Troubleshooting Mice

For the past few days, I have been having trouble with my mouse. When I would go to move the mouse down, to the left, or any combination of the two, it would inexplicably start mousing up and to the right. But not 100% of the time. Sometimes it would offer a glimmer of hope, work as it should.

Nothing I could do seemed to fix it - rebooting, re-pairing bluetooth connections, upgrading the kernel, PC firmware, any kind of troubleshooting I could think of - nothing would fix the mysterious mousing direction.

Turns out, I hadn't cleaned my trackball mouse (MX Ergo) for a while. A bit of cruft had fallen onto the laser and when I would start moving the trackball, the cruft would start moving too. Changing my input into whatever it had in mind.

A gentle reminder that sometimes the problem is often solved, or prevented, by the simplest solution. Cleaning cruft if you will.