Stupid X Tricks

Buried in this Penguin Pete Post and Comments is a trick that I'd never seen before. It could be extremely helpful, albeit tedious to use, if your mouse suddenly scurries off or is otherwise inoperable, and it works in any setup running X:

• Do a 3-figured salute using Ctrl-Alt-Numlock, (in Gnome and KDE, it's Ctrl-Shift-Numlock)
• Press one of the arrow keys on the keypad
• The mouse cursor will move on the screen. A bit of experimenting shows that the "5" key is button 1, and 1-3-7-9 move the cursor diagonally. (OK, I looked here. But the diagram is almost unreadable, and I probably would have hit on it eventually.)
• Unplug mouse, free up USB port. (Well, maybe not.)
• Apparently you can also do this with that Microsoft product, though not in the same way.
• Apple? Don't know.

You stick around now it may show

Forty years ago, on this very day, the Beatles shot the cover picture for Abbey Road.

The crosswalk is still there. A few years ago somebody at the Abbey Road Studio had the bright idea of pointing a web cam at:

http://www.abbeyroad.co.uk/visit/

Found via the New York Times newsfeed.

(Hey, you got a better lyric for the title, add it to the comments.)