Replacing My Mouse Cable

My mouse started malfunctioning recently and I suspected the mouse cable was the problem. It worked intermittently and only when the cable is stretched a certain way. As I liked the mouse, I decided not to spend $20 on a new crappy mouse, but to replace the USB cable myself. A quick check at the nearby Courts showed that a new USB cable was only $1.90. I could go for the one which lights up but that costs more than $10. I'm a cheapskate. So sue me.

Some of you would be asking why I'm going to the trouble of fixing this mouse. It is in fact a cheap mouse I got as a freebie from Sun Tech Days a few years ago. People seeing this mouse either love it or hate it. I like it because it gets people's attention. Plus, it's got Duke in a small compartment of water/liquid.

Anyway, I documented the whole replacement procedure so I can blog it in pictures. This is something simple and you can probably do it on your own as well if your favourite mouse has the same problem. All the equipment I used were:
- Screwdriver
- Penknife
- Pliers
- Scotch tape
You don't need the scotch tape if you have a soldering iron and know how to solder. ;)

First off, dismantling the mouse! I had to remove some screws and pry the transparent portion containing the drowning Duke. This step will be different for other mice, but should not be difficult. During this step, I found my mouse to be in desperate need of dusting and cleaning. :|




Now to slice off one end of the $1.90 cable and connect that to the mouse. The biggest problem now is to match the wires as they are not following a standard color code. The way I did it was to pry open the USB jacks on the spoilt mouse cable as well as the part of the new cable I sliced off, and then do a pin to pin matching. Basically it's just working out which wires connect to each other. Once that is done, just twist the wires together and use scotch tape to protect the ends. If you plan to solder the wires on, you can just solder the new cable onto the board.




Finally, putting the mouse back together and a test run to see that the mouse works:



I tested it on my desktop as well as laptop. Works like a charm! I didn't even have to buy a soldering iron. :)

More Photos

More images of my new bundle of joy:

New Member in My Family

Yesterday, Ellie was born. She's 2.7kg and 48cm. Sooooo tired.... ZZZzzz

EZ-link Internals

For those of you living or working in Singapore, you'll know what the EZ-Link card is. It is a contactless smart card based on Sony's FeLiCa used mainly in public transportation. More uses are being added to it all the time.

Anyway, I had a slightly damaged but functional card and decided to sacrifice the deposit I paid for it and dissect it for interest's sake. Here's how it looks like when one side is stripped off:



The side I peeled off had some minor circuits as well, but it is completely destroyed by my fat fingers. I don't have a picture of those remains. :|

And, yes... it no longer works...

So, I decided to try out Writely, and managed to get an invite for it today. Now I'm trying out this "Web 2.0" application. It's supposed to be able to post to my blog. I'm composing this post from Writely right now. If I've got my settings correct, this *should* post to my blog when I choose to publish it.

Well, so far the writely interface seems clean and simple. It's intuitive and easy enough to use. Anyone fairly familiar with MS Word or OpenOffice should be able to start using it right away. It may not have fancy shmancy editing features, but then, I never use those features. What I do miss, is spell check. Well, it looks like I'll just have to install spellcheck for my Firefox.

That said, being a modern web application gives Writely other advantages or features you would not find in client editors like MS Word. Such as online collaboration and the ability to use it from any connected PC with a browser.

The collaborative aspect is certainly of interest. I can imagine working together with multiple colleagues on a single document. No more sharing of Word documents and document versions lost in email. I'll definitely give this a spin. But first, I need to figure out how to invite my colleagues and convince them to give it a try. The word "Beta" might be a problem here...

I noticed the document auto saves itself as I type. Probably to counter the many problems that can arise due to the nature of the application. It does not seem to interfere with my typing. Maybe because my text is still small. But I see this as a Good Thing. Well, that's all for now. If you're interested, visit http://www.writely.com. Their registration is officially closed but members can invite others into the service. If you need an invite, drop me a line.

OpenSUSE 10.1

My laptop hard disk has died as expected. After Dell sent a replacement, I decided to take this opportunity and try switching to openSUSE from Ubuntu. I had heard that it was solid, but slow. Also, I wanted to try the XGL effects which are integrated into openSUSE pretty well.

