A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[TheLurker]

If only my laptop automagically disabled the trackpad when a meece was plugged in and reënabled it likewise...

A long time* ago (in a galaxy ect. ect.) I had a Windoze work lapdog, it may have been a Tosh., that did exactly this thing and it was very heaven.  I have looked for the same feature on every lapdog since and it has been conspicuous by its absence.


*I was working for Royal Mail at the time so 1996-97

[orienteer]

There's usually a way to turn the trackpad off, though exactly where will depend on the drivers.  Have a poke around in mousy settings, or devices.

USB meece are a case of plug them in and they just work (if you have multiple pointing devices, the pointer gets the sum of their inputs^[1]).  Again, the usual settings to adjust speed, button behaviour etc, which should be independent of the trackpad.


_{[1] For example, on this machine I have a mouse for my left hand and a trackball for my right.  If I move them both at once I can wrestle with the position of the pointer.}

Thanks Kim!

[Mr Larrington]

My old Asus does the automagical meece detection, until it stopped working some time during Teh Years Ov Plague, leading to heavy cursing as my untrained paws kept prodding the touchpad.  Updated some bit of Asus-specific meeceware cured it of this unseemly behaviour, to the great relief of the people in adjoining rooms in the Battle Mountain Super 8.

[rafletcher]

For the first time suffered the fate of water splashing the keyboard of my Toshiba Satellite laptop. Problem is the touch pad is now very erratic, if it doesn’t dry out wondering how easy it is to buy an external mouse to bypass it. The windows settings page includes an option for mouse settings. How do I tell the system to use the mouse rather than the touch pad? Thanks in advance.

All the laptops I’ve used you just plug a mouse in, or use BT (built in or dongle) to tether it, and it just works. No changes needed.

[CAMRAMan]

I've had my Yahoo email address since April 1996. That's the longest time I've had any address before or since. It was first xxxx_xxxxxx@yahoo.com, but they gave me the xxxx.xxxxxx version in c.2005, making it much easier to pass on verbally. I first recall seeing an email arrive on a computer when I was in Sweden and thought 'I gotta get me one of those' and did when I got back to the UK. And then it sat mainly dormant for ages, as no bugger else I knew had one. My gmail address is much clumsier, so the Yahoo one still prevails.

[Pickled Onion]

Related: Did I mention that the previously dust-gathering dedicated 'email' button on my keyboard now toggles the default arseaudio output device between the onboard sound (headphones, for the use of) and the monitor's mediocre but occasionally useful squeakers?

My keyboard has a dedicated "Eject" key where a windows keyboard would normally have the INS key. When I RDP into my (employer's) win machine it runs an AutoHotKey script to put the keys in sensible positions. But can I get it to remap* the  ⏏️ key? Leading to much hilarity when accidentally pressing whatever mysterious key combination puts the stupid win machine into overwrite mode.


* can I fuck.

[orienteer]

There's usually a way to turn the trackpad off, though exactly where will depend on the drivers.  Have a poke around in mousy settings, or devices.

USB meece are a case of plug them in and they just work (if you have multiple pointing devices, the pointer gets the sum of their inputs^[1]).  Again, the usual settings to adjust speed, button behaviour etc, which should be independent of the trackpad.


_{[1] For example, on this machine I have a mouse for my left hand and a trackball for my right.  If I move them both at once I can wrestle with the position of the pointer.}

Thanks Kim!

Received an HP optical mouse via eBay today. Just plug and go; it's better than the touch pad in that it's "higher geared", so don't have to move my hand as much. Only problem is no space left to put my coffee next to the laptop, might be forced to do that long overdue tidy up.....

[Feanor]

Dear my work's IT people.

Yes, you can migrate stuffs from one place to another.
But when the new place contains directories with dots in their name, that blows up everything.
Plz not to be doing that.
Use an underscore like Dog intended.

I think Tim Patterson once said that if directories had been intended to have dots in them, there would have been examples in the DOS manual.
But I can't find a reference.

[Kim]

it's better than the touch pad in that it's "higher geared", so don't have to move my hand as much.

FYI the 'gear ratio' of mouse-like devices is usually configurable in the relevant input settings.

[Feanor]

it's better than the touch pad in that it's "higher geared", so don't have to move my hand as much.

FYI the 'gear ratio' of mouse-like devices is usually configurable in the relevant input settings.

Yes, and I've found one part of that, the scroll-wheel gear ratio, to randomly change.

In Chrome under Windows, the scroll wheel can change from normal to stupidly slow with no apparent reason.
Only a re-boot will fix it.
No idea why.

I think it's specific to Chrome, but can't be 100% sure.
Can't see why it would, that's an OS thing but there you are.

[Kim]

Probably from the same school of paternalistic bastardry whereby Chrome intercepts a left-scroll mouse event and turns it into a 'back', regardless of what the user might want.  There was a time when I indeed had my tilting scrollwheel mapped to 'back' and 'forward', but as standards of web design have deteriorated I've found it more useful to be able to use it to scroll the window.

Hence I'll scroll right using the mousewheel, then instinctively scroll left, whereby the page will start to scroll for the time it takes to be reloaded with wherever I was at previously, at which point Bad Swears will result.

