Apple's Missing "Insert" Key

The extended Apple keyboard lacks an "insert" key.  If you're running Windows in a virtual machine, there are some apps where that key would be very useful.  Well, it turns out that a Windows virtual machine sees your keyboard a little differently than MacOS does.  Press the "clear" button, and you're actually toggling the "numlock" setting.  Once out of numlock mode, pressing the zero key is actually hitting the "insert" key.

Flipping your Mouse Wheel in Windows 7

I've gotten used to Lion's goofy "natural scrolling" behavior.  When I bootcamp over into Windows, the "normal" scrolling irks me.  I've found two (Volker Voeking and Tom Mason)  perfect posts on how to do this in the registry (without using flakey softwarez) but they weren't entirely obvious for my Mighty Mouse.  If you know the hardware ID might start with a big mess between braces, you should be able to just use either of those.

Here's my quick redux for my own remembery porpoises:

• Open Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Mouse.
• Go to the Hardware tab, take a look at the Location for each device.
• Get the Properties of the mouse you wanna flip.
• Go to the Details tab, select Hardware ID from the Property drop-down.
• The entry containing "VID" somewhere in it is what you want.

And then do the registry pieces:

• Hit the Windows (command) key, "regedit" and hit return.
• Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Enum > HID
• Expand whatever device ID you found previously, expand whatever garbled entry is under that.
• Select Device Parameters, right-click on FlipFlopWheel, then choose Modify.
• Change this from 0 to 1.
• Exit.

The next time your mouse is recognized, it'll inherit the new setting.  To make that happen, you can just power it down, wait a dozen seconds, and power it back up.  That otter do it!  Welcome back to wackyland.