Tag Archives: howto

Black pointer: Never lose track of your mouse pointer again

I’ve tried several ways to keep track of my mouse pointer.  It’s kind of hard from time to time.  Adding more than one monitor does not help at all!

Recently a colleague gave me the tip to make the mouse pointer black… and larger. I tried this and found that the mouse pointer was much easier to spot.  No surprise there, really.  After all, white on white tends to become a bit hard to keep track of, tiny silhouette outline or not.

I was told how to do this in Windows (Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer, but that’s another story).

In Gnome (I’m running Ubuntu 8.10) you do it in the System > Preferences > Appearance dialog (see below).  In my version of Window’s there’s no settings under Appearance > Mouse.

Appearance Preferences

Next you click the “Customize” button:

Customize Theme

In the new dialog select the “Pointer”-tab and select the color of pointer you want.  In order to resize it, see the “size slider” below the list of pointers (there seems to be three distinct sizes to choose from).

Click “Close” once you’re done, and voila, you have a new and much easier to spot mouse pointer!

Badblocks

It took me some time to find out the equivalent of Window’s checkdisk/scandisk/chkdisk on Linux, but trust me, there are several.

For starters I am going to take a look at badblocks, a command that as the name implies, looks for bad blocks.

The basic format of badblocks are:

badblocks [options] device

If you have a fresh drive with no data or data that can be deleted on it you can do:

badblocks -s -w /dev/sdb

Note however, the -w command will erase all existing data on the drive so do not use it for drives with existing file systems on them. You cannot use -w on a mounted drive, unmount it first. The -s flag makes the command show a progress bar. This could come in handy when you are testing larger drives since even the fastest systems will take at least an hour to test an average sized drive (my 400GB took about 2 hours on a SATAII system).

If you want to test the drive without deleting data you can use the -n switch which will use non-destructive write-read mode, however, this switch can, for obvious reasons, not be combined with the -w switch.

badblocks -s -n /dev/sdb

Links: