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It always seems like a missed opportunity that trackballs don't detect when you twist the ball. It would be so natural for spinning a model in CAD or zooming.

The easiest approach would probably be to add a second optical sensor and do some math to calculate the twist rate.


This guy made exactly what you describe

https://youtu.be/u1v7TXViRi8


These have been made on and off since 1995 at the latest. They never work out even though you'd think they'd be super popular for 3d modelers at least. I first encountered one for SGI workstations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360 as one example.


A lot of people who haven't seen one are confuse it with a trackball, but SpaceMouse and its kin aren't trackballs, they're double cascaded joysticks on a fixed mount shaped like a ball.

The stump om the base works as a 2 axis tilting joystick, and the stem of the ball works like its own 2 axis XY sliding pad with extra push/pull plus twist axes. There's a wire through the stem of the knob to get the readings. Together they capture the whole 6 axis deflections for the knob.

Trackballs OTOH is just rubbing a mousepad rolled up to be a ball to operate a Magic Mouse while charging.


I love the SpaceOrb 360 and still have mine but there are no drivers for it anymore.


Twist scroll requires two sensors and is patented by Kensington.


Is it this one?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050184962A1/en

> [..] and a plurality of Sensors located in the capacity Surrounding the track ball for detecting pressure directions.

...

> Status Expired


Do you know until when?


Why does it require two sensors?


Mouse sensors are usually ~16x16 CMOS cameras that just return signed int X/Y movements. Shutter speed is goverened by both luminosity and polling rates. There's no raw pixel output, and even in sensors that have it, it's for focus adjustment only and not useful in realtime sensing. They're also crazy cheap.

Therefore the cheapest way to do ball twist is to just put two sensors and use the error as the twist amount. You could use a singular high resolution highspeed camera pointed at the ball instead, but that won't be the cheapest way to do it.


With only one you can't detect rotation around the axis that goes through the sensor, and for rotation close to that axis the resolution will be very poor.


Okay, sure, but that's a very narrow and specific angle though? Not sure I could deliberately rotate the ball in that direction even of I wanted to.

Especially given the limited use kensington uses rotation for (at least to my knowledge)


What about using 3 or 4 instead?


The Kensington SlimBlade scrolls when you rotate the trackball.


https://rotatrix.com/ Does pretty much that


This is true, unfortunately. I've have had to walk away from a client because their software-illiterate lawyer didn't want me to build with copyleft dependencies.

It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.


Rice stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements.

Race-inspired to look cool, but not actually functional. Picture putting one of those giant fake air intakes on the hood of your car.


Do you think "Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements" is the origin of "ricing" / "riced-out" or a backronym[1]?

Honest curiosity about language and language use.

In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym


> I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.

Any negative connotations "rice burner" once had was lost when the term shifted towards referring to cars instead of humans. But now re-recognizing that the enhancements are inspired by the East Asian race turns the connotations back to humans. Isn't that a regression?


Nah, I remember back then, it was definitely intended to be derogatory to the cars, to asians, and to people who like the cars.


Yes, the term originated as derogatory slang towards the Asian population in the early 1900s, and its use towards them became especially popular during the Korean War. There is no question there. However, as before, the term evolved away from people and towards cars. You cannot be derogatory towards an inanimate object. It doesn't have a mechanism to internalize feedback. In that evolution, the term lost its derogatory connotations. The historical usage, while a part of our past, is used no more.

Reintroducing this to be something about a population's race reinstates the derogatoriness. You can be derogatory towards humans. Minimizing the cosmetic enhancements to be being inspired by the East Asian race and not valuable human achievement brings us right back to the same place we were when Japanese cars started being introduced into the North American market, diminishing the human contribution. It is a regression.


Old enough to watch this cycle from racism, to community, to memes, to racism, and now back to community


I recently had the following conversation with Claude:

Me: how many P's are in the following text? [Pasted text]

Claude: There are 14 P's, all lowercase (no capital P's)

Me: how many in "strawberry"?

Claude: there are 3 R's in the word "strawberry".


I tried this with Gemini 3.6 Flash

Me:how many P's are in the following text? [Pasted text with 10 P's]

Gemini: There are 9 "P"s (1 uppercase P and 8 lowercase ps) in the provided text. [List of words except the one missed]

Me: How many in strawberry?

Gemini: Something went wrong (1096)


You can also try asking Gemini to create art that is "as close as possible without infringing" - I've had success with that.


according to https://x.com/Mith_/status/2041911606213537971

> The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.


Some battery recycling challenges are minimal volume at this point on the EV adoption curve, and LFP and sodium ion battery chemistries won’t be worth recycling for the materials alone (but still require recycling as ewaste).

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5847025/ev-battery-recy...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicl...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893945

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48013768



What is the standard non-renewable resource used for the recovery process? What materials are used up as catalysts to convert it back?


Sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate. Not catalysts but reagents. Most currently come from fossil fuel feedstock but that isn't essential.


Why would any of those compounds come from fossil fuels? Sulfur is mined, hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off, and sodium carbonate is made from salt and limestone


Because they can, because when refining petroleum products you get a lot of crap that's not carbohydrates


Sulfur is produced when the H2S is removed from petroleum and natural gas. Elemental sulfur is burned to produce Sulfuric acid using the Contact Process.


> hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off

Isn't it water with some oxygen added?


more importantly what is the cost versus getting it the non recyclable way


that way is 100% non-renewable, the important questions are the total long term costs


The QR code that you use to transfer TOTP secrets to a new phone, is static. It never changes (unless you add a new service) and it requires no verification.

Do with that information what you will.


If you can have a copy or deployment of your TOTP code accessible (or memorized) at any time then you've solved the same problem already!


This could also be a legitimate lifesaver in places like India where extreme heat is common but delivery and gig workers have to travel outdoors.


If Jujutsu had become popular a couple of years earlier, it might have had a chance to catch on. I worry that it missed the most critical training window for AI and we may be locked in on Git forever.


This is not true at all, a year ago it was difficult to force models to use jj consistently, but nowadays, (codex+chatgpt, at the very least) models very nicely obey jj workflows when guided in AGENTS.md . They have been training models to use it.

Edit: my original comment was related to how git worktrees are by default used in the implementation of these agent orchestration tools. I would rather prefer jj workspaces.


your current wallet lets you add labels or stickers to your cards.

classic Apple situation - look, this is super clean, intuitive software! but if you want a reasonable level of flexibility that you would expect elsewhere, you are SOL.


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