Mendeley instead of Endnote

I recently switched from using Endnote to Mendeley. There were several reasons behind this:

• It must be platform-independent. I have to work on an Apple Mac at work, and I enjoy working on my Windows 7 system at home, with occasional explorations into the Linux world. Writing a paper or a thesis and inserting references has to be possible on all 3 operating systems.
• It must be software-independent. It should not matter if I am writing on Word, OpenOffice or in LateX, references have to be easy to integrate.
• It must sync between different machines. 

I eventually stumbled upon Mendeley on the PLoS ONE website of my first paper where it was mentioned in the right sidebar. And bingo, there was a usable piece of referencing software!

Advantages

• It integrates into Word, OpenOffice and Bibtex, runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. I can't say anything about the performance in long documents with hundreds of references yet, but once my thesis is redone I will create a version with Mendeley references
• Mendeley synchronises the references between different machines. The free plan includes 1 GB of storage, which is enough for about 1000 references for me (with the odd badly digitized 5 MB PDF among more modern an smaller ones). 
• Unlike Endnote it is very good at finding document information from DOI addresses provided nowadays by all journals on their websites. It has some trouble though with recognizing them in some documents (PNAS, I'm looking at you!).
• It has also its own Chrome/ Chromium extension for easier import of websites and documents into the Mendeley library.

Problems

• Mendeley is, compared to Papers2, quite bad at reading the essential information out of a PDF file. It regularly fails to find the abstract in an automatically imported PDF.
• The software  is not open source, so development might stop at any moment due to financial trouble. Or prices might rise so quickly so high that I might have to hunt for yet another reference management system. 

But there is a nice way around the freemium system: Dropbox. I already have it, it synchronises files between computers on Mac OS, Windows and Linux (what I am looking for!) and there are quite often promotions to expand one's storage size without having to pay for it. Even the initial 2 GB free storage should be sufficient for quite an extensive library, about 2,000 references by my guess. Oh, and someone else has already done it before me, so there are actually some instructions on what to do already out there. There are some problems though, and often checks for duplicates are recommended.

Review: Logitech k400

It is meant to be used later on on my Raspberry Pi, if I can ever get my hands on one. For that I would like to have a second small keyboard with a tiny receiver so that I might be spared even more clutter on and next to my desk. Also, I need something else to do but only thesis revisions. Oh, and a wireless keyboard with a trackpad should work nicely with a TV-connected computer.

The k400 in all its beauty.

The good

• A few multimedia keys on top of the keyboard (mute, volume up, volume down, and a 'home' button to open a browser window).
• It worked without problem once the drivers were recognised and installed. It might have helped that the Logitech SetPoint software had already been installed on my home PC. The keyboard was also recognised at once on my work CrapBook.
• The keys work quite well once you're used to their size and their position.
• It takes normal AA batteries, and two of those babies were included. This opens the possibility for using rechargeable AA batteries.

The k400 from underneath with the battery compartment cover removed.

The bad

• The touchpad could be a bit more responsive and sensitive to fine manipulation. As these things go, I would guess that it is about 5 years behind in development of touchpads.
• The arrow keys are in a very bad position. It was quite easy for me to hit both up arrow and the shift key at the same time and then delete the marked line when hitting the letter that was meant to be capitalised. 



The badly positioned arrow and right shift keys.

• The enter key is a bit narrow for my taste.

The weird

• There is a 'left mouse click' button on the top left side of the keyboard. I don't know yet how useful that would be, given the full touchpad on the right side of the keyboard with single tap recognition and a left click button.

The weird 'left click' button on the top left.

• Instead of using only the tiny unified receiver one is supposed to use and additional bridge between that receiver and a desktop PC. I don't know why, but that makes the whole receiver larger than a standard Logitech one. And it worked fine without that connector on my desktop at home. Maybe it is meant for signal amplification when the receiver is connected at the back of a PC tower underneath a desk, but I used it on the USB dock on top of my desk.

The actual nano receiver on the left, the connector for PCs on the right.

[Update]

There is one thing I am missing: The touchpad does not support multi-touch gestures. The minimum I would like to have would be that a two-finger-tap would do a right click, but unfortunately I have to use the button. I personally got very used to a touchpad doing exactly that. Hell, even my ancient Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop did that!