My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right | Hacker News Reader

My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

theregister.com

85 pointsCHB040308548242 comments

In the architects defence, the precursor to using a mouse for drafting was to use a digitizer. This had a fixed area which was the drafting area, plus a customisable arrangement of 'buttons' around it (usually in the form of a laminated sheet stick into the digitizer board) which was the interface.

You could absolutely pick up the digitizer mouse and put it down into a different location on screen. It took me a bit of time to get used to drafting with a mouse after using a digitizer. It was so much less intuitive, so much less accurate, and didn't allow you to build muscle memory.

I remember my brother once (mid nineties) had a graphics tablet that came with a pen (corded of course) and a "mouse". But the mouse only worked on the tablet and had clear area with a crosshair. Is that the same thing? (Unfortunately I can't find a picture)

You reminded me of the Kurta IS/One I had around that time. Here's a picture of the puck:

https://www.recycledgoods.com/kurta-puck-puck-for-is-one-12x...

And yes, that's the sort of thing they are talking about.

(Edit: Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm beginning to recall that mine had a cordless puck. It looked exactly like this one, without the cord, and had silver-gray conductive paint down each side so that it would turn on when you grabbed it.)

The one i used was something like this.

https://cache.getlazarus.org/images/autocad.jpg

> Instead, the problem was that the architect was unaware that it was possible to pick up a mouse and relocate it without the pointer moving from its current position.

I am an elementary school teacher, and my students also don't realize this! It can be surprisingly difficult to explain to the younger ones. I sometimes have to put my hand over theirs on the mouse and demonstrate the motion.

If you've grown up using touchscreens (absolute position), then a mouse or a trackpad (relative velocity) could be a bit counterintuitive.

I suspect that’s also why the default for scrolling on computers is now the inverse of what it’s ever been. The default is that you’re grabbing the document and pulling it up to scroll down whereas those of us who grew up before smart phones find it way more logical to scroll the wheel down to scroll down.

Basically moving the document (touchscreen) vs moving the viewport (pre-touchscreen).

I have to change the default on every machine I use, I hate how inverted scrolling is becoming the normal scrolling direction, and normal scrolling is being thought of as inverted. Heh.

That's just an Apple thing, the scroll direction is still the same on normal computers.

Not in my experience. Windows also sets it wrong by default, I can’t remember about Ubuntu with the default DE but I think it also sets it wrong if you’re using a trackpad.

IIRC it was also backwards (compared to a scrollwheel) when I installed linux and kde on my laptop but I'm going to boot it and check. Hm... the value in the config claims it is the default so I'm not sure anymore.

Yep ... To the point where we had first year university students (20yo-ish), who never used a laptop or desktop pc before.

We really took some things for granted. These things usually need to be taught from childhood to build intuition because no one would really be able to teach them all of these later, even themselves.

I’m surprised your kids aren’t more curious about the mouse. I remember being in school during the trackball/optical mouse transmission. There was no question how the mouse worked for us, because we’d do things with it like stealing the schools trackballs to play with or staring directly into the optical laser, in either case learning everything about the mouse. Maybe kids aren’t so curious with their electronics these days.

That is very surprising, since I thought younger kids would be more likely to play around and figure out themselves that the mouse can't move the cursor unless it's flat against a surface.

I think some of them might recognize this (that the cursor only moves if the mouse is on a surface), but figuring out how to use it to recenter your mouse in space is a bit of a logic leap.

You’d think you’d learn that within one of the first times you used the mouse by accidentally doing it. Then again the OP is about a professional architect failing to realize this…

Hardest to diagnose phone support I had to deal with was an elderly relative in the DOS days trying to find another lost file....

"type in 'dir \documents' and press Enter. What comes up?".

"Nothing".

"Nothing at all?"

"Nothing happens".

After trying many variations of this, it eventually became apparent that he was pressing the Space Bar instead of the Enter key.

This article made me conscious of my use of the mouse: I realize that I move it only with a ~3cm square, which allows to reach all corners of the screen by only moving my fingers, while the base of my palm stays "locked" to the desk. When using multiple screens, the mouse does some quick hops to reach them, but almost never leaves that square.

This requires configuring the mouse to have sufficient "speed". I've never had any musculoskeletal disorder, probably thanks to making such small moves with my hand and staying relaxed.

