Give permission so you don’t need forgiveness later

When you start a meeting, you are often asked to give permission for the software to use your video and your audio. Some people get annoyed at this, but you need to know that this is feature, not a bug. You really do not want to grant permanent permission to any entity to have access to your video and audio.

Now that I think about it, you should probably be covering your camera with a Post-It Note between uses. But don’t forget to remove it when it is time to use it.

Massive muting avoids mutiny

The single biggest problem with multi-person on line conferencing is that people have no idea what sorts of noises they are making, and transmitting sometimes way too efficiently, over the microphone. Gentle tapping on the keyboard becomes pounding like the proverbial feet of the Russian Army. Moving something around on your desk can sound like the Concord take off. That one last time. And, most annoyingly, consider the times you turn your attention to the person in your room — your spouse, your kid, even your pet — and have a lengthy conversation with them about how you are out of toilet paper, or whether or not that last cookie is yours, or whatever. The entire group can hear you, mainly you, they stop, and they listen, and they wait and figuratively tap their feet. Because you forgot about the meeting and so you forgot to mute your mic.

A partial solution to this is to always have your mute on, until you need to speak (for more guidance see below). But then, remember to turn your mute back on when you do want to speak. Else, you’ll be yammering on and on and others will be interrupting you and acting like you are not even there and totally ignoring you! Then by the time you realize your mic was off the whole time, the conversation has moved on to the next inane thing. A YouTube video of that happening could be funny, though.

If you are running a meeting, pre-mute everyone, and remind them about their mic and what kinds of noises they make, unknowingly. Then, when someone joins the meeting late, take a moment to remind them as well (but see below for more information on that). Also, make sure to tell them how to unmute themselves. I had a recent meeting where one of the participants, a Zoom first timer, sent me an email asking to be unmuted near the end so he could add his two cents.

Consider getting an external microphone and using headphones. A good set of earbuds with a microphone, or if you like the DJ look, must go all the way and get a set of YouTuber headphones. Generally speaking, using headphones or earbuds will reduce the potential for feedback and other bad noises.*

You’re not going to like the way you look

I have a collection of screenshots of people Zooming that is totally hysterical but that I can’t show you our I’d lose friends and relatives. Just how many nose hairs does Aunt Betty have? I didn’t realize that Emanuel’s forehead was so interesting, but good thing it is because that is all I can see of him. My colleague Jane in Indiana is a demigod, I can tell because of the huge halo surround her body. Or is that just the giant window with the sun blaring through it in front of which she is sitting? I had no idea Ahmed’s face was so freaking big!

Lighting should be shining on you from your front, not from behind you. You want your camera positioned at your eye level or slightly above, pointing at your face, not some other thing in the room. Not just the top of your head. You don’t want the camera shooting up towards you with your head bent down looking at it. Just do that and look at yourself. See the quadruple chin? That is because your head has sunk into your neck because your laptop is on your lap, your screen pointing up at a steep angle so your built-in camera can get your face, but you are looking down your nose (nice nose hairs, by the way). Just stop that.

Sit in a chair. Have your laptop on a desk or table in front of you, probably on a book or two so that the camera is eye to eye with you. Make sure there is a gap between the top of your head and the top of the visible image of you in the software, and make sure your shoulders are visible, at least. Make sure the background is dark, foreground is light, and that what can be seen in the background is not something you don’t want people to see. Or maybe it is something funny or apropos, just not something that ruins either the image or your reputation.

Take a shower, comb your hear, wear a clean shirt. And, just in case you have to stand up for a moment, wear pants. Please.

Consider getting a separate free-standing camera (a web cam) that can be placed somewhere other than on the front of your laptop. You want a small tripod perhaps like this or similar. I suggest a Logitech Webcam, but DON’T BUY IT NOW. With everyone using Zoom all at once, webcams are the new toilet paper. They are sold out, but you can get a $50 one for $300 if you want. Just wait on that, but later consider it.

What did you say, Private? It wasn’t private!

In Zoom, and this may be true in other software, there is a chat function that includes a “private” chat that is person to person. The point of this feature is to allow you to have a side-bar conversation with someone else and not distract the larger group. The point of this feature is NOT to have an actual private chat. It turns out anyone can see this private chat of yours, and this is a feature, not a bug. If anyone clicks on “save” in the chat box, both the “To everyone” conversation and the private conversations are now saved, and visible in that saved document. This is great for keeping meeting minutes. Or, blackmailing your friends and co-workers.

