Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer - my everyday fights with reality

Many of you probably saw my previous post about cleaning up Mighty Mouse here

After using my mouse for another 2 years I have found out that using this method may in fact become less and less effective (meaning I have to do it much more often that I used to). So I had to come up with something to solve this problem too. Now I’m using a modified method which is much more material involved :-)

I bought small bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol and I put one or two drops on the ball when mouse is still in upright position. then I use ‘Apple method’ of pushing down on the ball and turning it around to loosen up the dirt.

Then I continue with the above method using either white sheet of paper as before, or even better - clean microfiber cloth I got with my new pair of glasses recently. All that helps greatly to get the dirt off of the sensors.

After such treatment my mouse is working flawlessly for over a month now.

Recently I came to the point when free space on my virtual drive under VMWare was almost nonexistent. Usually it doesn’t bother me at all but I wanted to watch a movie from Netflix and all I got was information that Netflix’s player requires at least 1GB of hard drive to play anything at all.

Unfortunately disk size option in virtual machine settings was in my case grayed out so I couldn’t do it directly. After quick search in Google I have found that there is a command line tool already included that allows you to do so. All you have to do is run this little command:

cd /Applications /VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/
./diskTool -X 15Gb /VmWare/Windows\ XP.vmwarevm/Windows\ XP.vmdk

Be sure to pt the path to the actual vmdk file. After a minute or so I saw

Grow : 100% (10485760/10485760) done.

And all that left to do was to start the virtual machine and resize partition using partition resizing software of your choice.

Yesterday I was trying to install new Logitech webcam on Iza’s computer. During installation I was repeatedly getting this error:

“error 1327. Invalid drive: F:\”

during one of the installation software steps. Funny thing is that this particular computer does not have drive F: at all.

After some unsuccessful Google research I started to think (yes, that’s a skill I’m using sometime). One thing that came to my mind was DAEMON tools - the software used to create virtual CD/DVD drives to mount disk images without burning them. I opened it’s setting page and disabled it completely. Another try - and voila! Logitech webcam software no longer checked mystery drive F: and installed itself properly.

Note: Newer version of the procedure is here

I use it all the time. I’m taking it everywhere with me together with my laptop. Thanks to it’s wirelessness it’s easy and nice to handle. I like this mouse a lot. The only problem I have encounter is dirty roll. It slowly stops working - first in down direction. if you press it a little bit dipper it still works, but only for a moment. Then other directions stop working too. Apple’s provided method of cleaning usually works only for couple of minutes.

So out of desperation I started to look for methods to disassemble it. Unfortunately Apple decided to glue it together so you can’t disassemble it without breaking things. Although some say you can glue it back I don’t like this solution at all.

Some googling later I think I have found the solution. If Apple’s cleaning method doesn’t work for you anymore proceed to second step. Find a flat surface and lay a sheet of white printer paper on it. Then turn your mouse upside down and, for about 1-2 minutes, do this:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

After some time you should start seeing small dirt leaving your mouse and staying on the paper. Don’t expect too much - there isn’t much space inside the mouse for dirt to accumulate, yet it’s enough to prevent it from working. Anyway judging from amount of dirt my mouse left on paper it should work like new - and in fact it does!

Technorati Tags: wireless, mouse, Apple, cleaning, working

I’ve just received a phone call from a guy who claimed he is FBI agent. He said that my email server has been compromised over a year ago and used in crime activity. Then he started to ask some very detailed questions (like if it’s company server, if this server is used in government related activity, what type of software is on the server). Despite I’m quite knowledgeable person regarding my servers and I’d rather notice it being compromised, detailed nature of those question made me suspicious.

Why would he ask such detailed questions over the phone? And why is he asking about informations he could easily get by himself just from using Google and web browser? There is more - he reached me under the number which is not listed anywhere in connection with my domain - so he apparently didn’t even used whois service.

Considering all that I asked him why does he need all those informations? He replied that he’s trying to build a case and he wants to check if I was a victim (my server was compromised and used in some illegal activity without my knowledge) or if I was taking active part in this activity. Wait a minute - since when FBI agents call you in advance telling you that they are thinking about building case against you? So I kindly replied to him that I’d be more then glad to give him all those information in person as it’s apparently a big case. And here even bigger surprise was waiting for me - he said that Iowa is to far away from him and he hung up.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to get his name or town from which he’s calling. Whole call lasted less than 2 minutes and my thinking in English is still to slow to quickly react. But I suspect that all those questions were leading to some identity theft attempt.

The only thing that’s bugging me - how did he get this phone number?

Technorati Tags: phone call, FBI, agent, identity theft