something else that pains me
Work
There are many stange things about my work. Like being an all MacOS X and Linux shop that does not have to pay the usual Microsoft tax when buying new computers, yet all the mice we have are made by Microsoft.
These mice are a quintessential Microsoft product. They look high-tech and have all sorts of features above and beyond what a basic mouse needs. They are also fat and bloated, heavyweight, flakey and the core features you need from a mouse - being able to point and click at things - don't work very well. I'm often muttering double click, dammit!
to myself using the thing and prefer to bang it around rather than straining to push it.
There is a second type of Microsoft mouse in the office that is a basic model. It only has two buttons, does not use a laser and is light as a feather. Ironically, everyone wants these because unlike the premium model it actually works well. If you aren't an artist do not expect to hang on to it very long however: They are constantly getting swapped and given to artists that don't have them.
It really is the small things that make the difference.
Comments
For small annoying things like that at work, I prefer to just BYO. I'm not going to put up with a clogged-up, never-been-cleaned ball mouse or keyboard just because the company doesn't want to spend $50.
Posted by: Dave Hill on June 3, 2006 08:49 PM
I'd agree with you, but because I'm only there 0.5, stuff just goes missing and I think any such mouse would as well.
I lost two good chairs (i.e. chairs that do not cause any sort of posture-related pain) before I grabbed the one with the half-broken arm that no-one wanted, ripped both arms off and claimed as my own. It still gets stolen, but at least I can find it and claim it ("Look, the arms are over there on my desk, it _must_ be mine!").
Posted by: Mike on June 4, 2006 11:38 AM
I hate all mice.
OK, fair play, yours sounds like a particularly evil case. But I long for a world where your pain isn't necessary, because computers are operable out of the box without one.
Posted by: Joel on June 6, 2006 11:21 PM
... says a Mac guy. No, no, wait, I have a better one: I think they already invented that: a command line interface!
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week, don't forget to tell your friends! Oh and the venison is to die for.
I assume you're not happy with pointing devices in general because surely you can't be happy with touchpads. I am kinda looking forward to getting a tablet that can track multiple points of contact at once and playing around with it, however.
Posted by: Mike on June 7, 2006 12:02 AM
No... I'm not happy with pads of any kind. Except maybe these cool pads on the knees of my jumpsuit... I quite like those.
FWIW, I do operate my Mac generally from the CLI, but you're right. It's the pointing that gets me down. It's at this stage I start wondering about ION (or window managers in general) on MacOS, but I have to admit that even I haven't used ION in years.
Must do something about that.
(Yeah - buy another Linux box?)
Posted by: Joel on June 9, 2006 09:22 PM
/me points frantically at a Ubuntu PPC live CD/installer disk image
;)
Posted by: Mike on June 10, 2006 11:11 AM
Ah, nice one. Turns out I'm not the only person who's wondered how to do this:
https://wiki.chaos-paderborn.de/index.php/Ion2_On_OSX
Posted by: Joel on June 17, 2006 12:20 AM
Yay for the lazywub!
But where are the screenshots?
Posted by: Mike on June 17, 2006 03:32 PM
It looks almost exactly like you'd imagine.
Still trying to sort it out now with nice keyboard options...
Posted by: Joel on June 20, 2006 03:00 AM
Well, with that extra modifier key, you should be pretty much sorted...
Posted by: Mike on June 20, 2006 10:01 PM
Yeah... slightly complicated by my choice of keyboard tho.
Now what would be really cool is a way to get the OSX applications to all obey signals from the X server (which should be possible, even if it's not fully X there has to be some connectivity - quartz-wm --proxy should mean something, right?) so I can abuse them with Ion too. As it is, I can really only play with the GIMP (which hates Ion to the point of unusability) and XEmacs (which plays nice).
Hmm.
Linux, I think.
Posted by: Joel on June 20, 2006 11:45 PM
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