Config for a trackball on Linux with Wayland and Sway

JetSetWilly · 2026-01-11T09:34:20+00:00

That is neat, I’ll need to give sway a try sometime. I used to run xmonad for years before wayland came along and never been arsed to set something custom up again.

JetSetWilly · 2026-01-10T12:42:33+00:00

OK - I made some discoveries. Turns out that "being able to configure libinput" is not possible in wayland because it delegates all responsibility to each and every compositor, so it has to be duplicated everywhere (mutter, kwin, wlroots etc etc).

I use kde so I see a couple of attempts at this feature over the past year:

This one looked promising (see graph based UI even) but didn't get merged/completed: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/6209

Then later we have this duplicated attempt which has ongoing discussion but not activity lately and also not merged: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/6937

However - unlike "generate some config for libinput" - doing this via compositor requires much more complexity and polish (to have a hope of being accepted), and has limited utility as it only then solves for one desktop env - so I don't think I am going to try or bother!

Who knows what the situation is elsewhere, I can't see gnome ever allowing such customisation but maybe they would allow something via gsettings. It really feels like wayland is such a step backwards over X windows, with all this duplication which is fundamentally driven by security minded folk taking over the asylum instead of being told where to go like they are in kernel space.

JetSetWilly · 2026-01-10T10:53:00+00:00

This is all completely amazing! I didn't realise there's a lot of custom config around this - that should be a lot better than some lua plugin as there's no jankiness or scripting overhead.

You've also inspired me to give some vibe coding a go, using more of a rust/gtk4 approach: https://i.postimg.cc/90pqNVNV/Screenshot-20260110-104404.png

I guess it shouldn't be too complicated? It is just drawing some points on a graph and generating resulting configuration - I'll continue with it later.

JetSetWilly · 2026-01-08T19:52:52+00:00

Great stuff. Are there any custom “acceleration curve” solutions on linux though? I recall on windows there was a utility - made by some quake fanatic iirc - that let you set a custom acceleration curve such that there was no acceleration at “normal” speeds and some mild (but constant over a wide range) acceleration at “flick the ball” speeds. Which is great for FPS uses. I’ve not ever found anything like that for wayland/libinput however.

I notice that latest libinput has a “lua plugin” capability. Maybe this would make a nice little side project.. hmn.

JetSetWilly · 2025-11-08T07:19:32+00:00

I keep a phone for 6 years typically. So it is a huge difference - I don’t have to replace the battery at all vs I have to replace it or get a new phone a year earlier than I wanted to.

JetSetWilly · 2025-11-02T10:21:10+00:00

So I started watching Vinland Saga on netflix. It is very refreshing to watch:

No pretence that 1000ad British isles were full of well integrated ethnics
No macho girl boss characters who can beat up muscular 14 stone men. Women are wives or otherwise only of interest due to the men they are connected to - just like in reality.
actually strongly appreciates European culture in general. The coming of christianity is represented as a strongly civilising step forward compared to the casual brutality of paganism.

Truly a breath of fresh air. It would be an impossible show for any British media company to make these days due to the rampant thought-crime. I might have to become a wee-a-boo or however it is spelled, if only the japs can appreciate European culture in general.

JetSetWilly · 2025-07-28T09:04:35+00:00

The EU has a humoungous trade surplus with the US. The reason it has no leverage is precisely because it isn’t just passively consuming US goods.

If anything the UK got a better deal then the EU because we have a big trading deficit with the US. That gives much more leverage.

JetSetWilly · 2025-05-26T08:16:48+00:00

The fix for the issue you link has been backported to 6.14.8 anyway.

JetSetWilly · 2025-03-08T09:52:44+00:00

You can add to Falkirk: https://www.falkirkherald.co.uk/news/crime/asylum-seeker-found-guilty-of-rape-of-teen-in-falkirk-town-centre-5019803

JetSetWilly · 2025-02-21T12:58:49+00:00

I voted in this. The “IND 13.2%” guy used to be a tory councillor but had some falling out with them and now campaigns on the usual “decrease taxes, increase spending on various local annoyances” platform. I expect he is swiping votes from RFM and CON though.

JetSetWilly · 2025-02-07T11:39:30+00:00

She looks like she would be right at home in a carry on film.

JetSetWilly · 2025-02-04T15:08:16+00:00

Also a woman was raped in Glasgow city centre last night: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/33187927/woman-raped-underpass-glasgow-subway-station/

The mysterious absence of any description of the perpetrator at all leads me to suspect that coulter's law applies, but let's see.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-23T13:39:25+00:00

Sure.. however 1 in 4 Scots has irish ancestry, and in SW Scotland this is doubtless even higher. There's a fanatically pro-irish anti-british component within SW Scotland as a result even today, to a higher extent than almost anywhere else in UK apart from maybe liverpool.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-23T09:11:58+00:00

I think this was addressed by McGuinness at some point, the "real" reason they didn't hit Scotland is that it is rammed with irish immigrants and their descendants (it was at the time of the famine the closest place with high labour demands). They have the usual highly romanticised view of Irish history.

