Tag: mouse

Love Linux but sometimes…

DELL XPS13&XPS15_29

Sometimes I come across simple things which just need someone to think about it from a user point of view.

One such example is adjusting the sensitivity on my XPS 13 trackpad. The XPS 13 has a widescreen trackpad which is good (although I do miss the Thinkpad pointer) but the right hand tends to hover around the edge, as there isn’t much room to rest my hand due to the keyboard and trackpad. The solution is to adjust the sensentivity of the trackpad, so I get less hover mistakes trigger from my thumb. Simple!

On my ubuntu setup, the trackpad driver is called synaptics and it can be configured anyway you like. Except to do so, you need to mess with the terminal and maybe even log out and in for the changes to stick.

If I was doing one #lazyweb request, it would be to automaticlly create a gui/wrapper for terminal operations like changing your mouse settings.

Forgetting history

Xerox Parc Mouse

One of the things I’m hoping to do a lot more of in the future is working with the hackers of our generation and understand how what there doing now to scratch there own itches will expand to the mainstream. Anyway interestingly I was having a discussion with a guy from my circus workshop class (yeah another day I’ll explain) and he was saying why he liked Apple. One of his reasons was that Apple created the Mouse and that Apple create the best Keyboards and Mice.

I was totally shocked!

Now to be fair he was only 19 but still… one look at the Xerox Parc page on wikipedia page.

Most of these developments were included in the Alto, which added the now familiar SRI-developed mouse unifying into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computer use.

Shock horror, apple did not develop the mouse. They may have borrowed/stolen the idea once Steve Jobs saw it but it wasn’t developed by them.

Anyway the point is theres a lot of this going around. We cover this on the latest Techgrumps, people ignoring or dismissing the rich history which sits behind most of the things we take for granted.

My good friend Miles use to talk a lot about the fact most blogs would only go surface deep however the blog does make a great place to dispense information. Don’t get me wrong there are some really great blogs with well thought out posts but maybe there isn’t enough?