You shouldn’t be saying anything privately that you can’t say publicly anyway, but especially using the Zoom “private” chat.

Be like a Boyscout, but in a good way

Before using any meeting software, be prepared. Have a pre-meeting, and try to get everyone to join in. Maybe two meetings. And don’t expect your first meeting to go well, or to give everyone a fair chance to participate.

I have an analogy. For the longest time, only a few people knew how to drive, or ever wanted or needed to drive. Then, one day, everybody had to drive, so everybody got a car and a learners permit more or less on the same day. Chaos. There are some of us who have been using on line conferencing software on a regular basis, for years. To the rest of you: Welcome to our world!

Get a wing-person, or be a wing-person

For larger, or more complex, or more important meetings I recommend a two-leader approach. One person (in your organization this can be the secretary or communications committee chief, perhaps, whoever takes minutes) initiates the Zoom meeting (meaning, does the invites, sets it up, and acts as “host”). A second person chairs the meeting. The host is in charge of making sure that participants’ names are showing (if someone calls in, that has to be fixed by replacing their phone number with their name), and that everyone is muted, and that people are reminded to unmute and remute. The host force-mutes or throws off the meeting any participate who, probably through no fault of their own, is disrupting the meeting. Yes, folks, if suddenly you are talking to your spouse about the day’s plans and can’t manage to mute yourself, you should be bounced off the meeting, get an email from the host telling you why and welcoming you back.

There is another thing I think the people running the meeting can do, but I’ve not done this, so I can’t advise in detail. In Zoom there is a lobby, or waiting room that you can force people to wait in before being allowed into the meeting. It is very common for people to show up at a meeting late. They should be forced to wait in the meeting room until they have been given the guidelines and norms for the meeting. Otherwise you’ll have 80% of the participants doing everything right, and a too-large number (which is 1 or more) of participants talking to their dog and writing their thesis on a loud keyboard as they pretend to be in the meeting. Or sending scurrilous private notes to others. Or whatever.

Norms and Guidelines

By now this should be obvious, but in case not: At the beginning of each meeting, take a minute to go over a few norms and guidelines. Like, how to get permission to speak, if that is necessary, the muting rules, etc. Ideally, a five or six bullet point text file can be on hand and transmitted along with the meeting invite, and then also put on the chat box. But you will have to tell people that the chat box exists and how to get it. And, much of this can be done in the waiting room.

I hope this helps you, and I hope you add in the comments your own tips and tricks.

What is a regular expression? We can talk about that in detail some other time. Briefly, it is a string of symbols that is designed to match a specified set of symbols, or a range of a set of symbols, in a larger body or stream of text. For example, if you pass a stream of information (say, all your emails) through a filter with the regular expression:

‘\d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d’

then any part of that stream of information that looks like a phone number (not using parens), such as 636-555-3226, will be isolated.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a book that teaches beginning Python computer Augean programming focusing on examples from day to day life, including but well beyond REs.

The new edition includes pattern matching with regular expressions, input validation, reading and writing files, organizing files, web scraping, manipulating Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets, PDF and Word documents, CSV and JSON files, email, images, and automating your keyboard and mouse.

The great benefit of a book like this is that you learn Python (the first part of the book gives you all you need to know to program in Python) in the context of things you actually want to do with Python. If you are interested in learning Python, or coding in general, this can be your first book.

The book is well done, as all in this series are, and fun. There are strong on line resources including all the code, and that information is regularly updated. Generally, “No Starch” press books are great, and this is one of those!

I would like to have seen at least sidebars on manipulating things using Libreoffice software, but note that the book focuses on documents, and OpenSource software does work with normal Excel and Word documents, so it is there.

The second edition adds a new chapter on input validation. The Gmail and Google Sheets sections, and the information on CSV files is also new. I plan on using the software tips and tricks to develop my own highly specialized and targeted search software. I’m often looking for files that have specific extensions, and certain kinds of content, in certain locations. Just the ability to hard-wire where to search for files will save me a lot of time and trouble.

Author Al Sweigart is a professional software developer who teaches programming to kids and adults, and who is author of Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, Cracking Codes with Python, and Coding with Minecraft, all of which are quite nice. We need a new edition of Coding with Minecraft, by the way, that looks at a wider range of coding options and keeps up with the major advances in that software environment! So, get to work, Al!

