nerd.cx

I recently deleted my Facebook profile. I think I updated my status twice in three years, and made little or no effort to solicit friends, but I did read the front page, and sent an occasional message. The overt service was moderately neat, and I liked being able to see what others where doing, if they decided to post. That said, the continued erosion of privacy settings, and the ultimate fact that I was Facebook’s product – me and my relationships are what they are selling – was finally enough to me to get out.

Dana Boyd’s recent post brings up a few good points, but one that particularly resonates is that Facebook’s interface did not make it clear what you are giving away by using the site.

I think that they way to address this is to have a tabbed screen preview of your profile and activities, where each tab is a sharing constellation – 3rd party API users, friends, friends-of-friends, everyone – and you could tune your profile by excluding classes of information to those constellations, and see who comprises those groups at the same time. You could click on the friends-of-friends tab and see, perhaps to your horror, what you are sharing with your mom’s coworkers, and who they are in a neat, sortable list.

I would still be a Facebook user if I could click on the API tab and turn it off, click on the Everyone tab and turn off everything but my name and profile picture, etc. But I can’t and because I can’t see what I’m sharing, Facebook seems to think I don’t care, and they’re wrong.

Well, something in the behaviour of X changed again after an update, and now in response to the previous code, xinput set-int-prop '"Logitech USB Trackball"' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 8, I get this error: unable to find device "Logitech USB Trackball".

So I go a-hunting in man xinput and find that, if the name of the device has changed, I will find it by using xinput list, which give me this:

? Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
?   ? Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
?   ? Logitech USB Trackball                  	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]
?   ? Macintosh mouse button emulation        	id=10	[slave  pointer  (2)]
? Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ? Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ? Power Button                            	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ? Power Button                            	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ? AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=9	[slave  keyboard (3)]

It looks to me like it’s still called a “Logitech USB Trackball”. Long story short, I now have to identify this by id code, or drop the extra quotes. For posterity, here are the commands that work:

xinput set-int-prop 8 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 8
xinput set-int-prop 8 'Evdev Wheel Emulation' 8 1

or

xinput set-int-prop 'Logitech USB Trackball' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 8
xinput set-int-prop 'Logitech USB Trackball' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 1

Yes, these changes are a pain in the ass.

As near as I can tell, some update or tweak in the way X works has invalidated the configuration of my mouse via hal. This is definitely getting tiring. I have had to work around it by putting this in my .xinitrc:

xinput set-int-prop '"Logitech USB Trackball"' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 8
xinput set-int-prop '"Logitech USB Trackball"' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation' 8 1

If it starts to work differently, I’ll update, again.