This is a mouse that was on­ce bro­ken but is now healed. (A me­chan­i­cal switch on the cir­cuit board was bro­ken; upon fix­ing that, the mouse works al­most like-new.) I was ac­tu­al­ly quite sur­prised at the ex­treme sim­plic­i­ty of the ac­tu­al mouse hard­ware - a cou­ple of re­sis­tors, ca­pac­i­tors, an LED for the sen­sor, and the sen­sor chip it­self. It seems to me that the costs for build­ing such a mouse must be rather cheap in­deed. In fact, I won­der now about the op­ti­cal track­balls out on the mar­ket to­day - mine (the [Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse][kem]) is to all ap­pear­ances just an up­side-down op­ti­cal mouse with a ball and a cou­ple of ex­tra but­tons; would it be per­haps pos­si­ble to con­struct my own per­fect­ly-func­tion­ing track­ball with on­ly cheap op­ti­cal mouse parts?

[kem]: http://blog.non­graph­i­cal.com/2008/08/kens­ing­ton-ex­pert-mouse-70/

Fas­ci­nat­ing as that may seem, there are in­deed [more ex­cit­ing pro­jects][mt] to at­tend to first.

[mt]: http://ssan­dler.word­press.com/MT­mini/

Here’s how to stop Fire­fox from au­to­mat­i­cal­ly virus scan­ning all down­loads after they’ve fin­ished - some­thing that’s been an­noy­ing me since I’ve up­grad­ed to Fire­fox 3 be­cause of the ex­tra­ne­ous disk ac­cess­es it cre­ates. Open up the `about:con­fig` (open a new tab, type `about:con­fig` in the lo­ca­tion bar), and find the **`browser.down­load.man­ager.scan­When­Done`** val­ue. Type in `browser` in the fil­ter bar for quick search­ing. Set that val­ue to false by dou­ble-click­ing. And that’s it! What, were you ex­pect­ing some­thing more?

(orig­i­nal­ly read [here][ghacks])

[ghacks]: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/04/dis­able-au­to­mat­ic-virus-scan­ning-in-fire­fox-3/

[Down­load Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py][dl]

[dl]: http://non­graph­i­cal.com/me­dia/uploads/Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py

One of the prob­lems with us­ing hy­brid Win­dows and Lin­ux en­vi­ron­ments is that one needs to watch close­ly for filesys­tem and file anoma­lies and in­con­sis­ten­cies. Dif­fer­ing end-of-line mark­ers, for ex­am­ple, cause many prob­lems when shar­ing files be­tween the two op­er­at­ing sys­tems. One par­tic­u­lar prob­lem I’ve run in­to is that of hav­ing du­pli­cate files, or in other words, mul­ti­ple files with the same file­name. This can hap­pen if, say, you copy a di­rec­to­ry some­where in Win­dows, then switch to Lin­ux and use a tool such as rsync to copy that same di­rec­to­ry over again. If the cap­i­tal­iza­tion is dif­fer­ent, Lin­ux will not re­place the old files, be­cause Lin­ux, un­like Win­dows, is case-sen­si­tive. This will even hap­pen, and is tech­ni­cal­ly ac­cept­able, on NTFS filesys­tems.

The so­lu­tion I’ve come up with is this sim­ple script, called Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py. Ob­vi­ous­ly, you need [Python][py] in­stalled to run it, but it has no ad­di­tion­al de­pen­den­cies. Sim­ply run it *in the di­rec­to­ry you wish to clean*, and it should do the rest. Note that you shouldn’t use this for en­tire filesys­tems (yet), be­cause it will use ridicu­lous amounts of mem­o­ry if it is given a high num­ber of files. [Down­load it here][dl]!

[py]: http://www.python.org/

P.S. Al­so, I can­not guar­an­tee that this tool will work as in­tend­ed or will be bug-free. Use wise­ly.