Yeah, hated boiling the eggs every week or so.
Came to the comments to check for this.
Exactly why I opened the comments as well.
The image doesn’t show the fingernail scrape technique on the wheels that the ball drives. That cotton swap isn’t going to get that off you need some elbow grease and a fingernail!
Satisfying and gross at the same time.
Actually using a standard cheap mouse on a desk without a mousepad will generate the same crap along the pads, it doesn’t come off so crisply but reminds me of this every time.
Any fingernail?
Those balls were usually steel ball bearings with a synthetic rubber wrapped around it. They gave the entire mouse some weight which made the mouse feel better to use. You could clean them with something like soap, but you’d have to be careful not to use anything that messed up the rubber. Some people cleaned them wrong, which caused the rubber to become more sticky and thus get dirty sooner. You’d also risk the rubber becoming harder and not sticky enough, so they would slip a lot. They were basically a pain in the ass and I’m happy we’ve moved on from that.
Got it: be careful when rubbing the balls otherwise they’ll get too sticky or hard
Also that everyone in 90s was cupping balls of steel
B-bb-bb-bb-alls of steel.
…
For me the extra resistance the mass gave against acceleration made it really good for playing first-person shooters.
Some gaming mice these days come with small weights you can put in the bottom to adjust the heft
I have had a G5, G500 and G502 that used weights. That made them nicer. I think there’s probably a bit of a difference between static weights tbat need to be accelerated and a rolling ball that has to start rolling, but I’m not sure. Maybe they are equivalent. I should find a ball mouse and try CS2 with it. 😅
Cat hair, dog hair and crumbs.
People actually washed that ball?
With soap and stuff?
I just used my nail to clean the roller things inside the ball area, and then put it back together. Never had a problem.
These people were fancy.
I loved breaking the little dust rolls wrapped around the direction shafts
Yeah man, it was so satisfying
For a long time I thought those were built-in special rolls.
I’d let you rub my direction shaft any time.
My first job was IT Assistant at a manufacturing company. I spent at least 50% of my time cleaning mice.
I used to get to go inside to turn on check and setup the computer lab before school in jr high. Mostly spent cleaning rollers or looking for occasional missing mouse balls.
Got to play too if there was spare time, and it sure beat standing in a prison like asphalt court yard for 30 minutes in the winter dark.
I do. When modern mouses stop working, I feel useless.
These worked on glass. Almost nothing today works on a glass table but these did
I use a thumb-trackball (and have since the 90s). They work on glass. Hell, they work on my lap or beside me if I’m in bed. And no space needed to move around.
Every week or two I pop the ball out and give it a quick wipe with a lenscloth.
Preach the good word, partner
Are you an adult by night?
I love my thumb-trackball. Doesn’t matter where I use it, it will always work.
I used these religiously until the carpal tunnel from phone scrolling set in
This comment made me curious so I tested the two mice I use regularly.
My Logitech G502 tracks very poorly on glass and is basically unusable.
My MX Anywhere 2S lives up to its name and seems to track perfectly fine.
I use a mouse pad, it works pretty well.
I have a “magic trackpad” from apple on a side table to use when I’m watching or reading something and recline too much to reach the mouse.
It’s nice (and with some free driver I found can do multi touch on windows), but for some reason it had a battery (despite having a fixed usb cable) which pillowed up making it unusable until I literally ripped it off (damn thing had more glue than battery).
Obviously works fine without the battery, which I assume is just an attempt at extremely inefficient planned obsolescence, but I wouldn’t recommend it, too much of a fire hazard if you don’t notice the trap.
At least you know wired mice won’t blow your hand up, and I value that more than the convenience.
When I have to lower myself to the filthy gutter of having to use the mouse at all, I feel like an itchy scrotum in need of a lye bath.
One old tech thing I don’t miss.
I used to work in an office with shared desks. I remember one woman came in with a basin of soapy water and a toothbrush, and took the mouse ball out and washed it. Then she pried off every key on the keyboard and scrubbed them too. Under the keys was a thick layer of beard hair and crumbs. Boak.
Never washed the ball. I did clean out the runners inside though. They hid away dead skin grime and pet fur better than any keyboard ever will.
Edit: I give my work keyboard a tip and tap once a week or so and have been asked why I do it. I explained it’s basically a hygeine thing, explaining why, and was told it’s disgusting. Encouraged colleagues to do it and they were mortified with the mess left on their desks. It was like they just dealt with the consequences of opening up their car engine after neglecting to oil change for 150,000 miles.
WHO’S DISGUSTING NOW???
They can try take the high road, but I’ve seen how many icons are on their desktops, so I basically know how messy their bedroom floor is.
Rick: “Your boos mean nothing, I know what apps you use!”
I use an air compressor to clean out my personal keyboard. Good reminder to do it at work tomorrow for my work one, too.
These balls were so satisfying to handle.
Mine are too
Nah, if I handle yours like an oldschool mouseball, you get all screamy. Really ruins the mood.
You all are making me feel ancient.
Now let’s talk about losing the ball and having to fish it out from under the fridge.
I use a trackball and clean mine every few days. It just takes a quick swipe of the rollers though no soap or anything crazy.
I have a trackball. I still clean it once a week. I’ve never washed the ball itself though. Maybe roll it across my shirt. I just take a pencil eraser to the rollers in the ball cavity.
