Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 June 27

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June 27

What causes computer mouse buttons to have difficulty holding?

Here's what I mean: On some occasions, I may accidentally open two new tabs at once instead of just one, and when I want to close a tab, I would also sometimes end up accidentally closing the tab next to it, so it seems that some single clicks are being registered as double clicks. But when I hold the left mouse button on the scroll bar, I can observe the scroll bar flickering, so the problem is that it doesn't always hold when I want/need it to. A consistently working solution is to just click and hold the button harder than I usually would, but it would be a headache to do that all the time. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 17:36, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

I've experienced that; it's often caused by dirt. Dirt may interfere with the "click", but may also cause the button to stick as well, so it's kind of a double whammy. I'd start by trying to clean out the area between the button actuator and the body of the mouse, but it can be tricky to get to. Matt Deres (talk) 21:19, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

And another solution is to buy a new mouse. A $5 mouse can easily save you from a lot of wasted time due to accidents. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Assuming that you use MS-Windows, then Autohotkey can debounce mouse buttons. This merges two (or more clicks) within a few milliseconds into once click. https://superuser.com/questions/207731/configure-debounce-time-in-windows-for-mouse has a discussion of scripts. LongHairedFop (talk) 18:34, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Non-random PINs

I use meeting rooms like Zoom and Google Meets many times per day and I've noticed that the ubiquitous PINs and meeting room numbers that you have to enter don't seem to be random; there's duplicated numbers, short sequences, etc. Like, it's not unusual to have PINs like 987110234, 887734349, etc. Am I just projecting patterns onto randomness or is this a deliberate attempt to make the numbers easier to remember/transcribe? If it's the latter, how is it done? Matt Deres (talk) 21:25, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

It might simply be Apophenia. Random numbers often contain short "patterns" that the brain is good at picking out. Alien878 (talk) 06:35, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I designed a measure how striking a pattern is (duplication, increasing/decreasing sequence) which assigns a score of 3 to each of the two numbers above. Here are some numbers with their scores:

192768504: 0

981146961: 1

381176022: 2

425240001: 3

759822211: 4

321336669: 5

911144482: 6

311833332: 7

666678836: 8

893444449: 9

In a run of one million randomly selected nine-digit numbers, 9.6% had a score of at least 3, while 3.4% scored 4 or higher.  --Lambiam 19:28, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. So, I guess the question becomes whether the various PINs and meeting room numbers, etc. used by online conferencing sites get 3's significantly more often than ~10% of the time. That'll be harder to know, but I at least have a baseline to consider. I appreciate the effort! Matt Deres (talk) 14:39, 29 June 2023 (UTC)