Hi, I'm Nikolay Bryskin. I debug things until they confess, then write it down.

Part one ended with a mouse plugged into one computer and working on another: netevent reading /dev/input/event8 on a little ARM board, a socket-activated stream over Tailscale, a uinput clone on the laptop. The cursor moves, the mouse never found out.

It left one thing behind. The G502 is wireless — it has a battery, it knows how full that battery is, and it tells anyone who asks. On the laptop, the power panel lists the internal battery, the USB-C sources, a Bluetooth keyboard. The one power source I actually hold in my hand is the only one that isn't there.

Today I found that I needed to connect a USB mouse to my laptop — and both USB-C ports were occupied, one by the monitor, one by power. Turns out it's not a huge deal on Linux if you have another PC nearby.

The reasonable fix is a €3 USB-C adapter. But the adapter is three days of shipping away, and the other PC — a little Rockchip ARM board that lives on my desk — was right there, with free USB-A ports and a network connection to my laptop. On Linux, "the mouse is plugged into the wrong computer" is not really a hardware problem. It's a routing problem.