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Having used the Apple Mighty Mouse for a while, I have found that there has been a small buildup of dirt under the trackball. Below I have documented my attempt at cleaning the mouse.

Unfortunately Apple decided that cleaning the trackball was not something users would want or need to do. In order to get to the trackball, a white band which is attached to the mouse with glue must be removed. This is a somewhat perilous operation as the band is quite thin, especially where the cord connects to the mouse. You are likely to cause some damage (scratches and such) when removing this and when reassembling the mouse the band will need to be glued back in place.

Tools:

• Credit card (used to pry components while minimising damage – be warned this might cause some damage to the card)
• Philips screwdriver for removing the trackball from the mouse
• Small flat screwdriver for opening clips.

Step 1 – Removing the gray rubber

Simply insert something between the mouse and the gray band and pry it out, it comes away quite simply.

Step 2 – White plastic band
In the previous step we removed the gray band to give more access for this step. Be careful with this stage, its quite easy to do damage.

To begin insert the card in the gap exposed by the gray band and attempt to loosen some glue. I began by using a small screwdriver to create a small gap between the mouse and the band. Once i could get the card in force it around to remove the plastic. As you get near the cord the white band is particularly weak – so care is needed.

Step 3 – Separating the Mouse

With the white band removed, we are now able to separate the mouse. Near the bottom of the mouse (in line with the certification symbols) there are two small bars attached to the upper housing. Pull these away from the center of the mouse and they come loose.

At this stage the mouse is in two parts, but there are two ribbon cables connecting the halves. You need to disconnect these cables before preceding.

Step 4 – Removing the trackball

There are three screws fixing the trackball to the top of the mouse. Once these screws are removed. you are free to take out the trackball assembly.

Step 5 – Separating the trackball assembly

You can use a screwdriver to remove the white plastic cover for the assembly. The rollers and trackball are quite small, so take care not to drop any of the components.

You are now free to remove any buildup from the rollers and around the assembly.

After seeing the 37signals.com homepage evolution blog post published last week, I thought it would be interesting to record the evolution of some of my own sites. For this project I used wkhtmltoimage which is a fork of wkhtmltopdf.

wkhtmltoimage runs on the console and renders either a jpg or png of the page. I have limited this to 1000 pixels vertically in order to keep the file sizes down.

Below is the bash script I created to read a list of sites from a file and save them into a directory which is named after the site, with each image been titled with the date and time.

#!/bin/sh

FILENAME="sites.txt"

while read URL; do
    #generate the current date + time
    DATE=`date +%d_%m_%y_%H%M`
    OPTIONS="--height 1000 --crop-h 1000 --quality 80"

    #if the directory does not exist create it
    if [ ! -d "$URL" ]; then
        mkdir "$URL"
    fi

    ./wkhtmltoimage-amd64 $OPTIONS http://$URL ./$URL/$DATE.png

done < "$FILENAME"