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Logitech Marble Mouse on Ubuntu 18.04 and Mint 19

Posted on August 20, 2018 by james

I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. So much in fact that I have several spares in case my current one dies. It’s always been a little niggly to get to work with Linux though. Every few releases something changes and the configuration I had stops working 🙁

Ubuntu 18.04 and Mint 19 are just such releases. It took me some time to discover that my old configuration (from Mint 17 via Mint 18) didn’t work because it used the “evdev” driver which appears to have been dropped in favour of “libinput”. Not only that, the change of driver means the configuration directives have changed too, so the commands for scroll wheel emulation and so on no longer worked.

After grubbing about for configuration details I finally came up with the following to make mouse work once again. I created this in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-marblemouse.conf.

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier  "Marble Mouse"
        MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
        MatchIsPointer "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "ButtonMapping" "1 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 2"
        Option "ScrollButton" "8"
        Option "ScrollMethod" "button"
        Option "MiddleEmulation" "on"
EndSection

This makes the large left and right mouse buttons work as “normal” left and right mouse buttons. The small left hand button works in combination with the ball to provide scrolling and the small right hand button pastes.

Now I wonder how long it is before it will be broken again?

Posted in Computing, Linux | Tagged logitech marble mouse | 2 Comments

Swimming, 20th August 2018

Posted on August 20, 2018 by james

So, first time back to my USRPT set since before I went on holiday over a month ago…

400m front crawl warm-up
25 x 50m front crawl, target time 51s, rest interval 24s
200m front crawl swim down

I’d already succeeded at two of these back-to-back, so just needed another to drop the time down another second. I expected it to be hard though, and I wasn’t disappointed. Times started off surprisingly quick with many of the early reps hitting 47s or 48s, even some 46s ones here and there. By rep 14 I just couldn’t maintain it though and I had to skip number 15. Things went fairly well from there, staying under 50s until number 23 when I was over 51s. I skipped rep 24, then finished off with a 48s rep.

I’m a bit disappointed not to have made it, but on the other hand most of the reps I completed were pretty good so it’s not a total disaster.

USRPT distance this year: 52,300m
Total distance this year: 127,450m

Posted in Swimming | Tagged training, USRPT | Leave a comment

Lunar eclipse from Southern Spain

Posted on August 20, 2018 by james

The lunar eclipse at the end of July found me on holiday in Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains with a view to the coast and beyond (as far as Africa, in fact).

I had used my cabin baggage allowance to take a telescope and other astronomy kit with me:

though I deliberately left the counterweight behind and improvised with a few cans of coke (other flavours of counterweight are available) and tape. In the end I also used the remaining cans to hang off the bottom of the tripod to improve stability.

The Moon rose over the mountains to the east late in the full eclipse which made imaging tricky initially, but as it moved out of totality it turned a stunning red and from then I captured in the region of 1000 frames to the end of the eclipse. I’m still working on processing them, but here’s an early frame to be going on with.

I suffered for my art, too. Look away now if you’re squeamish. This is my inner left calf shortly after that night. I was utterly savaged by something that clearly liked the taste of me 🙁

Posted in Astroimaging, Astronomy | Tagged eclipse, moon | Leave a comment

Swimming, 17th August 2018

Posted on August 20, 2018 by james

Last practice session before hopefully getting back to USRPT next week. Fortunately it wasn’t as busy today. It’ll all be different in a few weeks when school starts again.

USRPT distance this year: 51,150m
Total distance this year: 125,700m

Posted in Swimming | Tagged training, USRPT | Leave a comment

Swimming, 16th August 2018

Posted on August 20, 2018 by james

Insanely busy in the pool today. Myself and another chap were pushing things along doing lengths when a mum and her son decided they’d like to do the same, in the same lanes, but at half the pace and not in a straight line. I asked for a lane rope to be put in for us because I was concerned that someone would end up getting hurt, but then the mum and son decided they’d swim in it as well! I really didn’t feel at all sure of not swimming over the top of someone or hitting them as I was coming off the turns.

USRPT distance this year: 51,150m
Total distance this year: 124,300m