The volume is a bit low at the start but get goods before the first minute.

The first bit of advice is this: Maybe don’t do this.

If you have multiple monitors on one or both of the two computers you would like to share, then you are probably taking up a lot of desk space. More to the point, the two dimensional, but really, one dimensional, range over which your monitors are spread is probably so wide that you can’t really use two computers with one keyboard and mouse without have some sort of super chair, a very long neck, and an extension build onto your arm. Maybe what you really need is two desks near each other with a computer on each one.

The USB fix.

But, maybe you still want to do this, to use two computers with one keyboard.

I want to do this in part because the only keyboards I really like are large and tend to cost close to $150, such as a full size Tactile Keyboard for a Mac, the Avant Stellar keyboard (which is very hard to find these days), or a cheaper Linux friendly Mechanical Feel Gaming Keyboard, such as this one which is on sale dirt cheap at the moment though I’ve not used this exact one so I’m not sure if it is any good. I like the big tactile keyboard sitting there with my favorite mouse, and I just want to sometimes use one computer, sometimes the other computer. I’m willing to shift the keyboard and mouse one way or the other by a foot or so on my desk, and I don’t change back and forth on the fly, just going to one computer for an extended period, then switching to the other computer for an extended period.

For this, you want a USB switcher such as the UGREEN USB Switch Selector. I use this one. You plug a USB mouse and a USB keyboard into it, and then run one USB cable to each of your two computers.

There is a button you press to switch computers. If you read the reviews you’ll see people complaining that the switch is not instantaneous. It isn’t, but for this particular use case it need not be. It is pretty fast. There are four USB inputs, so you can put more devices on the switch beyond just the keyboard and mouse, and if you do, that may slow down the switching more. Point is, this works fine for changing which computer you have keyed up, as it were, and it is not an expensive or difficult to implement alternative.

The Synergy Fix: Attempt one unhappy

There are multiple software solutions that allow two computers to use one mouse and keyboard by having one computer be the “server” and the other the “client,” so as your mouse moves from the screen of one computer to the other, both the keyboard-computer link and the mouse-computer link “seamlessly” changes.

I reviewed all the solutions for this and settled on Synergy by Symless. I then tried out version 1-point-something, which happened also to be on sale at the time, so I think it was less than $20. (Yes, this is not open source free software, but not everything is!)

I didn’t like that solution, and eventually uninstalled it. That is when I bought the USB switch. It was too slow. The performance of the mouse on the host computer was affected, and slowed down. So, as I moved the mouse across the screen, mouse-over events (when you move the mouse of a button or window or something) slowed down and sometimes stopped the mouse. Moving to the other computer was sometimes jumpy, sometimes didn’t work. Setup and re-setup when things went wrong was off. In order to make this work I actually had to keep a keyboard and mouse (in my case, bluetooth, small, and out of the way so no biggie) hooked up to the client computer in order to get that computer out of sleep mode, locked screensaver, or address issues on startup before the Synergy server-client thingie started working, or to fix the Synergy client server.

The advantage would have included the possibility of copy and past between computers, but in this version that was quirky and having that option on seemed to slow it down even more. (Note, your network may matter in how well this works, see below.)

The Synergy Fix: Attempt two pretty happy

But then Synergy 2.0 came out and it was good enough to prompt me to write it up and suggest you try it. Now, for me, I had already bought Synergy 1-point-something, so the upgrade on an extended black friday sale was $12. For you it will be closer to $50, but they guarantee satisfaction.

The upgrade and set up was not flawless or seamless but it did eventually work. I think I still need the second keyboard and mouse set up, but again, that is just a bluetooth setup stashed off to the side. If you are a multi-computer, multi-monitor level operator you have this hardware around anyway.

The mouse seems to behave perfectly normally and cut and paste between computers is fine. With the earlier version, the keyboard stalled unacceptably often when using Synergy and typing into a browser or editor or a text editor. I find all things that interfere with typing to be unacceptable because because I am a writer. Also, I can really notice the slowdowns or stuttering, again, because banging stuff out on the keyboard is what I do. I will not tolerate a software solution that messes with this.

Under the current system, the server computer (in this case a Linux computer) works flawlessly when typing. I see a small amount of hesitation every now and then on the client computer, a Mac, but this mac is slow and old, so I can’t be positive it is because of Synergy. The amount of slowdown is minimal.