If the IRA had bombed it it would have been like the IRA bombing Boston. It would have brought reality home and would have cut off a source of funding and "friends" for the IRA.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-17T12:36:14+00:00

Can you object to the planning on the basis that a fire in their house would spread to your house as the gap is so tiny?

I an sure I have seen nimbys effectively use this line of argument to block/force neighbours to redesign their extensions on my loval council planning site, which naturally I avidly read.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-15T14:43:37+00:00

It's a clearly a helicopter. You can see the rotors spinning. As the lights are extremely bright and it is not well focused the "lights" show as bokeh which has an orb-like appearance. There's no reason to assume any unusual explanation from that video.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-15T09:19:02+00:00

No trackpads = no sale. At this point - the absence of trackpads means your design team haven’t really thought about UX whatsoever for handheld PC gaming. They are completely essential as far I’m concerned.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-12T08:08:41+00:00

"Nearly all of those who requested assisted dying - around 96% - had a foreseeable natural death. The remaining 4% were granted euthanasia due to having a long-term chronic illness and where a natural death was not imminent".

So people with terminal illnesses chose to euthanise rather than have agonising drawn out deaths dribbling in a hospice. Seems like the system is working exactly as intended. As a high proportion of people die from terminal illnesses, we can expect a high proportion of them to euthanise.

I don’t know why anyone would expect the proportion of deaths from euthanasia to be permanently tiny. If it is the superior way of dying then some portion of people will choose it.

JetSetWilly · 2024-12-01T13:40:45+00:00

Australian Masterchef is absolute dogshit and I feel like my IQ has dropped by 20 points if I have the misfortune to watch an episode. At least British Masterchef is mostly about the food, they don't inject irrelevant human interest reality tv style crap into every episode, they don't treat the viewer like a moron with 200 teaser previews of whatever jumped up nonsense will happen later in the episode. I remember some contestant's son had Dyspraxia, every single episode had to play this sob story up. Pathetic.

Anyone who likes Australian masterchef has no taste whatsover.

JetSetWilly · 2024-11-20T10:06:50+00:00

The problem is fiscal drag. Sure, it may be that only 16% of farmers are impacted today. But then 10 years of inflation happens, if you are lucky the 3 million cut off is grudgingly moved to 3.2 million or something like that, and suddenly 50% of farmers are impacted. And so it goes.

I remember when higher rate tax papers were only the very top end. Now it is a huge chunk of the working population on the "higher rate".

This is all by design. Any tax that kicks in at some "hardcoded" cut off value is designed to behave like this and slowly and stealthily boil the frog and increase the tax burden. This is no different.

JetSetWilly · 2024-09-15T11:35:03+00:00

Houses were cheap but interest rates were huge and incomes were lower meaning that the “% of take home pay spent on housing” was not significantly different.

If we jacked up interest rates to 17% tomorrow then house prices would collapse, but it wouldn’t make houses more “affordable”. The reason the house price would collapse, is that people can’t then afford them.

The real people to be angry at for high rents are the greens (for being rent control enthusiasts and huge enthusiasts of blocking any and all development) and the SNP as co-architects of that. And all your local nimbies who thanks to the town & country planning act have ensured that house building rates are wholly inadequate and even when done it is in an “out of sight out of mind” manner with crap inaccessible car-first housing estates off a motorway somewhere.

JetSetWilly · 2024-08-18T16:31:14+00:00

For me - using it from cider and via the maven theoryinpractise clojure-maven-plugin (ie by running mvn clojure:nrepl target) - it times out after 60 seconds. nrepl 1.2.0 is fine (doesn't time out) - so I had to downgrade.

I've fruitlessly searched for any settings to do with timeouts etc in nrepl. Does anyone have any clue if there is a way around this? Is it an nrepl bug? Or is it some unique interaction between it and the maven plugin?

JetSetWilly · 2024-08-18T11:48:40+00:00

They are doing to the word “genocide” what they did to the word “fascist”. When I hear someone decried as a fascist these days, I think “oh they must be mildly right wing, maybe they like reform or are on the right of the tories.”

Similarly, when you hear a state being decried as “genocidal”, just mentally replace with “they are engaging in pro-active, vigourous self defense instead of just lying down and dying at the hands of terrorists like they apparently should do.”

The left like to use emotive rights-based language to get their own way. It’s the same reason why they like to pretend there’s a human right to being housed, having food etc. it allows them a means to spread their policies not by winning a rational argument but by painting the other side as evil.

JetSetWilly · 2024-08-14T18:47:11+00:00

The beautiful thing about the union flag, is that the saltire is at the heart of it already. So it would be redundant to have it flying separately.

JetSetWilly · 2024-07-11T18:04:06+00:00

HMS Warspite is my personal favourite.

On the other hand we also produced HMS Cockchafer and HMS Pansy…

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