So off I went to look for the installation media. Here's the website for Novell's OpenSUSE:
http://www.opensuse.org
By the way, SUSE is pronounced as soo-za.

It turns out SUSE requires no less than 4 CDs to install. This put me off a bit and I had to install Ubuntu on my system first so I had something to use. Ubuntu only requires 1 CD. Anyway, I opted to download the DVD iso via bittorrent. What I found out was the download speed I can achieve sucks. Unless you download in the morning. I could reach speeds of up to 200kB/s (limited by my broadband speed) when I got up at 7+am to set up my download. Took me 2 mornings to get the iso.

So, once the disc was burned, it was on to installation!

Not all live CDs I've tried so far are able to boot and detect the DBus DVD drive on my Latitude D400, so I was a bit apprehensive. But I'm happy to report that SUSE booted just fine and proceeded to present me with install options like language and time zone, etc. It's not text based, and it's very easy to use. The only problem I can see people having with this is common to all linux installations. The partitioning of the hard disk. Of course you can just wipe the whole hard disk and install.

My system was already set up for dual boot between Ubuntu and Windows XP. The installer detected this and recommended I format and install on my existing Ubuntu partition. At least the installer has some intelligence to recommend how to partition. I thought it was very nice. And if you decide to use your own partitioning, you can enter the "Expert" mode.

The installation took about 30 minutes to copy needed files to the hard disk, and then rebooted the machine. Once booted, it will proceed to set up other configurations like network and graphics. Unfortunately, mine hung when I was trying out different graphics resolutions. The "Test" option did not return from a black screen after a few minutes and I had to force a reboot. SUSE started up fine after that but I suspect it affected my sound card installation and I had to subsequently use the Yast software to re-install my sound card. Thankfully this was just a matter of a few mouse clicks.

Finally we get to the OS proper itself. I was a bit disappointed to find that there was no boot splash. Either that or it was unable to support the feature on my D400. I know Ubuntu had no problems with this...

The OS comes packaged with quite an impressive array of applications. It comes with the requisite Firefox/Konqueror web browser, and openOffice.org. On top of that it throws in packages like Planner, for project management needs, Dia and Inkscape, as well as Liferea and Blam.

My initial impression of the whole system was that response did seem a bit sticky at times, e.g. web pages not drawing fast enough when I scroll. But it's no biggie. It could be because I enabled 3D desktop effects (XGL/compiz). Which brings me to the other point. When I enabled 3D Desktop Effects, the control center applet warned that my integrated video card is supported but might be slow. However, the transparencies, wobbly windows and other 3D effects work very well without much visible slowness. Overall I'm pleased with the performance, and I can't wait to show off the eye candy. :)

On to updating. I tried update/patch the system last night. Although it didn't take very long, it was much longer and a bit more involved than what an update in Ubuntu would take. It also doesn't seem as easy to use. The software update icon in the GNOME panel does not seem to function properly for me. I encountered errors during update until I decided to dismiss the icon and manually initiate an online update from Yast (btw, they should really rename this. The name is not intuitive). Other than that, the patches and updates went smoothly enough.

Well, it's only day 2 of my SUSE experience so I don't want everything to seem negative. I can only compare it to Ubuntu. Although not as fast, I do love the fact that it is a more polished product. And a lot of the software comes well-integrated. I'm still having fun wobbling my windows. One point I forgot to mention during installation was that it will ask you if you wish to install GNOME or KDE as your desktop. For me, I chose GNOME and my opinions are all based on the GNOME installation. Overall, SUSE is a competent desktop and certainly can stand up as a Windows replacement candidate. Novell has a good product in SUSE Linux.

duCklinG Resolves the Battle of the Sexes (with Google help)

Well, seeing as Google is now a big part of everything and becoming an important source of information mining, I decided that the Google oracle can resolve the ongoing battle of the sexes.

