Category: PC Tweakage

Remembering which tweaks worked

Electronics Workbench, PC Tweakage

Kensington Expert Mouse Scroll Ring: More Data Points

A note from Alan adds more data about troubleshooting problems with the classic Kensington Expert Mouse trackball scroll ring:

I have two comments and a question: first I made the mistake of purchasing 4 used expert mice on ebay etc and each had a different problem but 3 of 4 also had faulty scroll rings. 2nd: one of them was dated 2020 (a wireless version). so they definitely haven’t fixed this issue and it’s very wide spread (or maybe why shady sellers decide to part ways with their trackballs).

question: from reading across your quotes it’s not clear but it seems like there is no real consistent fix to this issue nor a really strong conclusion as to what causes it? My futzing with a couple of these does seem to suggest that alignment of the ring makes a difference but not a lasting one.

As far as the alignment non-fix goes, tweaking the detector position just changes the amount of light passing through the wrong side of the reversed IC, without solving the problem. That’s what we’ve all done, with essentially the same results: feels good, doesn’t last.

Kensington (whoever they are these days) may have fixed the problem with a different quadrature detector oriented in the proper direction, but that’s not something we civilians can accomplish.

It should be possible to unsolder the reversed detector (if, indeed, it is), aim the lens (if that’s what it is) at the emitter, then somehow resolder the leads to the same pads. Perhaps flip it to put the leads on the top, away from the PCB, secure it with a generous blob of hot-melt glue, and connect jumpers from pads to leads?

So far, the two new-ish units on my desks continue to work well, depriving me of sufficient motivation to dig into my junkers.

If anybody is willing to hack their defunct trackball, please let us all know what happened!

Because you may be reading this in our future, comments on this particular post will probably have been disabled to reduce the attack surface for spammers. Send me an email / use the comment form (linky over on the right), or comment on the post of the day and I’ll sort it out. Thanks!

Electronics Workbench, PC Tweakage

CR2032 Lithium Cell Lifetime

The Dell Optiplex 9010 acting as a file server woke up dead after I plugged it in after returning from a road trip. Its ID sticker shows a manufacturing date almost exactly nine years ago and the problem was exactly what you might expect:

Optiplex CR2032
Optiplex CR2032

I’d never measured 100 mV on a CR2032 before.

Because the Optiplex runs headless in the basement, diagnosis required hauling it upstairs, booting it with a display & keyboard, whacking the date into the current decade, then resetting a few other vital bits.

The electrolytic caps looked to be in fine shape, though.

Machine Shop, Oddities, PC Tweakage

Huion Tablet USB Cable Realignment

The Huion tablet on my desk has its USB cable sticking straight out of the left side, whereupon it must loop around to burrow under the shelf under my monitor on its way to the port on the back of the PC case. The loop snagged on all the clutter atop the desk and I finally got around to Fixing That Problem:

Huion tablet - rerouted USB cable
Huion tablet – rerouted USB cable

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple.

Right angle USB Mini-B connectors are still a thing:

Huion tablet - USB angle adapters
Huion tablet – USB angle adapters

Which is a “left angle” adapter and which is a “right angle” adapter depends on which supplier you ask and how much you trust their descriptions / product photos, so you should get a set containing both: it’s the only way to be sure.

The one on the right (a “right angle”) shows a bit of carving, which came after the completely unsurprising discovery that the stylin’ curves on the side of the tablet collided with the rectangular adapter:

Huion tablet - misfit adapter
Huion tablet – misfit adapter

Some diligent X-Acto knife work carved away enough of both the adapter and the tablet case to snugly join them:

Huion tablet - plastic surgery
Huion tablet – plastic surgery

The hackery over on the far right fits around the USB cable’s molded connector. I simply cut away any parts that touched until the adapter seated firmly in the USB socket and the cable exited parallel to the edge.

Part of this involved not carving deeply enough into the adapter or cable connector to expose the internal wiring. I assumed the tablet didn’t have anything vital immediately inside that fancy curve, so that’s where I dug deepest.

Stick adapter + cable to the tablet with good-quality electrical tape and now the cable points directly to where it should go.

Declare victory and move on!