There’s no mouse I’d rather have. Being a Mac user, I mean, almost every mouse is better than Apple’s. I’m not even talking about the charging port on the bottom. Charge it at night when you’re not using it, it doesn’t matter. It’s just ugly and looks uncomfortable to use. Now the Magic Trackpad… yeah, I could get used to that. But I’d rather have my trackball when precision matters.
Being a Mac user, I mean, almost every mouse is better than Apple’s. I’m not even talking about the charging port on the bottom
fucking… “It just worksTM” my ass.
Ironically MS make some great peripherals. The Sculpt ergonomic keyboard is pretty good, and when I inevitably break some keys trying to clean them, I unpack old reliable Natural 4000 and clack away again.
peepShowErgonomicManagementKeyboard.jpg
Btw, I probably mentioned this elsewhere: MS Natural’s humongous alt keys, mapped to the main modifier cmd in Mac, are a revelation. I’m not having ctrl under the pathetic pinky finger in Linux or Windows ever again.
I’m not having ctrl under the pathetic pinky finger in Linux
in KDE :
Yeah, I’ve already set that up on my system — although Cinnamon doesn’t allow some more complex setups, seemingly just like KDE. Gonna have to look into xkb remapping.
Ironically Mac is again ahead here, because open-source Karabiner allows arbitrary mappings and different mappings per keyboard (e.g. built-in vs external ones).
although Cinnamon doesn’t allow some more complex setups, seemingly just like KDE.
No idea how to help…
“It just works” was always bullshit marketing drivel. Even long-time Mac users didn’t swear by it. No computer “just works.” They all have a learning curve. Most of them make dumb-ass decisions. I like Macs, but it’s not like Macs are perfect and PCs are complete dogshit. I use a Windows 11 machine at work and I enjoy working with it for the most part. (To be fair, Copilot is disabled by IT, so it’s not full fat Windows 11.) I do like my Mac more, but there are some things Windows machines do better. By the same token, yeah, it kind of does just work, but so does Windows. So does Linux. So does Android. Your computer/device doesn’t get brownie points for doing its fucking job. It gets brownie points for the things that make you miss it when you’re using another one. And they all have those.
thank you for your good reply.
Just stupid thoughts; years ago I’d have tried to talk about how shit OSX is and maybe stick to windows or move to linux. With your great post and the current OS landscape, I have no fucking idea what my opinion is anymore.
For people using open-source software, MacOS is not much worse than Linux. It’s FreeBSD under the hood with a solid GUI on top, very automateable. There are lots of open-source utils for tuning the GUI, just like in Linux one needs specific programs to do particular things with the UI. Iirc there’s even a tiling wm.
Moreover, Mac has some productivity software that’s way better than anything on Linux or Windows. Namely Alfred and Hammerspoon.
The way MacOS has been explained to me is “you pay for it to just work”, I.e. no random driver issues after an OS update or stuff breaking. I’ve never used it and I can’t stand Apple, but I understand why people who need it for work prefer it over Windows or Linux. Windows has been particularly bad with updates breaking the most basic shit and producing bizarre bugs, and I genuinely wish I didn’t have to use it for work. My Fedora has unironically been more stable and consistent than Windows.
I’m also a bit into UI design, so I have the questionable capability of seeing where each OS has effort put into its UI. When I first tried MacOS in a VM, I saw right away that it was made for people and not some abstract users. Apple’s designers actually know more than a little about design, while MS struggles with basic stuff like the principles of grouping. (How basic? Well you can make a good design in black and white with just these principles and nothing else.) Microsoft’s design paradigm since the nineties until Win10 was to cram as much stuff as possible onto the screen, with no regard to how people will have to use that.
And naturally, the control panel, the litmus test of an OS’ design, had ten different styles of windows in Windows 7. And two entirely different control panel designs in Win10.
With Linux, of course, it’s a toss as to whether any given environment has some design sense. KDE started as ‘Windows, but even more so’: they’ve managed to be even more busy with hundreds of options and dialogs. Gnome 2 unabashedly stole good stuff from MacOS, until they threw it all away in Gnome 3. Cinnamon still lacks some little details that make MacOS so damn good: e.g. the fact that you can adjust the volume in 1/4th increments in Mac by pressing alt-shift and volume up/down.
MacOS is actually great if you treat is as a desktop environment and nothing else. Buy a used Macbook Pro, don’t buy other Apple devices, don’t use the ‘Apple ecosystem’, just use the same open-source apps that you would in Linux or Windows, plus some more for tweaking the UI, and a couple paid apps that are better than alternatives. You get a rock-solid DE.
It comes down to what a person needs to do, what they may need to do, their comfort level with learning, what they’re used to, and any other requirements.
Average person I’m not putting on Linux of any flavor. But someone asks me for a special use-case (e.g. old laptop), or expresses interest in doing something beyond average user things (like some form of self-hosting) then I may suggest a Linux distro.
To be fair back in the early days of Mac vs Windows 3.X, “It just works” had a lot more relevance.
For the average user, it did just work more than Windows. Though I crashed Macs as much as I did Windows boxes back then.
I appreciate what Apple was trying to do, despite their approach. Finding anything in the UI beyond the basics was painful (intuitive my ass).
But after NT4 (and especially Win2k), that difference was gone.
