click'n and screaming

Damn those quirks! You know when you are typing or mousing and your thumb inadvertently touches the touch pad. The cursor veers off to another place and the text you are typing along with it. The solution, tape your thumb to your index finger!!
There is a setting on this PC that shuts the touch pad down when a PS/2 mouse is plugged in, what? this laptop has no PS/2 ports, it's USB.

Ran into another quirk, did some drawings in Inkscape on one computer, copied to jump drive, then used Inkscape on another computer to work the same file. The first PC was Linux with a 1920x1200 screen, the other was XP with 1024x768. Man the picture was scrambled and I had to sort it out. When I ungrouped it the text flew off into the margins!?! Strange strange.

Speaking of strange, my vintage Wacom Graphire 2 graphic tablet is rarely used. I can't get a handle in it. Ooh, you need a new one. Wait, it still works and I'm not that good with it. What's wrong with it? It's too small, like holding a pad of note paper. On the table it is too thick, on the lap it is too small. Not the drawing area, the outside of it. I found the lid of an old laptop with the LCD removed from it. I placed the little Wacom in the middle of it. Had to do some cutting to make it fit flat. Then I took foam board and filled in either side to the height of the surface of the tablet. Finally I covered the whole top with a sheet of thin plastic. The drawing area is still 3.5 x 5 but the surrounding area is now 8 x 13. I now have room to rest my hand on the surface and I can sweep across the surface not worrying about edges. Hey, a little swashbuckling goes a long way, you know.

Your in a room with a few people and you are trying to not be distracting. You turn on the laptop and the built-in speakers beeps, burps and sings. I took an old cutoff headphone plug, stick it in the jack during boot up. It is quiet. I think I'll sell it with a fob, quiet, cool, bling!!

Laptop is still running great, no video mishaps, solid, stable.
Mint is great, I am going to try the Gnome desktop to see if they improved it, but no rush. Ooh, last quirk, a Linux and Open Source Software user in a sea of XP and Win7. They expect MS, it doesn't compute that Linux and Open Source is viable and free too. There are cross-use issues but in the fold.........no worries.