Apple’s Mighty Mouse is a decent enough mouse, but it’s scroll-wheel nib thing gets gunked up all the time. My users are constantly complaining about the scroll wheel not working…it’ll scroll up but not down and vice versa. The fix is very simple, really:
Hold the Mighty Mouse upside down in your hand and take a piece of copy paper and rub it vigorously against the scroll nib a few times. You’ll probably have to press fairly hard. The gunk that’s blocking the scrolling should dislodge and the paper will collect some of the skin oil and grime that’s on the wheel.
This is nice! GlimmerBlocker is a way for Mac OS X Safari users to block ads without having to rely on a Safari add-on. So when Safari gets updated (which seems to be happening more and more frequently), you won’t need to wait for the add-on to be updated; GlimmerBlocker doesn’t care.
I don’t fanatically hate all web advertising, as some people seem to. What I hate are the obnoxious flashing, rotating, vibrating, sound-playing ads that seem to be taking over the web. They’ve even become a vector for infection on Windows PCs as people are “tricked” into downloading what they think is a free Anti-Virus 08 or 09 software. Not a week goes by when I don’t receive a call from one of my users asking if they really need to download the anti-virus software like they’re being told to by the scam ad. These are the kinds of things I’d love to be able to block for my users.
GlimmerBlocker will let me do this via its use of filters. The community has been posting different filters you can download and use. I’ll likely be writing one specially geared to the educational environment in which I work, and GlimmerBlocker will be making its way into the next round of maintenance installs for my faculty’s MacBooks.
I’m linking to this really just for the sake of coming back to it later. Typically, when I encounter a machine that I need admin access to and the user doesn’t know the password, I just reset the admin’s account password by booting off a Leopard Installer DVD, but here’s an way to add an account to the admin group, during Single-User-Mode boot, which achieves the same purpose.
iFixit takes apart the 17″ MacBook Pro Unibody. I can’t wait to get some of these new Unibody laptops so I can try my hand at taking one apart. I’m really liking the engineering, based on these iFixit photos. It actually looks quite trivial to replace the “non-replaceable” battery.
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This is nice! 
iFixit