be an approximate date or information about the location. "When did Pepe's Pizza close? Sometime after this picture was taken, but what year?"

The algorithms and time needed for this go way beyond my patience, but I'm sure it will happen some day. I just hope I'm still around so I can finish categorizing our pictures!