At the moment, this means to me that I can use Synergy just fine, and I still have the USB switch noted above hooked up. So, I can change the keyboard via USB when I need to for extended typing.

Indeed, the last 134 words were typed in BBEdit over on the Mac, with acceptable performance, and in a moment I will copy it and paste it over to the post you are reading, being created in Chrome on the Linux computer.

Here we go.

There, that worked.

(Note, to use both a Linux or Windows computer AND a Mac, you will have to deal with some ctrl-alt-whatever keyboard issues, but I’m sure you can handle that.)

In short, I recommend all three of the above outlined solutions, in some sort of combination. Over time, one or two will settle out to be what you usually do. The main point is this: If you previously used Synergy version 1-point-whatever and were not happy, try Version 2, it is way, way better and actually quite nice.

One thing that might help any Synergy or similar system is to fix up your network better. Right now, both computers are communicating with a router via wireless. Never mind why, I know, it is not ideal. I intend to try to get a router in the same room and hook both computers to the built in switch, hooking that router out to the Internet via wireless. This will allow the Synergy system to be much more directly connected between the two computers, I assume.

In all the above I speak only of two computers and one set of keyboard and mouse. There is a lot more you can do than that, including multiple computers and multiple mouse-keyboard options. Since I’ve not tried any of that and don’t know exactly what is possible or what, if possible, is acceptable in terms of performance, I’ll remain silent on it.

If you have multiple computer use cases where you’ve tried stuff out, please let us know about your solutions and problems in the comments!

The Scratch programming language is a project set at MIT. Scratch programming involves moving images, called blocks, from a pallet into a work area, hooking them together and maybe changing some values attached to them, in order to develop programs that mainly, but not exclusively, manipulate sprites. (See example of code blokcks above.) The project is located HERE. This is a full object oriented programming language with quite a few features that make it very powerful, for a kid’s toy.

When you use Scratch, normally, you are interacting with the server at MIT via a web page. This allows you to use Scratch on any device regardless of operating system or power, as long as you have an internet connection. It also means the development environment is always up to date. And, on this site, you can interact with all the other scratch coders in the world, and borrow each other’s code, etc.

There is also a version of Scratch that can be run in stand-alone mode on a computer.

And now, there is a version of this stand alone program that is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi.

This version of Scratch has coding elements that control the General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins on the Pi. This means you can use the Scratch programming language to interface not merely with sprites on a screen, but with anything physical in the real world, and in so doing, TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! BWA HAHAHAHA!!

You probably think I’m kidding but I’m not. It is well known that ten thousand chimpanzees randomly banging on keyboards will recreate all the works of Shakespeare. But it will take so long that the Universe will have ended by then. But if you give a few million kids the ability to write programs that interact with the real world it won’t take nearly that much time for them to change the world itself, considerably. Who can even imagine how? But I digress.

Anyway, we have a very easily learned and potentially very powerful software development environment married to a machine that has essentially unlimited abilities to interact with the physical world via GPIO pins, which ultimately can control any kind of switch, motor, sensor, other computer, or anything, that is electronic or that knows something that is electronic.

None of this is sudden. Scratch has been around a long time, and comes from a heritage of software development that goes back to the very beginning of modern languages. The ability to control GPIO like pins is exactly what controllers of all sorts have been doing for years. There has been a stand along version of scratch from early on in the MIT project, presumably with some version predating the on line version. The ability to interact with Raspberry Pi GPIO pins has always been there because you can write special code for Scratch and the actual ability (instead of the merely pedantically potential ability) has been around for maybe a year or so. But over recent months the stand along scratch that you would install on a Raspberry Pi and that has a fairly rich feature set has come to life. Bwa hahahaha!

One way to access this significant power is to buy into the Kano system. You can get a Kano Computer Kit for just under $150. It allows you to build a sort of laptop, including a keyboard and some other stuff (but you supply the screen). The box that holds the Pi, on which Kano is built, has some fancy LED lights that can be manipulated with Scratch. It also comes with a Makey-Makey like sensor that allows some additional interacton. But I’m afraid that’s about it.

I can’t recommend the Kano computer for most users. The markup on the LED lights and the ground fault serial interface device feels like 1000%, though I’m sure it is very nicely packaged and all that. If you go farther, and get the more elaborate Kano Computer Kit Complete , for just under $250, you get some additional LED lights and some sort of microphone. Kano also has a Motion Sensor kit for $23 bucks sold separately, which I think comes with the afore mentioned kits, and there are other things you can get.