Machine Shop, PC Tweakage

Raspberry Pi: WLAN to Wired Network

The CNC-3018XL and MPCNC machines each have a Raspberry Pi feeding G-Code into an Arduino clone controlling the stepper motors. The former grew a USB WiFi interface in place of its internal WiFi hardware when it seemed to have difficulty connecting to the house router, while the latter pretty much worked. Of late, however, I’ve been trying to reduce the number of WiFi devices cluttering the airwaves, with the result of wiring both machines to an old Ethernet switch from the Box o’ Network Stuff:

LinkSys Switch for CNC machines
LinkSys Switch for CNC machines

The blue puck is the KVM button to select one of the machines for the keyboard / mouse / monitor on the bench.

One key point I generally screw up: the WiFi IP address cannot become the wired IP address without rebooting everything else on the network. Instead, just change the IP addresses and be done with it.

Collecting all the pieces in one place:

Disable the both internal WiFi hardware and Bluetooth in /boot/config.txt, thereby eliminating the need to force the WiFi down in /etc/rc.local:

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

Define the static IP address in /etc/dhcpcd.conf:

interface eth0
static ip_address=192.168.1.34/24
static routers=192.168.1.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.1.2

Kill IPV6 activity in /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

I very much doubt this information is either complete or correct, but it serves the purpose as of early 2022.

PC Tweakage, Software

XFCE: Remote Desktop via X11vnc Through an SSH Tunnel

For the first time in a loooong time I (had to) set up remote desktop sharing, starting from an existing SSH login through a single-port pinhole in an immutable router firewall.

The remote PC runs Xubuntu 20.4 LTS and I verified it already had x11vnc installed. If that’s not the case, make it so.

In order to share / control the desktop of a different user (hereinafter known as kay), I must SSH into that PC as kay. My SSH session uses public key authentication and kay has no need for outbound SSH, so just use my PC’s public key in kay‘s authorized_keys file. On the remote PC, where I am signed in as me: 

cd ~
sudo mkdir /home/kay/.ssh        # kay does not have a public key
sudo cp .ssh/authorized_keys /home/kay/.ssh     # so just copy mine
sudo chown -R kay:kay /home/kay/.ssh     # transfer ownership
sudo chmod go-rwx /home/kay/.ssh     # set proper permissions

From my local PC, I can now SSH into the remote PC as kay and start x11vnc through the SSH tunnel:

ssh -v kay@remote.address -L 5900:localhost:5900 "x11vnc -display :0 -noxdamage -ncache 10 -ncache_cr -nopw"

Still on my PC, aim a VNC client at the local end of the tunnel:

novnc localhost:5900

Using novnc presents the remote desktop as a web page in a browser, although you may prefer something more traditional.

Somewhat to my surprise, It Just Worked™.

Administrivia, PC Tweakage

Clearing the Noto Font Clutter: Again

Installing Atkinson Hyperlegible reminded me to clear out the Noto font clutter in this (relatively nerecentw) Manjaro installation. Of course fonts now appear in slightly different locations with slightly different names, so this remains just a serving suggestion:

cd /usr/share/fonts/noto
sudo chmod a-w NotoSans-*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansMono*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansDisplay*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansMath*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansSymbol*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSerif-*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSerifDisplay*
sudo chmod a-w NotoMusic*
sudo chmod a-w NotoMath*
sudo find . -perm /u=w -name \*ttf -delete

Get rid of some other clutter:

cd ../TTF
sudo chmod a-w DejaVu*
sudo chmod a-w Inconsolata-*
sudo find . -perm /u=w -name \*ttf -delete
cd ../droid
sudo chmod a-w DroidSans-Bold.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSans.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSansFallback*
sudo chmod a-w DroidSansMono.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSerif-*
cd ../adobe-source-han-sans
sudo rm *otf

For unknown reasons, we now have two font cache updaters:

sudo fc-cache -v -f
sudo fc-cache-32 -v -f

Now font selection in, say, LibreOffice doesn’t involve paging through a myriad fonts in languages I cannot recognize, let alone read. Admittedly, Inconsolata does have more variations than I’ll ever use.

PC Tweakage, Software

Naming Is Hard

A recent update to the X Windowing System (or whatever it’s called) once again changed the names of its monitors / displays / output devices, so that my startup script no longer confined the tablet to the landscape display.

In mostly reverse chronological order, here are various commands I’ve puzzled out:

#xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP1-8"
xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1-8"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "HEAD-0"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "HEAD-0"

Over the last two years, the display name changed from DP-1 to DP-1-8 to DP1-8, and back to DP-1-8. I grew accustomed to this with the Wacom tablet (HEAD-0‽)and now know where to look, but I still have no idea of the motivation.

Aaaand the tablet’s stylus name? The Wacom names were stable, but the Huion names apparently come from the Department of Redundancy Department.