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.

A Universe in Fireworks, originally uploaded by johnflan. ]]> http://johnflan.com/2011/11/a-universe-in-fireworks/feed/ 0 http://johnflan.com/2011/09/monitor-the-evolution-of-a-webpage-with-wkhtmltoimage-bash-and-cron/ http://johnflan.com/2011/09/monitor-the-evolution-of-a-webpage-with-wkhtmltoimage-bash-and-cron/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:39:42 +0000 John Flanagan http://johnflan.com/?p=233 read more »]]> 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"

Generating Random Fractal Terrain – Paul’s article is a little old but walks through the algorithms demonstrating their results in a well written piece.

As surprising as it sounds the technology for a network of this type exists today, not in some shady lab run by Google, Facebook or even Microsoft, but in our pockets.

Recently I toyed a little with the Facebook Open Graph, and since then I have been considering how these Object ID’s map to the real world. Everything in the Open Graph is an object in the software development sense and Object ID’s are used to represent individual people, businesses, events, places and activities.

So how can we exchange these ID’s quickly and invisibly?

A number of methods exist today to integrate this functionality into say the Android or iPhone Facebook applications. For example a handset could broadcast a Wi-Fi SSID of “FB-ID:XXXXXXXX” where X’s would represent the users Facebook Object ID. Bluetooth radios could also be utilised to transmit and receive this information, offering an advantage of a shorter range (10m or so) enabling the software to understand that this person was in close physical proximity.

Concurrently, your device on say a thirty-second interval could perform a scan looking for other devices broadcasting an SSID with a “FB-ID:” prefix. With this data the software can trivially discover if the detected Object ID’s around you resolve to existing Facebook friends. If they turnout to be valid object references then record the duration, the location (from GPS) and time of the meeting, and if the Object ID’s dont match existing friends store them for later analysis.

We can build systems that can dynamically partition these aquantances into categories like close friends, co-workers, business contacts and others. And importantly, manage how these relationships change over time  representing your current real life social network.

Whether or not current wireless technologies are up to this task or if users would be happy with this level of invasion remain to be seen, but I am confident that this is how the Facebook of tomorrow will function.

Thoughts or comments are appreciated.

It seems that the Android debugger (adb) has problems on Ubuntu when trying to connect to a physical device, a Nexus One is this case. The issue is relating to user permissions with the debugger being unable to access the usb device. I have seen a number of solutions for this with the most common being simply killing the adb process and restarting it as root.

cd android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools
adb kill-server
sudo adb start-server
adb devices

But unfortunately this was not sufficient to resolve the problem for my configuration and also it would be necessary to restart adb on every system restart. A more permanent solution appears to be adding a rule to udev to permit usage of the device.

sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

and paste the following lines

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE:="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE:="0666"

The 0bb4 in the idVendor property identifies the device (Nexus One), you can list the currently connected usb devices on your machine running the command lsusb, from here you will be able to identify the vendor id for your android device.

sudo restart udev
cd android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools
./adb kill-server
./adb start-server
./adb devices

Even with this second solution be sure to physically disconnect and reconnect the handset.

For those of you who at one time or another played multilayer quake, this is for you. Its funny after not having played the game in years the levels still have a strange sense of familiarly. The run was completed on nightmare mode in 52min, with every secret discovered and every enemy killed.

Via Geek.com