Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2023 JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 13TH OCTOBER, 2023 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: New trackball with Linux support + quick status update DATE: Fri 13 Oct 20:43:23 BST 2023 Recently for work I’ve had to do a lot of mousing around. As a rule I don’t use a mouse much and prefer to drive everything via the keyboard. However, I’m currently having to use a low-code development environment in Windows, running in a virtual machine of course, and everything is point and click hell. It’s driving me insane. You really cannot expose the richness of programming with hundreds of dialogs and thousands of options :( Mousing so much, all day long, also makes my hand ache. So, I’ve just invested in a trackball. I did have a nice large and chunky trackball that was very nice to use. I only stopped using it because it had a 9 pin serial connection :| First thing I needed to do was look for something that would play nice with Linux. After some research I went for a Kensington Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring (K72337EU) for £42 on Amazon. I did consider the more expensive models, but as usual, even after doing research I wasn’t sure what the Linux support would be like :/ As it turned out the Orbit just worked, including the scroll ring and emulated middle button click — hit left and right click buttons simultaneously. This is on Debian (testing/Trixie) using Xorg and libinput. The only thing I needed to tweak was the sensitivity using: xinput --set-prop 11 'libinput Accel Speed' -0.6 Where the 11 in that command is the Orbit’s ID from running “xinput list”. Off the bat I’m quite quick and accurate with the Orbit. Only time will tell if it will help with the aching. The scroll wheel is really convenient and works vary well. The only fault I can find with the Orbit is that the buttons are quite noisy. In development news, I’ve just been upgrading to Go 1.21.3 which has a fix for the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS attack. The strong type work on Mere is nearly complete, I hope to push out an update over the weekend. I’m still dithering over some of the changes and wondering if I’m doing the right thing. I still need to handle defining function return types. What I want is something like: test: func s:string is s == ""; return "", 0 return s+s, len s endfunc string, int Here the return types are defined as string and int on the endfunc. Then the types can be checked for each of the return statements. I’ve not decided yet if Mere should support named return parameters or not. Anyway return types can wait until the next update for now. It’s now October, Friday 13th, soon be Halloween! ╓╥ôô╥╖ :) -- Diddymus Up to Main Index Up to Journal for October, 2023