February 2008

I recently shoved an extra 512mb into my intel iMac to take it to 2gig after getting annoyed at sluggish performance. Mostly because of Firefox’s willingness to eat as much memory as possible.

Although it’s helped, it didn’t take long for Firefox to take advantage:

That’s only after about six hours of use with around 8 tabs open.

I’ve finally rid myself of an annoying rodent infestation.

It didn’t take a phone call to pest control. Just a simple purchase at Amazon.co.uk.

For a while I’ve been using Apple’s Mighty Mouse. It’s a fine piece of plastic topped nicely with a 360 degree scroll ball which has really made my life easier when coding with large documents as I don’t like to soft wrap them. It’s also a joy to use in Photoshop when zoomed in.

The problem is that the ball sticks or jams frequently. Apple’s suggestions range from blowing at it with compressed air to rubbing it vigorously on a clean piece of paper. They are both fine suggestions but sadly only have a temporary effect which diminishes with each ‘clean’.

After a few months, the scroll ball is virtually unusable. It either refuses to scroll up or down or does so under huge protest only moving the document with every four or five frantic strokes. It’s a very frustrating experience.

I have gotten through three of the things over the past few years (two wired, one bluetooth) in the hope that the design has been improved or that my fingers have stopped producing more oil than Texas.

Sadly neither is the case and after spending a month beating my bluetooth mouse daily in an attempt to restore the scroll ball, I took the plunge and purchased a relatively cheap Logitech mouse.

The MX400 is fully 10.5 compatible and offers a scroll wheel that has a ’tilt’ facility to enable X and Y scrolling. It arrived today and I’ve been using it happily for a few hours. The scroll wheel may not be as smooth as a new Mighty Mouse, but at least it won’t need chronic abuse to keep it spinning.

It’s the little things that make the big difference.