Sweet mercy, it’s been twenty one entire years as of today since journal post number one landed in a database on a long-forgotten web host somewhere. It wasn’t the start of my blogging experience, as I’d been running Monaural Jerk on a workstation at the office called Zero previously, but it was the start of this grey duck dot net experience, such as it’s been. The software and the memes and the hosting environments have changed along the way, but the silly man behind the keyboard remains the same… older, but relatively unchanged, for good or ill.
More than two decades later and I’ve still managed not to figure out what I’m really doing here, but I intend to keep doing it anyway.
Fediverse user “c0debabe” posted thus, this afternoon:
Bad logging is worse than no logging because then there is false hope that the info you want might actually be there.
https://hackers.town/@c0debabe/109667298320413659
And that inspired me.
It’s unusual for me to use an existing, well-known template. Enjoy this rarity.
Look, I am a delight, okay? Also, I might as well get something useful out of that year I spent living deep in “spotted owl makes good eating” country as a teenager.
I queued this one up in advance so I’d have a post to start off the new year. (Be proud of me, dammit!)
Of course, since I’m posting this mere days after receiving the trackball named in the subject field of this entry, you can probably guess that I’m now awaiting my third trackball purchase of the past few months.
The Sanwa Gravi is (more or less) a Japanese company’s rework of the venerable Microsoft Trackball Explorer. It’s comfy and familiar and is very close to being a very good input device overall.
Too bad that this is not one of those cases, like a game of horseshoes or chucking hand grenades, where “very close” is “good enough.”
My first problem was the stiction (“stickiness,” basically) of the ball itself. It hitched or got fully stuck a lot. Oddly enough, the solution to this was… swapping out the ball for the one in the Elecom. Stiction problem resolved!
Unfortunately the other problems couldn’t be solved, no way no how. Firstly, the only way to program the rightmost two buttons (which default to issuing “forward” and “back” commands to your web browser, a “feature” I did not “ask for”) is to install the special software. Great, I did that, can I turn one of those buttons into a double-click? I love having a double-click button.
Those are the Mouse Function options available for programming a given button. Also, I could program a button to execute a program or send a command to my media player. Just… no double-click.
Well, okay then. So I just turned those two buttons off entirely. But speaking of buttons… I then noticed that the left-click button sometimes… doesn’t. Click. Or it’ll click and kind of forget that I’ve been holding it down for a reason, and sometimes then remember again. Imagine you’re drag-and-dropping something, or drag-selecting a bounding box around stuff, and the mouse decides you didn’t really intend to do that. That gets very frustrating, very quickly. And I do a lot of drag-selecting because I make screenshots almost every day, usually of specific parts of my screen. (Lightshot is great for this, by the way.)
What’s worse, the mouse driver seemed to go to sleep after a minute or so of inactivity. I’d be typing, or watching a video, or whatever, then go to move the mouse pointer… and nothing would happen until I tried again, then it’d behave like it’s supposed to.
Who in their right mind programs their mouse driver to go to sleep? Of all the things on a computer that need an inactivity timer, the mouse is just about the last of them.
So I’ve ripped out the drivers for the Sanwa, and there’s a new device on order. I just have to hang on for a couple of weeks for it to arrive. Maybe the third time really will be the charm…?
I’m working on a tour video for our three-person co-op Satisfactory game. I recorded the footage Tuesday night. (We took the week off for various reasons, so I used that time to let the Space Elevator shipment production accumulate a bit.) For lack of anything better to do and not wanting to actually Do Game Stuff without the others, I started a video project.
Last night I completed the editing-down. Tonight I started the text overlay process, and decided I’d take this chance to learn something new (to me) in DaVinci Resolve: How to pin text to an object on the screen. Tracking, in other words.
It’s a learning process, but for the sake of this one joke I feel like it was worth it:
Yes, I used that garish color combination on purpose. I mean, why not?
Mind you, I could have used a fancier method and achieved smoother, better-looking results. But for a quick throw-away joke? It’s fine.
Hopefully I’ll have the full tour video up by the weekend.