In short, Kano looks great, seems nice, may be a really cook kid friendly set of technology, but I’m afraid there will be a close correlation between families that benefit from Kano and families that benefit from the Republican-Trump tax bill.

A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Motherboard costs about $35. Put that together with stuff you have laying around, like your TV or an extra monitor, a keyboard and mouse, etc. Maybe get some sort of breakout kit such as the Smraza T Type GPIO Breakout board for Raspberry Pi 3 2 Mode B/B+ with 830 tie-points Breadboard and 40 Pin Rainbow Cable. This allows you to more easily attach things to the Pi. The Pi-3 already has internet and Bluetooth capabilities.

The most current version of the Rapsperry Pi operating system, a form of Linux called Raspbian (for Rasperry and Debian, a classic form of Linux) has the offline Scratch language built in. Go to this site to learn more about that. Then you can have code blocks like this:

Depending on that GIPO pin number 2 is hooked to, you can now TAKE OVER THE WORLD … BWA HAHAHAHAHA!!!

But seriously, this is very cool, and very powerful.

I predict that in the not too distant future, the Internet of Things will be operated with, essentially, the Scratch programming language. It is accessible to regular people, allowing them to modify their home automation, and allows companies that install this sort of thing to have much more powerful technicians with less effort on training. Think of Scratch on controller software to be a bit like the old Microsoft Windows macros — remember that? — back when that technology was usable, and in fact used, by people who knew virtually nothing about the computers they were using.

What could possibly go wrong?

I can’t explain exactly what went wrong, but eventually I ended up with a dialog that required that I click “OK” followed by the same dialog, again and again, long enough that I figured it was infinity time.

I eventually followed a procedure that I’ve found to work sometimes. First, I turned the computer off and the back on again (always a last resort) and the desktop never loaded, so I knew something was pretty messed up.

So, I did this. I hit alt-ctrl then a function key. I started with F6 and worked my way down until I got the desired result, which is a prompt at the command line, with no graphical user interface, to log on. You can actually do this any time you want in Linux, even when things are working fine. These are called “virtual terminals” but I prefer to think of them as actual terminals, as they are more actual than virtual, given that actual actual terminals don’t exist any more. But I digress.

Once at the terminal, I logged on (with my user name and password). I then had the system update

sudo apt update

(It will ask for your password, enter it.)

Then, I did an upgrade

sudo apt-upgrade

Then follow instructions if there are any.

Then, go back to the original plan explained here

Everything will be fine. If not, you might be in trouble.

(See picture above.)

Then, in either a terminal or in the box you get when you hit Alt-F4, type the following and hit enter:

update-manager -cd

You might get something that looks like this, and you can hit the upgrade button and follow instructions. Good luck. Have a backup. Should work fine.

If things don’t work fine, try THIS.

This is a momentous occasion because this will be the first version of Ubuntu’s main flavor that does NOT include Unity as its default desktop.

If you don’t know, Unity was a menu and control system for the desktop, your main interface when working with the computer other than, obviously, while using a particular application. It was the look and feel, the essence, of the operating system. Unity was supposed to unify things, like diverse features of a typical desktop, like Ubuntu running on a cell phone, a desktop, a laptop, a whatever.

Unity used a modus operendus that many other interfaces were shifting towards. I hear there are versions of Windows that looked a bit like this, and Gnome from version 3.0 onwards had this basic approach.

This was a shift away from a style of interface that first emerged with early Linux desktops like Xfce and its variants, and which Windows users got to see on Windows 2000. It was a good, easy to use, intuitive, hard to break, and stay out of the way system. The Unity approach was supposed to stay out of your way too, but it did that by getting giant, in your face, making decisions for you, being extremely complex in its supposed simplicity, and in its earlier version, automatically looking stuff up you might want to buy while you were searching, say, for a file on your hard drive. All very non-Linux like.

So, let me say “I told you so” this one time, and note that Unity is dead. Now, the default Ubuntu desktop interface will be a current or recent version of Gnome. Which is a little, but not much better. The far better interface, in my view, is the one that forked off the earlier Gnome when it was still Gnome 2-something. This is called Mate (pronounced Mah Tay, like the obscure Australian plant).

Anyway, this will be the first post-Unity release, and I applaud Ubuntu for realizing that Unity had to go, and for moving on. Must feel good.

