2008-04-16
My secret mouse fear
One of my little computer terrors is that someday I won't be able to find good quality plain three button mice any more, because everyone will have stopped making them. In fact it may already be too late to get decent USB three button mice, which worries me; although I have a stash of PS/2 ones, I may someday have to migrate to a USB-only machine.
(Searching the web is basically no help in finding out, and since I have a reasonably large stash of suitable PS/2 mice I haven't had to go out into the computer store wilds to find out.)
What I would really like is something that I am not sure is even made: a mouse with three regular buttons on top and then a scroll wheel somewhere on the side. This would handily deal with my major objection to the scroll wheel, that it gets in the way of easy and fluid use of the middle mouse button.
The appeal of GNU tools
I admit that every so often the freakish superintelligence of the GNU
versions of programs has its appeal. Consider, say, units
:
You have: 7 feet + 2.5 inch You want: mm * 2197.1 / 0.00045514542
GNU date is another good one:
; date -d 'last sunday' Sun Apr 13 00:00:00 EDT 2008
Or even better:
; date -d 'last saturday -1 week' Sat Apr 5 00:00:00 EDT 2008
(Judging from the manpage, BSD date
may also have some freaky
superintelligent date math stuff, and judging from some experimentation,
GNU date is not all that superintelligent, or at least not that well
documented, since I couldn't see an obvious way to do something like
'the third Saturday in January 2008'. As an aside, the GNU date
documentation perfectly illustrates the downfall of the GNU's (text)info
documentation format.)
Also, I will admit that sometimes GNU is plain right about things. For
instance, I'm pretty convinced that the -h
option to df
, du
, and
ls
just is easier for people to read; I find myself usually using it
unless I am going to feed the output to something else.