Help troubleshooting a mouse / repairing a mouse scroll wheel?


I have two wireless mice. One is a really good mouse that served me for years until it got too beat up, and now the scroll wheel doesn't work very well. The other is a newer HP mouse (specifically HP 280 Silent Wireless Mouse, product number 19u64AA) that is a bloody piece of shit and I hate it.

The HP mouse currently has two main issues with it. 1, it doesn't "sleep" or turn itself off after a period of inactivity. It just stays on, even if the usb dongle is disconnected, until the battery just dies on it. 2, it's clicking software/firmware had a fucking stroke or some shit. It only clicks on the active screen; so for example, if I have Firefox open and fullscreen, it will not click on the task bar on the bottom of my screen at all. It won't even register that it's hovering over something down there, it just refuses. That, and the middle click won't work. It's genuinely annoying, because the mouse used to work with no issues. I have no idea what caused this, and my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long, because this is fucking horse shit. I do not recommend this fucking mouse at all for this.

What's funny is, I tried both my previous mouse (the one with the broken scroll wheel), and my desktop's wired mouse, and both worked excellently. No issues at all, unable to replicate the issues experienced by my HP mouse. Crawling through the journalctl logs don't show anything wrong with any of the mice, at least not that my noob ass could tell, and the HP support page for the 280 doesn't have a fucking user manual for it. There just doesn't seem to be one at all, not one I can find at least.

Anyways, /rant. How can I see what's wrong with the 280, or fix what might be wrong with it (or factory reset the mouse, if that's a thing)? Alternatively, how can I fix my other mouse's scroll wheel (Victsing Wireless Mouse model PC106A my beloved)?

Edit: Forgot to mention, on Linux mint 22.1 cinnamon, on an HP laptop oddly enough (you would think HP accessories would work with HP products). if you need any information, journalctl, inxi, my fucking social security number, whatever, lmk.

This entry was edited (1 hour ago)
in reply to Cacktus

Wäre er mal dabei geblieben, dafür hätte ich deutlich mehr Respekt. Aber selbst der Autokram ist wahrscheinlich deutlich ethischer als die DVAG (Pyramidensystem das sich als Finanzdienstleister tarnt), für die u.a. Michael Schumacher, Mick Schumacher und Jürgen Klopp jahrelang Werbung gemacht haben.
This entry was edited (2 hours ago)

Microsoft and Asus announce two Xbox Ally handhelds with new Xbox full-screen experience


in reply to FiveMacs

I mean conservative estimates have over 20 million people using game pass and the steam deck is getting long in the tooth technology wise - valve has also made it very clear there are no plans to release a new one any time soon, if ever.

Also, Ilove my steam deck so much, but it is not the most user-friendly for newbies sometimes. You have to be comfortable troubleshooting occasionally, especially if you ever plan on using desktop mode. Which is not required of course, but you are leaving a lot of the appeal of the device in the first place on the table if you don’t use that ever.

I fucking hate Microsoft, I am over the Xbox ecosystem, but ultimately this will be a very pick up and play device. It will likely sell at least half decently (likely underperform their estimates as always). I think anybody saying it’s doomed to fail however is honestly not up to date on the current state of gaming.

If I had to ignorantly shoot from the hip, I would say they will probably sell ~500,000-1mill units

This entry was edited (2 hours ago)
in reply to toomanypancakes

I do not for the life of me understand why people do this.
Shoes: go great with socks and cold weather
Thongs & sandles: go great without socks and warmer weather

The avantages of thongs/sandles is that they have airflow and are easy to get on & off, wearing socks with them both hampers airflow and also are fully exposed to getting wet or dirty.
Do you also wear a sweater over your bathers? A beanie over a sun visor? Breifs with your assless chaps?

Need help implementing ActivityPub - getting inconsistent results across platforms


My friend is working on adding ActivityPub support to his blog platform (BDServer) so people can follow/comment from Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.

Current status: Lemmy and Misskey can find and follow his account (@blenderdumbass@blenderdumbass.org), but Mastodon can't find it at all, even though he sees proper ActivityPub requests hitting his server.

The technical details are pretty gnarly - RSA signature verification, HTTP header recreation, multi-threading issues. He wrote up the full journey here: Please Help Me With Activity Pub

If anyone has ActivityPub experience or wants to take a look at the code (Python), we have a Matrix room for BDServer development. Any insights on why different platforms behave differently would be super helpful.

matrix.to/#/#bdserver:tchncs.d…

Source code: ActivityPub.py

in reply to Tony Bark

This only really works for people who have hardware whose fingerprint readers are supported by upstream fprintd; would be interesting if they (or another distro; haven't seen anybody implement this yet) add a "just works" option for installing and setting up e.g. libfprint-tod-vfs0090 or python-validity (which I use on two of my machines actually), similar to how some distros (Mint included I believe, but haven't dealt with it in a while) give you an option for installing Nvidia proprietary drivers (or just make it work out of the box).

However these drivers are extremely sketch at times so... I guess there's some good out of it not being preconfigured for people (because you have to look into it yourself and realize just how terrifying they are, both security and stability wise, python-validity especially)...

(though now I'm on NixOS where I have it pretty much "just work" through not that much effort, at least not as much as on Arch, and definitely not as much as on Mint which was painful because PPA fuckery)

in reply to Tony Bark

Fingerprint sensors have been an interesting hurdle for Linux distros. Not one I necessarily would have anticipated either. The biggest question seems to come down to their security as well, given that there have been exposed flaws in the design of biometric hardware that tries to generalize its compatibility.

Microsoft has defined SDCP as a strong standard for TPM/Windows, but there isn't an equivalent for Linux. Match on chip sensors have made things a bit easier, but there isn't a standard way to communicate the validated authentication to the OS, usually relying on TLS.

This entry was edited (2 hours ago)

What editor or IDE do you use and why?


Now I'm wondering who uses what development tools. I mostly use Qt Creator myself - I chose it because of its good integration with C++ and Qt projects, and I'm just used to it. On Linux I use Qt Creator, and on Windows I use Visual Studio.
I wonder what others use? VSCode, Vim, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDE, Emacs, Sublime or something more rare?
- Why did you decide to use them specifically?
- What do you like or annoy you about it?
- How usable is it in real work?