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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • In Search Of A Trackball – Sanwa Gravi

    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…?

  • Satisfactory: 2022 Co-op Year End Tour Video

    Post tagged:

    The video I mentioned in the previous post? Here it is:

    Arrak-ish. Dune… desert biome. Look, I’m bad at naming things sometimes, okay?

    I hope that we all get to have more fun, less stress, more health, less catastrophe, more prosperity, less misery in the year to come.

  • Silly Things To Do With Video Editing

    Post tagged: ,

    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.

  • A Year In Review (Of Blogging)

    I really don’t use this place much. But it’s getting better!

    Prior to this year, January 2021 was a high-water mark out of most of the previous decade, with a whopping tally of five entire posts… and every one of those was about Satisfactory. (Yes, I love that game. Still do.)

    One of my “resolutions” going into 2022 was to make more and better use of this thing. At least I’ve done “more,” not sure about “better.” In January of this year I managed 17 posts, which isn’t quite more than all of 2021 combined… but not that far off, either. (And I refuse to tally up previous years because it’ll probably depress me with how far ahead that single month’s tally will prove to be versus any number of entire individual years.) Most of the rest of this year I wrote six or seven posts in a month, with a couple of lower counts along the way for various reasons.

    If I can keep at the habit I’ll achieve quantity again, if not actual quality, and that’s something to celebrate. No joke, I actually feel good looking at the improved output for this year on this site. I did something I said I wanted to do! Intent paired with follow-through! Imagine that.

    To be sure, it helps that Twitter’s a deteriorating mess now that The Emerald Scion has taken over and seems hellbent on “lithobraking” that bird as fast as he can. On the other hand, I transitioned over to my new Mastodon instance just fine without abandoning the blog, so… go me! (Also, hey, one of the improvements made here recently involved adding the RSS feed of my fediverse output to the blog’s sidebar. The miracles of modern technology, eh?)

    Plans for the future? Keep at the pace, such as it is, and keep going with what works, which means you’re almost certainly going to see more Satisfactory content, more silly videos, and what-not.

    Here’s to 2023 sucking less, if at all possible.

  • In Search Of A Trackball – Elecom Deft Pro

    A few months ago I decided that in the interests of making my tiny, uncomfortable workspace just a wee bit more ergonomic I’d pick up a trackball for my main computer. I used to love trackballs back in the day! I’ve had a couple of Kensington devices, and so forth. And no, I cannot use those Logitech “thumb-ball” things, never mind my general dislike for the Logi brand nowadays.

    I spent a few days reading and researching and price-checking and such before settling on a Japanese brand name, ELECOM. (And that’s the last time I’m doing their preferred stylized all-caps presentation in this post.) Between the various offerings, such as the “Huge” and the “Bitra” and so forth, I settled on the “Deft Pro” which seemed like the best compromise between size and cost and general ergonomics. It arrived early in November.

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  • Working As Intended (When Observed)

    Ain’t this just the way things go?

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