Vintage Computer Festival; $3 Magic Mouse

Magic Mouse

At the SoCal Vintage Computer Festival, stumbled acrosss an OG Magic Mouse (the one that uses AA batteries) in a box marked $5. They gave it to me for $3 since it was untested. Got it home and tried to fire it up and no green light. Dead. Figured my $3 gamble didn’t pay off... But, being me, I futzed with it and, after testing the AAs and confirming they were good, kinda shoved them into the positive terminals and ... a flicker, then a steady flashing green light. Huzzah! It works fine, I’m using it as I type this. Pro tip: For $12, BetterTouchTool allows tap-to-click on the mouse, instead of requiring a physical click every time. Between that, and the built-in scrolling gestures (horizontal scroll to go back and forth between pages), I’m wondering why I never tried one of these earlier! (Probably because they’re like $80 and I’m forever a cheapskate.)

(Speaking of being a cheapskate: Everyone gripes about how the charging port is on the bottom of the mouse. The reason why is pretty simple. Apple didn’t intentionally place it there to “preserve lines of the design” or anything like that. This model shows what happened. Originally powered by AA batteries (as most(?) wireless mice were when it was released in 2009), when they switched to an integrated battery with a charging port (originally Lightning), they just dropped it in where the AAs had been. Quick, simple, easy, cheap modification. Why redesign the circuit board, the case molds, the manufacturing process, etc.? When they moved to USB C, it was again easiest, simplest, and cheapest, to just swap 1-for-1 and leave it in the same spot. This video walks through it. Any really, who cares? 2–3 minutes of charging (enough time to make a cup of coffee, let alone have a coffee break) will power the thing all day; charge it overnight and it’s good for weeks if not months. But I digress.)

Back to the festival ... Spent a few hours there, got to see everything on the floor and perused the consignment section. Learned how to properly solder at a workshop where we built a convention badge. Met Rick Wilkinson at the soldering lesson and followed him back to pick up an Austin Drive 2.0 DIY distortion pedal kit. (Oh, yeah, I started taking guitar lessons again.) Missed the exhibition of Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa, but it’s available online. (It’s also on YouTube, but if you rent it via Vimeo, apparently the filmmaker gets paid...) There are other presentations I want to watch that I wasn’t there for. FujiNet looks cool, but I didn’t have time to really get the demo. BlueSCSI had a presence (I think in connection with an Amiga group?), as did Rabbit Hole Computing, which had some interesting tech. I was intrigued by the PCI cards that support M.2 or SATA drives, and the CD-ROM emulator that actually supported audio out via the sound card pigtail. Neat stuff; if/when I get around to pulling my old PII/PIII systems out to see if anything still works, may set one up with solid state storage.