deconstruction in the basement

In my continuing quest to divert my attention from school and be less bored, I took apart my optical mouse today.

Cool. The mousewheel works with an infrared LED. It shines through tiny slits in the wheel at a detector on the other side, at that determines the scroll movement. Of course, it isn’t detecting movement right now because the wheel fell on the floor. All sorts of springs keep popping out of this thing and I can’t figure out how they were previously aligned.

Ok, this spring sets the snap distance on the wheel by working against a series of ridges on the inner circumference. It doesn’t work anymore. The other spring resets the mouse-clicking motion.

The optical motion is driven by a red LED which is filtered though a number of clear, plastic lenses. There is a pinhole sized detector on the base of the main chip, though I still have no idea how it works. If this was sci-fi I could ask it.

Cromlech needs a facelift, if nothing more than getting rid of this dreary grey background. I feel like I’m writing on the walls of a basement. Just painting it white, however, makes me feel like I’m writing in a basement that’s trying too hard to convince me it’s not a basement. Everyone knows that painted cinder blocks were unpainted cinder blocks at one point in their dirt-thwarting lives. We’re not fooled.

The people upstairs are trying to smash through my ceiling again.

Mouse scrolling is weird without the snapping.

And people that say things like ‘dirt-thwarting’ obviously have no idea what they’re talking about. Ph33r th3 l4m3 0n35, d00d.

Writing is weird without the focus.