sushi-k.com

A useful wiki with speed tests of various USB memory sticks (jump drives):

http://usbmem.heriet.info/

Every once in a while the scroll ball on my Mighty Mouse stops working.  According to google, this happens to approximately everyone who owns one.  Cleaning with a little bit of cotton and alcohol worked for a while, but recently I lost the ability to scroll down.  Doh.

After trying all the usual methods I found this wonderful description of flossing the scroll ball with tape.  Worked like a charm!

Let’s keep this short:  hooray for Mobility Modder!  It seems that Apple only distributes quite old ATI drivers with their Boot Camp updates, and this was crashing at least one OGL program I was developing.  Like most other notebook manufacturers, Apple also prohibits ATI from allowing their “reference drivers” (read: “most up-to-date/fast/stable drivers”) to be installed on Apple hardware.  That’s where mobility modder comes in, providing an app to modify the latest ATI driver distribution to run on most notebooks.

So my code is working again.. yay!  Now if only I could get back the 8 hours or so I spent debugging Apple’s driver update policies.

BTW, I wonder if this would also fix a crash I was having with FXComposer…

It’s only taken me 4 hours, but I’ve finally got my MacBook Pro’s japanese keyboard acting like a … japanese keyboard.  At some point in the recent past, Vista decided that the keyboard layout was really US, so colons, @ marks, and lots of other keys were mixed up.  I still have no idea what caused it, but this registry hack has restored order to the world, for now.  I want half my day back.

It took forever, but I’ve finally managed to do it.  The installer would start up saying “preparing to install” or the like, then disappear and nothing ever happened.  Finally a thread on macrumors tipped me off that it was a localization issue.  I have Japanese Vista Ultimate running with an english language pack.  Switching everything to Japanese and then rebooting solved the problem.  Note that Vista tells you to log off, but you actually need to reboot.  What is it with Windows and rebooting?!