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                    JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 13TH OCTOBER, 2023
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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


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