I have one of every device class under my desk, and on it. It’s a tangle and I figured I would share an aha moment… out of my frustration. It’s that “classic apple mouse” battery door that you just cannot open. The build of the mouse is incredible, the battery door is super rigid, you cannot bend it open, the battery compartment is designed to contain alkaline battery leaks (I rescued some old apple keyboards recently which also handled leaks well). The batteries can only go in one way, so it’s great for people with sight issues or in a hurry. This device is amazingly engineered, until you try open that door. It won’t budge! But today I managed to get the battery door open in one go. That’s because the technique is to use your fingernail to push the black plastic latch up and away and then hook your nail in between it and the door catch itself. I spent ages justifying why the door is the only flaw in the design. It’s taken me ages to work it out, you have to wedge your nail into the gap and pull, easy! I have been using rechargeable batteries with this mouse for ages, so I swap them out every month or so and I never worked it out until now. Yes my desk is one huge black mouse-mat, they are unfortunately also good lint traps as you can see.
My other late aha moment was using my Lenovo laptop to charge up and run tests on Android tablets. Problem is that you need to leave the screens unlocked, and dimmed. That still uses juice, so the tab slowly discharges over the course of 2-3 days and then I have to plug it into a dedicated charger for a while. I plug all my test phones into a hub, which fails to charge any tablet devices (apple tablets also won’t charge via a hub either,) so I don’t have to be plugging in and out all the time. Today I worked out that the ports that are on the inconvenient side of my laptop actually will charge my tablet. So now I have a wire trailing under my laptop and wondered, why it took me so long to work this out. I was just not frustrated enough to attempt the illogical. Made me wonder at my stupidity, but also at my rate of experimentation.