There’s people who use the mouse like this even in pro gaming. Then again thats where you see the biggest spectrum of ergonomics. Some people set the sensitivity so low they throw the mouse with the entire arm. I’ve even seen someone set the keyboard on the shoulder and wrap their left hand onto WASD like they are carrying a 2x4 like that.

I have found that my mouse usage also "evolved" to a similar efficiency. However this really requires a modern high DPI mouse, as I do intermittently use an ancient (1992) system with an equally ancient ball mouse, which can require a really massive "mileage" to do anything outside of native OS software.

I remember mid-90s it was typical for a home computer to come with a prominent tutorial on mouse usage. There was definitely one for MacOS 7, while I don't recall if there was an official Microsoft tutorial for 90s Windows or just ones provided by OEMs.

Solitaire was allegedly used to teach people about drag-and-drop with the mouse:

> Microsoft intended Solitaire "to soothe people intimidated by the operating system," and at a time where many users were still unfamiliar with graphical user interfaces, it proved useful in familiarizing them with the use of a mouse, such as the drag-and-drop technique required for moving cards.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire

> I remember mid-90s it was typical for a home computer to come with a prominent tutorial on mouse usage. There was definitely one for MacOS 7, while I don't recall if there was an official Microsoft tutorial for 90s Windows or just ones provided by OEMs.

There was definitely one in Windows 3.1 as well, though I don't believe it made it to 95. I've often heard that Solitaire and Minesweeper were also intended to effectively be mouse tutorials where people learned by doing while playing the game.

I remember in the late 80s being at the campus computer lab and telling someone to use the mouse to move the cursor, so she lifted the mouse up and pointed it where she wanted the cursor to go. Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but awfully close.

This was necessary with the Sun optical mouse pads when they shifted at an angle. You'd have to lift and nudge the pad back to get it orthogonal again.

My TV remote has a built in microphone. I feel like Scotty every single time I use that feature.

And your FBI agent laughs everytime you do the voice for them.

That'd be the AIVD over here, not the FBI, and I'm fairly sure they wouldn't need to bug my remote control if they wanted to listen in.

My grandma did the same in the 2000s. It was her first time seeing the family computer, and she picked up the mouse and placed it against the screen, trying to focus the login field for our Windows machine.

I once had an elderly student in a similar situation. His solution was to lift the mouse, move the mouse mat up then move the mouse down again. It was painful to watch.

reminds me of how many users i've saved from headaches and eye strain by changing their CRT refresh rate from the default 60Hz to 75Hz in windows 98 or ME :)

Though taking care to make sure the monitor was happy at that rate, or you'd make things worse. Sometimes if was a choice of 800x600@75 OK, 1024x768@60 OK, or 1024*768@75 with a constant high-pitch whine and occasional extra flicker.

Or setting LCDs to native resolution, adjusting DPI if necessary.

same with turing off motion interpolation on any tv i can

My parents claim that they can’t tell when it’s on. But then again, they also enabled the setting that would stretch any letterboxed content to fill the whole screen…

Our parents grew up watching a shoebox sized screen you could hear turn on from the yard outside. They can tolerate a lot of things that would send newer generations up a wall.

their generation was also told that getting a “big screen TV” was a status symbol, so picture size (not quality) is the only/primary metric

oh, that thing that makes every movie look like a soap opera?

yes, and generally calibrating them from in-store settings of everything turned up to 11

This is a great throwback reminder of all the dirty mice I’ve cleaned. Having all that lint unevenly stuck to the rollers made the tracking of the mouse uneven. I hated it so much my default behaviour when sitting down at a computer was to start with cleaning the mouse. That usually came with a puzzled look from the owner.

This reminds me of the case of the 500 mile email.

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

He had moved the mouse further and further on his desk to the point at which it was ascending the wall behind it

This makes me a little doubtful. He would've had to pick up the mouse to turn it 90 degrees to move it parallel to the wall, at which point he would've noticed the mouse would move without the pointer moving?

In those days, many mouses came with, besides drivers, a somewhat game-like tutorial program that taught people the basics of how to use them.

Having survived through this same era, I can assure you that shenanigans like this were the bread and butter of tech support.

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