I posed a series of relevant and extremely well thought out expressions and statements to Google, and recorded the number of results returned carefully. The results are a bit shocking to me. Surprisingly one sided (Grrrrr!). These are the questions (including quotes):

"there are more men in the world": 61
"there are more women in the world": 290

"men rule": 86,700
"women rule": 188,000

"men are better drivers": 297
"women are better drivers": 528

"women make good scientists": 6
"men make good scientists": 0

"men cook better": 17
"women cook better": 49

"men have more fun": 114
"women have more fun": 289

"men have it easy": 437
"women have it easy": 305

"men make better friends": 67
"women make better friends": 23

"men play fair": 6
"women play fair": 6

"can't live without men": 117
"can't live without women": 144

Finally, I just asked, Man or Woman? Judge for yourself. :)

man: 2,700,000,000
woman: 1,290,000,000

Maybe Google's a guy.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

All the various flavors of Ubuntu were released yesterday, 1st June. I've been using Ubuntu 5.10 on my work laptop for more than a month now. I'm quite happy with it except for the fact that wireless support doesn't seem very good.

Last night, despite droopy eyelids, I stayed up to update my ubuntu to the latest version. It is all quite automatic, thankfully. So far, I have not seen any major differences. My Evolution mail still can only connect without a proxy. Wireless only seems to support WEP. And to top it all off, since upgrading, the LAN interface eth0 does not seem to work on startup. I have to do deactivate it and re-activate it to get it working.

Good things I've seen so far: some better looking graphics/interface here and there. There's a better shutdown (hibernate!) menu and screen. Lastly, some re-arrangement of the system menu interface and application installation interface (the Add/Remove function).

I'm still happy with it. Have been living without Windows far longer than I'd originally expected to. For those of you interested in trying, you can download it for free from http://www.ubuntu.com or have them ship the CDs to you for free.

Elephants Dream

I downloaded a copy of Elephants Dream to watch, only to find I don't have the appropriate audio decoder. Well, I'm sure that can be fixed.

Elephants Dream is a short film made entirely using free software. All its production files are also being released under a Creative Commons licence and are available on it's DVD. It's free to download and watch or use.

Find out more at http://orange.blender.org/index.php

The film has some scenes which look really nice and detailed. Go check it out.

EDIT:

Well my sound is working. appears I just needed to restart or something for the player I downloaded to work. Well, I can't say I care much about the story. But I think it shows pretty nicely what people can do with freely available tools.

Life for your old PC

How I wish I did not throw away my old PC. Ever since rediscovering the world of Linux, I've found that Linux today can do so much. It can turn your old hardware into internet PCs and home entertainment units.

The Linux I know from more than 7 years ago has now exploded into a myriad distributions and interesting uses. So much so that it gets confusing and difficult to choose. I'm having a ball playing with LiveCDs and USB drives.

In the future, I'd like to post more of my 'adventures' with the various GNU/Linux flavours. But first, some interesting suggestions. If you have an old PC at home, here are some things you can do:

- Use GeexBox to turn it into a home media player. Preferably, if you have some cash to spare, buy it a video card with TV output and you're all set. GeexBox itself is only about 6Mb. Now you can compress all your videos into DivX format and play them using GeexBox. Just burn the ISO from http://www.geexbox.org or configure your own ISO.

- MythTV! Get yourself a TV or video capture card, a large harddisk, and create your own digital video recorder. MythTV looks very nice and has some advanced features like Media playing/ripping, scheduled recordings, commercial detection and skipping, basic video editing, picture in picture, and even built in weather forecast and games. This one is definitely interesting. http://www.mythtv.org

- Internet pc. Just install a diskless system or boot from CD. Use it to browse securely and do simple office work even. Every time you reboot, you get a nice clean and safe system. No more worries about your family infecting the PC. For this, there are many options available, like SLAX (http://www.slax.org), Damn Small (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org), puppy (http://www.puppylinux.org), and many others.

If you try out any of these options, do drop me a line to let me know how it worked out!

Update...

Well, it's been a long time. I'm surprised my account is still active. That's really nice of blogspot. I've had a working midlet up (as mentioned in my last post a long time ago), but had no inspiration on game design. So it's basically just a sprite moving around the screen. I've given up at that point.

Well, I'm back though. And I'm thinking, I need a blog with a theme. I'll be settling on some subjects and then writing relevant posts for them in the future. So watch this space! ;)