After a long and terribly difficult day, all I wanted was to play a little bit of Texas Hold’em on my Blackberry. Normally my biggest problem is being bad at Texas Hold’em, but tonight my problem was not being able to scroll to the right in order to open the game. After about 45 minutes of complaining and belly-aching, I took a few minutes to search the web. I finally found a post that explained how to clean the trackball without ever taking the trackball out of its chassis! Here’s the low-down:

Cut a thin piece of paper two to three inches long. If you were to make a square around your trackball, you’d want the paper to be as wide as half of a side, maybe a bit smaller.

Slide the paper into the side of the trackball chassis, and begin scrolling the trackball towards the paper. The goal is to let the trackball catch the paper and roll it around and back up through the opposite side.

TRICK: If you have problems getting the trackball to catch the paper, fold the paper over the trackball just a bit and use the piece of paper itself to gain traction while rolling the ball. This serves the dual purpose of pushing the paper in as the ball is rolling.

Once the paper comes up out of the other side, continue rolling the ball around so that you get a good grip on each of the four catches in order to clean them off.

BE CAREFUL TO NOT BREAK THE PAPER OFF UP IN THERE! That’d be bad.

Hopefully this cleans your trackball off enough to get the ball rolling again (literally and figuratively)!

— Brad