Interesting: ngrams.googlelabs.com

I’ve been thinking about switching my Make magazine subscription from the ‘Premier’ paper+digital to digital only.  The digital edition of Make is available as a PDF, which is easily imported into iTunes as an eBook, which in turn is easily synced to the iPad.

In addition to the obvious advantages such as reduced cost, faster delivery and searchability, a complete Make back catalogue on the iPad takes up significantly less space than the paper version, an advantage will only increase over time.

To further illustrate the point, the above stack of paper copies of Make weigh about 9,400g (20.7 lbs) or about about 13 3G iPads (14 for the WiFi-only version).

As with many Apple products, the Mighty Mouse is an absoute nightmare to disassemble. Normally I wouldn’t care, but the Mighty Mouse has a major design flaw that results in a non-functional trackball after a relatively short period of normal use.

There is no shortage of how-to guides for cleaning a Mighty Mouse, though most involve a knife and what appears to be permanent damage to the mouse. I’ve tried several non-destructive cleaning methods with limited success. However, I recently found success with a method loosely based of of this one.

My method requires a small motorized car and a little  surface cleaner (409, Sugar Soap, etc.).  Put a small amount of cleaner on the ball, then use the drive wheel of the car to spin the ball in several different directions for a few minutes.  In my experience, after a thorough cleaning the mouse feels as good as new.  As always, do this at your own risk, unplug the mouse before cleaning, and don’t whine if the cleaner fries your mouse.