Technology Blog – obscurus.org

I have recently bought a vertical mouse for work. This is to help combat a bit of RSI in my arm. Its great, make things much better. So good that I got another one for my other office. Then I hit a snag, the two mice are slightly different versions, one is a Evoluent 4 and the other a 3. This means that mouse buttons mapped differently to functions, and neither of them mapped how I wanted them to map. So… remapping mouse buttons.

First find out which button maps to which number. Easy with a little problem called ‘xev’.

xev | grep button

The command above pops up a window which you can click in, and then filters the output to the command line.

Next look at the output from xinput

xinput -list

This will tell you the ID number of the device you want to remap.

xinput –get-button-map Device_ID

Outputs the button map, you will get something like this:

> xinput –get-button-map 9
1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Then you just remap the buttons that wrong by switch them over, in my case 2 and 3.

xinput –set-button-map 9 1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Finally to make this happen every time you log in put the following in your ‘.bashrc. file in your home directory.

MOUSE_ID=`xinput list | grep -i Evoluent | awk -F= ‘{ print $2}’ | awk ‘{print $1}’`
xinput set-button-map $MOUSE_ID 1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The first line finds the ID of the device, just in case it changes. The second line maps the keys using the ID.

Easy!

I travel a lot with my job, and therefore I use a range of different wifi networks. These are often secured in different ways and to different standards. Or they aren’t secured at all. I recently suffered a fairly major credit card fraud, and I don’t really know how they got the details. This has made me think that I need to be able to secure my internet activity on my own terms at times.

I have therefore set up my own cloud hosted VPN that I am currently testing. This allows me to encrypt my internet traffic between a cloud server and my laptop even if the network isn’t secure. Once tested I will post up how I have done it. My plan is to have three private VPNs, one in the UK (my home server), one in the US on a Rackspace cloud server, and one in Iceland.

I had a minor brainwave to reduce the power consumption of my home server. Take out the GPU and use the on-board GPU. This was only recently made possible by the fact that I changed my monitors and the new ones have VGA connectors as well as HDMI and DVI. Something I had failed to connect with the possibility of reducing the home servers power consumption. The upshot is that I would be unlikely to recover the cost of upgrading it to newer parts for a long time as its power consumption is like to be pretty close to any upgraded kit.

Having issues with audio on my new computer. It has HDMI output and an on-board sound card. KDE decided that it would stop playing sound and grey out all the devices. Arrrgh! Sound is frequently a sticking point with Linux. I use Opensuse 12.3 and this is how I force KDE to take another look at the system config to get sound going again.

I re-named the following files:

• ~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrcmv
• ~/.kde4/cache-hostname/libphonon/hardwaredatabase

Renaming them makes KDE regenerate them, that got the devices back for me.

The control of the volume is still a bit flaky. it occasionally deafens me. 🙂