Wanted to change up the colours on the site, so now everything is blue. Added a nice jQuery effect for my face on the homepage... try it out! Much happier with how it looks now: the green wasn't all that pleasing and it all felt kind of washed out to me.

Here's a great way to find music from Muxtape.com. Say I am looking for Chicane's song ‘Offshore’, then I would search Google for something like this:

site:muxtape.com chicane offshore -amazon (link)

By using '-amazon' I avoid all of the outgoing links to Amazon.com and just get the Muxtapes that match my keywords.

I'm finding this is also a good way to find new music as it's likely if someone included one of your favourite songs they might have similar musical taste!

Do you have any Muxtape hacks?

I've been lucky enough to do some shopping recently and I thought I would highlight/discuss some of the things I've bought. Here's some of my loot:

First up, new shoes: I've been looking for a good pair of Nike Air Max 90s for a little while now. This is one of my favourite styles and this pair was just the right mix of value and color. They were the last pair at the Nike store on Robson St, which is lucky considering I have size 13 feet... total came to $107 with tax, not bad considering they often retail at $150.

Next is my new Holga 135. I'm almost done shooting a second roll of Ilford HP5 b&w film and am getting excited to develop. The camera itself is awesome; $40.50 for a camera with a hotshoe? Not bad at all. Super simple operation and it really forces you to think about what you're shooting. I'm trying to get back into film so this is the perfect starter. I also just signed up at the UBC PhotoSoc giving me access to chemicals and enlargers to do some printing.

I just ran out of space on my computer and external hard drive, so another terabyte should go a long way. I guess shooting RAW photos at ~13Mb/shot adds up pretty fast. The HDD itself is a Seagate Barracuda SATA2 to match my first 320Gb, just to be foolproof in case I plug them into an NAS, Raid 0 setup, or Mac Pro some day. Still waiting on the enclosure, which is a Vantec Nexstar 3 with USB2.0 and Firewire. It was important to get the Firewire cable this time as it's likely that both drives will be plugged in at the same time (leaving an extra USB port on my Macbook).

I also bought Helvetica, which is an great film on the famous font. My take away quote from the film is by Erik Spiekermann: when asked why Helvetica is so widely used he slowly answers, "Why is... bad taste ubiquitous." Perfect.

Some other items: some t-shirts at American Apparel ($15 each), a pair of shorts from American Eagle on sale ($30), a gigantic mixing bowl, a box cheese grater, and some Moo cards came in the mail.

Pretty happy with everything!

I love my Mighty Mouse but the scrollball gets dirty every so often. Today I got fed up with cleaning it from the outside and took it apart again. This is the second time I've done it, but the first time I did this was kind of scary. I didn't really know what I was getting into, it's $70 that I didn't want to spend at the time, and I would rather it just worked. However, after some googling, I found this website and off I went. Following are my steps for taking apart a Mighty Mouse. I've posted these with the intention of helping others in their own little spring cleaning project!

Tools I used to open up my Mighty Mouse.

Taking off the bottom rim. Use a twisting motion to separate the glue from each part.

Taking off the second bottom rim.

Removing the battery case.

Bottom pieces removed.

Prying off the outside shell.

Need to pry this post out of its slot and carefully disconnect the ribbons leading to the trackball and click sensors.

Top and bottom halves separated.

Removing the trackball from the top case with a small screwdriver.

Here's the trackball sensor all on its own.

Trackball holder taken off to expose the dirty bits.

Here are all the bits and pieces.

Putting it all back together again. Here I used the krazy glue on each point where the original glue was. Make sure you test out the mouse before you glue this last piece back in place.

And that's it! The longest part of this whole process is actually cleaning the rollers. Hopefully this helps someone in their own clean endeavors...!