The version of Gnome to go with the Artful Aardvark will probably be Gnome 3.26.

The Ubuntu default desktop’s Gnome will be slightly modified, and will include a “let me sell you stuff on Amazon” button. Removing this will be on the list of things to do after installing Ubuntu 17.10 (stay tuned for that).

Since Gnome will be Ubuntu’s default desktop, there will no longer be a separate flavor of Ubuntu for Gnome.

There are a lot of details under the hood you probably don’t care about, such as Wayland as the default display with an optional X.org session, P:robaabl LInux kernel 4.14 (or 4.13), etc.

Mozilla Thunderbird will probably be left off. There will be improvements to the network manager, blue tooth, and better support for video cards, with improved multi monitor abilities. The windo control buttons default position will move to the other side of the window from where they were before. I tend to move them to where I want them, and mine ar on the top right, as will be 17.10’s, so I guess I moved mine recently.

Look for a post coming up soon on how to upgrade (for some of you) and later, what to do after installing it!

Anyway, if you are messing around with any of these three “flavors” of Ubuntu, you might find yourself in a situation where you’ve not just messed around but you’ve also messed up. And, maybe you want to return the distribution to its default state.

Doing so will undo whatever customization you’ve done to panels, launchers, or docs, including indicators. It will rediscover and reset the default monitor resoution settings. It will put the fonts back to what they were by default and, for some of us most dramatically, it will reset the keyboard shortcuts. Themes will be returned to default as well, including all the details of your windows and such.

Some applications will have their settings restored to default as well.

Go see this post at OMG Ubuntu for an example of before and after for someone who had tweaked the heck out of their box and reset.

This reset only affects setting stored in dconf. You can “dconf dump” to get the current settings from that place before and maybe that will suffice as a backup. Good luck with that. This should not affect other desktops you’ve got installed, or affect drviers and other deep system level stuff. Probably.

Anyway, here’s the command:

dconf reset -f /

Good luck and may the force be with you.

You can find out what dconf is and does here.

There is some interesting and exciting stuff going on with mice.

Best but most expensive small mouse for general mobile use

The Logitech MX Anywhere 2 Wireless Mobile Mouse, Long Range Wireless Mouse is over fifty bucks, but it has some excellent features. It is small and portable and normative in shape and design. It works on any surface, is highly precise, nice to use, all that. It is a Laser tracking mouse. It has an internal rechargeable battery.

This mouse uses a small USB dongle or bluetgooth (Bluetooth Smart Ready). You can pair up to three different devices. It has hyper-speed scrolling.

The Most Magical of Mice: Flow technology

There are several mice in this category ranging across price. One of them is the Logitech MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse with FLOW Cross-Computer Control and File Sharing for PC and Mac – 910-005132, which is close to 80 bucks, and is like the MX Anywhere 2, but has the additional magical capability of controlling multiple devices, including managing a cross-device clipboard. You pair the mouse up with each computer, then you tie it into the same local network both computers are on. Here’s a video from Logitech:

This supposedly works on Linux, Macs and Windows.

Super Ergonomic

I am suspicious of the whole ergonomic thing. Ergonomic, in mice and similar devices, seems to be “we fit your hand so well you will only move one or two muscles ever,” which seems a bad idea. I think a mouse should require more movement and adjustment by the hand in order to Not cause repetitive motion syndrome. Note that this is entirely my non-expert opinion and I may be quite wrong.

Anyway, one of the top rated and coolest Ergonomic mice is probably the Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse which is extreme in its design and intended to minimize RSS. The same company makes a variety of products, and note, these are generally not expensive.

General all round mouse

The affordable Logitech M720 Triathalon Multi-Device Wireless Mouse pairs with multiple devices, has fancy buttons, has hyper fast scrolling capability, and uses a single AA battery. It uses bluetooth.

Glows in the dark

Other mice

The Logitech M330 Silent Plus Wireless Large Mouse is a large size mouse that makes no noise and is inexpensive (and wireless, but not bluetooth)
The super accruate, wired, Corsair Gaming M65 Pro RGB FPS Gaming Mouse, Backlit RGB LED, 12000 DPI, Optical is for gamers and has lots of buttons.

The mouse I need is probably the one I hope to find over at Goodwill; I need a plug in USB mouse to allow quick access to any computer any time without needing a dongle dangling off the back of something.