[Pingu]

...Only problem is no space left to put my coffee next to the laptop, might be forced to do that long overdue tidy up.....

Should've got a trackball 

[StuAff]

Have ordered a refurb (quite possibly new) MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 10 CPU/16 GPU cores, 16GB, 1TB) to replace the ancient MacBook (early 2009, bought new, third battery on its last legs). According to Geekbench the new one's about 30 times faster…looking forward to that. With the launch of the M2 Pro & Max models Apple knocked the price of the M1s down a lot, £500 cheaper than the new one....

[Mrs Pingu]

After another day out and about where my droid rot  infested Nokia 7.1 restarted itself multiple times, and aware that I and then we are off travelling soon we decided I should probably stop prevaricating and buy a replacement.
After seeing a cow workers Pixel 6 last week I repeated the 'small phone' search and decided on a Pixel 6a.
On the basis I couldn't bear to pay $howfuckingmuch!? I went for a return from Ama$on whorehouse warehouse at 76% of RRP. So we'll see how that turns out.

[Jurek]

I've just lost the will to live in an attempt to order some Cillit Bang black mould remover from Amazon.

[Mr Larrington]

Dusted off my long-dormant l33t VMS 5k1llz to use PC-DCL to modify about 800 text files.  Yay!  Go me!  It was either that or RSI from notepad++ macros…

It’s a pain in the bum that the f$search lexical function doesn’t work properly but I managed to work around it.

[perpetual dan]

I installed LaTeX for the first time in _years_ today. That felt so clunky and slow.
Obviously the first time failed. I don't expect bleeding edge from Ubuntu packages, but the 2019 version is so old it's broken. But not so broken that I wasn't trying to manually install stuff of ctan before I abandoned.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai “Chris45”!

Why do you call that trailer model “fridgedbl” when it quite clearly isn’t a reefer

Idiot.

Also Excel!  Plz to stop crashing

[ian]

I installed LaTeX for the first time in _years_ today. That felt so clunky and slow.
Obviously the first time failed. I don't expect bleeding edge from Ubuntu packages, but the 2019 version is so old it's broken. But not so broken that I wasn't trying to manually install stuff of ctan before I abandoned.

I interviewed someone who wrote LaTeX as per the logo in her CV today. There might have been other reasons for shortlisting her, but I remembered I hated the bloody thing (one of my first jobs was doing something useful with LaTeX formatted documents from astrophysicists, which as combinations go, ought to self-annihilate in a petite mort of excited photon, but who should be so lucky). She also talked about random forests a lot. I fear I may have introduced the stochastic bear. I hope she's got another offer and therapy.

[perpetual dan]

I installed LaTeX for the first time in _years_ today. That felt so clunky and slow.
Obviously the first time failed. I don't expect bleeding edge from Ubuntu packages, but the 2019 version is so old it's broken. But not so broken that I wasn't trying to manually install stuff of ctan before I abandoned.

I interviewed someone who wrote LaTeX as per the logo in her CV today. There might have been other reasons for shortlisting her, but I remembered I hated the bloody thing (one of my first jobs was doing something useful with LaTeX formatted documents from astrophysicists, which as combinations go, ought to self-annihilate in a petite mort of excited photon, but who should be so lucky). She also talked about random forests a lot. I fear I may have introduced the stochastic bear. I hope she's got another offer and therapy.

Did the bear do what bears do in the random forest?

[ian]

She accepted my job offer so I’m sure she’ll tell me precisely what it did, though perhaps not precisely where it did it in the forest.

[Ham]

Android vs iOS, and I'm not sure whether it is Google assistant related, or only on the Pixel implementation, but one very useful feature is that despite having autocarrot switched on, it recognises when I'm writing an SMS text in foreign and switches automatically to that language, which is very useful (I've used it for French, Spanish, German, not sure if it does more exotic stuff, too, but probably). As I  have just found, writing a Spanish message on my work phone, iOS does not and goes out of its way to make life awkward. You didn't mean to say hacer, you meant to say happy, didn't you? etc etc etc etc etc

[Auntie Helen]

iOS detects when I am writing in German on my phone so maybe there’s a setting issue somewhere for you.

[Mr Larrington]

iOS on my fondleslab does the “suggested words” thing above the keyboard but seems not to learn ones it thinks are FOREIGN because they contain “non-BRITISH” characters (such as Reëducation) or look a bit funny (such as Deignan or Prudhomme).  It's probably possessed by the vengeful spirit of some demonic Little Englander who died of apoplexy when he couldn’t find a copy of the D**ly M**l while on holiday in Lanzarote.

[Ham]

iOS detects when I am writing in German on my phone so maybe there’s a setting issue somewhere for you.

Hmmm - maybe if I install multiple language keyboards, that's the only setting I can see. Still not as smooth as the transparent google option.

ETA - Better, it stops aggressively correcting words spelled correctly in foreign, but doesn't seem to recognise that I have changed language and wrongly spelled words get corrected into English, and randomly even correctly spelled, eg "Mein arbeit" Turned into "mein at Ritz" There may be additional settings that may help, but actually I don't have to use my work phone for language as English is the technical lingua franca