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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) 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?

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

I fi­nal­ly re­ceived my new moth­er­board and in­stalled it in­to my com­put­er. It runs quite well, quite cool, and very qui­et. Here’s the fi­nal de­tails on the qui­et cool­ing sys­tem:

Fans/air­flow:

• 2 x qui­et 60mm fans be­hind the CPU cool­er
• 1 x SilenX 60mm fan next to video card, dou­bles as case ex­haust
• 1 x 120mm fan in PSU, helps move air through CPU cool­er
• 1 x Arc­tic Cool­ing 90mm PWM fan on other side of CPU cool­er

Heatsinks:

• Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon (mod­i­fied) on CPU (re­moved fan and fan mount)
• Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 on video card
• Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive si­lencer/cool­er

Ef­fec­tive­ness? CPU tem­per­a­tures at 37-40 de­grees C at idle. Not too shab­by, I sup­pose. I’m plan­ning to use (and al­ready us­ing) this ma­chine for some se­ri­ous com­put­er work, in­clud­ing 3D pro­gram­ming and graph­ics. I’ve ac­tu­al­ly re­cent­ly in­stalled Vi­su­al C# 2008 Ex­press Edi­tion, and I’m find­ing C# (and Mi­crosoft’s IDE) to be an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful and in­tu­itive lan­guage. I think I might switch to us­ing C# in­def­i­nite­ly, un­til some­one writes a de­cent­ly sim­ple and pow­er­ful IDE for D, my cross-plat­form lan­guage of choice. Oh, and fix X11 and give us one win­dow­ing toolk­it that works and has amaz­ing graph­i­cal tools while you’re at it, please?

I’m al­so run­ning VMware server (and hav­ing lots of prob­lems with that…) with an Ubun­tu 8.04 Server guest, to han­dle my req­ui­site Apache and MySQL stuff, and al­so to keep up with the very few Lin­ux-on­ly soft­wares I use.