ghosty hand

this is very strange.. the mouse cursor on this computer (not my machine, thankfully, but the computer center's) has a tendency to move of its own accord. and the mouse isn't moving and i'm doing nothing to the arrow keys, so i'm a tad befuddled. i was reading a writeup and - there! - out of the corner of my eye i could see the cursor slowly moving upward, changing from a hand to an arrow as it passed over all the links in the epicenter nodelet.

not only that, but it's nearly impossible to click it once. it always clicks twice, meaning that i lose half of all my work email due to the fact that the new email pops up in the same window and the mouse is still on the delete button when it clicks again. and sometimes when i scroll around with the arrow keys, moving the cursor cursor in a text window, the mouse cursor zooms around the screen, as well. which it ought not to be doing.

creepy shit.

On powerbooks, at least, it is seems to be caused by two different phenomena:

• a relationship between the internal humidity of the layers that comprise the pad.
• what your machine was thinking about when it last went into hibernation.

For the first, Apple once released a different patch for the recognition of the action of the pad (phew), what it did was take a more grid like reading, average the values to get the point of the finger, and then use this. This slowed things down.

In the second, throw the machine back into hibernation, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on and it should go away.