The Unclear Impact

another cleaning tip: use a thin piece of plastic, about 3 mm wide (a cut it out from a transparent plastic sheet meant as a cover for documents) to knock out stubborn pieces of lint from under the wheel in its casing once the mouse is disassembled

the iFixit guide is essentially correct, but here are some other notes if the scroll wheel starts feeling gummy. for me, gently pulling the wheel up got rid of the gummyness until i pressed the wheel, but turns out this has nothing to do with the click spring below the wheel. i simply had to clean the lint and dust from the inside of the wheel:

1. turn off the mouse
2. peel off the 3 feet of the mouse (the front one can stay) and remove the screws underneath with a 00 philips bit. the ifixit guide say the feet aren’t reusable unless heated beforehand, but if you dig deep enough (i used the guitar pick-like ifixit opener thing) you can pull off all the adhesive together with the feet in one piece, which can be just stuck back later. also remove the exposed screw on the front with a T5 torx bit
3. pull off the shell from the mouse. i used the guitar pick-like thing liberally. there are two challenges: there is a very stiff clip below the right button, so the base has to be slid forward to disengage it, but the scroll wheel and the lip of the base next to the horizontal scroll wheel will prevent the base from sliding forward. my tactic was to pull the base downwards while pushing it as forward as possible, and poking with the guitar pick-thing below the right button
4. disconnect the ribbon cable from the base. make sure not to break both pegs of the clip holding the cable. the shell is free now
5. clean around the wheel and especially the teeth of the internal gear on the while. i wrapped a microfibre cloth around the (closed) jaws of plastic tweezers to get between the teeth properly. compressed air would also help here, i believe, and maybe even some silicone oil for the axle
6. reconnect the ribbon cable. this may require some maneuvering, because the shell obstructs the space for the fingers
7. turn the mouse on and test whether it still works (it’s a pain to have to disassemble right after you have put it back together). make sure not to touch any PCB, then turn the mouse off again
8. snap the shell back to the base. the challenges are the same as for the disassembly. i could get it to snap back fully together except for the stiff clip below the right button. a combination of pushing the clip itself back (using a piece of plastic) from the gap left at the front and pushing from the top helped
9. put back the screws and stick the feet back

i also had some luck previously with rejuvenating the rubber coating eaten by skin oils with some isopropyl alcohol and cotton balls. i hope to use this mouse for a long time, despite it accumulating wear and tear quite readily

#logitech #mxmaster #repair #cleaning

sealing ceremony, but instead of doing mormon stuff they crimp tungsten wire into a glass stem via an intermediate layer of tungsten(VI) oxide

i’m not really familiar with this stuff, but isn’t state tv blasting stabat mater during a christmas opera recital kinda bad vibes? it’s like they just packed in whatever vaguely religious-sounding they could find

i mean, easter is still a quite fair bit away

@fritjof for the few occasions when I have to, I run zoom inside firejail (I found virtual machines not so great with audio synchronization, and bad sound is quite annoying to people listening to me giving a talk). I run zoom with the private flag in firejail, so it runs in an overlay-mounted ramdisk, it has no read access to any of my files, and I also connected the sandbox to a bridge interface with a strict firewall

nevertheless, a VM is probably a better solution security-wise – especially considering that firejail is a setuid binary, and might be vulnerable to privesc from outside the sandbox (inside the sandbox capabilities are dropped), if you’re concerned about that sort of thing (I think on a single-user system, privesc to root is less serious than getting untrusted code running with full access to user files, anyways)

@pigworker and we can construct them with a compass – no straightedge needed, phew!

internal thesis defense done, i guess

now onwards to making fixes for the final version of the thesis

in hindsight, leaving the making of the slides for my internal defense to the night before the defense was a suboptimal decision

maybe I just don’t understand #qemu enough, but why did linux-firmware 20221214 make my windows vm get stuck with 100% cpu usage and not boot, while downgrading to 20221109 fixed the issue?

is there a name for the #ExistentialType pattern in #java to avoid wildcards (especially to reduce confusion about where the quantifiers are when returning a #HeterogenousCollection like Set<Foo<?>>)? I’m thinking along the lines of

public sealed interface AnyFoo permits Foo {
    // Methods of Foo<T> that do not involve any T type variable
}

public non-sealed class Foo<T> implements AnyFoo {
    // Methods of Foo<T> that involve some T
}

I had students get very confused when the T type variable degrades to Object / Void based on the #covariant / #contravariant position, so enforcing the presence of an explicit cast might be beneficial. What is extra nice is that

AnyFoo anyFoo;
Foo<?> foo = (Foo<?>) anyFoo;

is permitted without an unsafe cast warning due to the sealed keyword (although, to be honest, something like

<T> void processFoo(Foo<T> foo);
processFoo((Foo<?>) anyFoo);

is much preferable – if you have a Skolem type variables lying around, the least you can do is naming them! )