Interesting. I couldn’t care less about being better at fixing mouse wheels, but I think I took away a more general lesson from this post, and I think this lesson is a valuable one.
If I were in your shoes, the thought to attempt to fix the mouse wheel wouldn’t have even occurred to me. It wouldn’t have been in my “things I might be able to fix” bucket.
Then if you prompted me to ask myself the question—“should I try to fix this?”—after busting the cache and re-evaluating my belief, I’d have arrived at the same conclusion: no. I’d have assumed that doing so would be too tricky and high effort.
In general, I tend to get intimidated by these sorts of things that require you to “open up the hood”. I tend to assume that doing so is going to be too messy. I’m a programmer and this applies to reading source code of libraries I’m using too. When I run into issues I’ll check the GitHub issues, but if that doesn’t prove fruitful, I usually give up.
But at least in the example of the mouse wheel, I would have been wrong.[1] And having a concrete, grounded example of being wrong about this general sort of thing is helpful. Moving forward, I’m going to try to be more open-minded. Spending a Yoda timer or two to brainstorm is probably a good approach in many situations.
I left it out in the post, but I’ve thought about this several times but always assumed the problem was something more complicated. OSX has weird mouse wheel behavior that’s hard to turn off[1], so I first assumed this was an extreme case of mouse wheel acceleration and I was turning it too slow. Experiments confirmed that spinning the wheel faster[2] fixed the problem, so mystery solved right?
As far as I know, the only way to fix this is by messing with the kernel, with software like SteerMouse, which I’m not allowed to install at my current job.
Interesting. I couldn’t care less about being better at fixing mouse wheels, but I think I took away a more general lesson from this post, and I think this lesson is a valuable one.
If I were in your shoes, the thought to attempt to fix the mouse wheel wouldn’t have even occurred to me. It wouldn’t have been in my “things I might be able to fix” bucket.
Then if you prompted me to ask myself the question—“should I try to fix this?”—after busting the cache and re-evaluating my belief, I’d have arrived at the same conclusion: no. I’d have assumed that doing so would be too tricky and high effort.
In general, I tend to get intimidated by these sorts of things that require you to “open up the hood”. I tend to assume that doing so is going to be too messy. I’m a programmer and this applies to reading source code of libraries I’m using too. When I run into issues I’ll check the GitHub issues, but if that doesn’t prove fruitful, I usually give up.
But at least in the example of the mouse wheel, I would have been wrong.[1] And having a concrete, grounded example of being wrong about this general sort of thing is helpful. Moving forward, I’m going to try to be more open-minded. Spending a Yoda timer or two to brainstorm is probably a good approach in many situations.
Well, I’m not sure if I would have reasoned about it as well and successfully as you did, but it’s at least plausible that I would have.
I left it out in the post, but I’ve thought about this several times but always assumed the problem was something more complicated. OSX has weird mouse wheel behavior that’s hard to turn off[1], so I first assumed this was an extreme case of mouse wheel acceleration and I was turning it too slow. Experiments confirmed that spinning the wheel faster[2] fixed the problem, so mystery solved right?
As far as I know, the only way to fix this is by messing with the kernel, with software like SteerMouse, which I’m not allowed to install at my current job.
Which incidentally requires a lot more force and increases the friction between the wheel and the rubber.