2718.us blog » apple

Unsticking the Mighty Mouse Scrollball

2718.us — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:34:43 +0000

This information is provided as-is, with no warranty, etc., which is to say if you use this information at all, you do so at your own risk.

I’ve been using an Apple Mighty Mouse (bluetooth) for years now, so for years I’ve been dealing with a scrollball that occasionally gets stuck. As someone who used to use mice that relied on a physical ball for tracking, this is nothing new. The only real difference is that we can’t remove the scrollball to directly ungunk the mechanics. My personal preferred way to ungunk/unstick/clean the scrollball (and mind you, for all I know, this might destroy your mouse) is to turn the mouse off, take a q-tip, soak up some denatured ethyl alcohol, and rub it around the scrollball, rolling the ball in every possible direction to try to get as much of the alcohol down and around the ball as possible, hoping to loosen up any gunk in the works there and bring it up top where it can be wiped away. Typically, this unsticks the ball and brings some visible gunk and stuff to the topside. It also helps to press down on the ball while rolling it around to ensure that it is moving the mechanical bits with which it has contact. Let the mouse fully dry before turning it back on.

OS X, Wake-on-LAN, and Passworded Screensavers

2718.us — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:35:04 +0000

The other day, I realized while I was at work that I needed some files from my Mac desktop at home. Normally, no problem, ssh into my firewall and open a tunnel to my desktop (this is better done with authpf, but that’s a post for another time), use sftp, and done. The problem is that because of unexplained kernel panics (probably a bad RAM module), my desktop would crash hard if left on all day, so I’ve been putting it to sleep when I go to work. Now, with my Mac set to wake for remote admin access, I ought to be able to run a wake-on-LAN utility to wake it up and be fine, except that I use a passworded screensaver. With a passworded screensaver, waking the machine locally or remotely will give 30-60-second window during which the computer is awake and expecting a password to be entered at the physical machine; there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this remotely and unlike earlier versions of OS X, since 10.3 or 10.4 or so, you can’t just kill the screensaver process from the command line (i.e. by logging in with ssh).

On the other hand, ssh is a very robust protocol and somehow ssh sessions seem to readily survive disconnect/reconnect cycles. Making use of this, it is possible to get a workable, if slow, connection to a passworded-and-sleeping Mac. On one connection to the firewall machine, run a loop of the wake-on-LAN command so that the magic packets that make the Mac wake are being sent every second or so. Use another connection to ssh into the Mac and do whatever you need to do. It helps to plan out what you need to do so that you can get the commands in fast, but even during the cycle where the Mac goes back to sleep and gets reawakened by the wake-on-LAN loop, you can type commands; they just won’t appear (not even echoed) until ssh recovers the connection.

While this is an annoying way to use a machine and it’s probably not good for the hardware to cycle in and out of sleep repeatedly in such a short time span, it does give a way to get at a passworded and sleeping Mac remotely.

The Argument for a Mac

2718.us — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:16:53 +0000

I have about as many WinXP machines as OS X machines around here (and a few OpenBSD boxes, but that’s beside the point), and yet I find it’s rare that I touch anything other than the Macs anymore. Why? Well, I suspect it’s the same reason I keep seeing little things here and there that suggest developers are increasingly working on Macs–if I want a Mac program, well, duh, I’m on a Mac; if I want a PC program, I’ve got Parallels, so I don’t even have to deal with dual-booting; if I want a ‘nix machine, I just look under the Mac GUI and there’s a BSD-type ‘nix (oh, and OS X can run a standard X11 server, too). I can use virtually any tool out there and work in all three worlds with one machine. I no longer need to have two or three machines on my desk at home, just my Mac desktop. I probably won’t be taking more than one laptop on the road with me anymore (I have travelled with two on several occasions in the past), just my Mac laptop.

Why do I want all these different facets? Well, much as I hate to use it, damn near everyone in “the business world” uses Microsoft Office, and the Mac versions suck (I don’t know about 2008, but I’m not optimistic) and I’d rather use the PC version (2003, since 2007 is a disaster best described as MS openly giving the finger to all its customers). Graphics work and page layout are in various Adobe Creative Suite products under OS X (I suppose that there exist PC versions, but really, who does graphics work on a PC?). I also prefer web and email on the Mac side. Then, when I have to deal with network/server/etc. stuff, I dive into terminal and I’m off. For actual programming, while I love using WinSCP + TextPad under Windows, LOVE it, I tend more toward Transmit + Komodo Edit nowadays (this is largely a side effect of having a huge project hosted on a server that only supports FTP, not SFTP, and for whatever reason, WinSCP can’t seem to maintain a stable FTP connection with that server, so editing led to all sorts of nasty corruption and whatnot when the connection would drop mid-edit).

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that my day job is in an all-Mac office.