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Peter's Gekko

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Of mice and old men

Working all day with screen, keyboard and mouse is quite a stress to some parts of your body. Over the years, getting old, you have to pay the toll. Sore wrists and tired eyes can become side-effects of your hard work. So far I'm surviving quite well but I do pay a lot of attention to anything which helps.

I'm addicted to Microsoft hardware. Their gull-wing keyboard is awesome and their mice are quite comfortable as well. I don't believe there is one mouse model which is the solution to RSI prevention; what really helps is switching continuously from one model to the other. So I have a couple hooked up together with the keyboard in a little goodie bag USB (1.1 is good enough) hub.

A "normal" mouse a monster trackball and just recently a wireless notebook laser mouse joined the club.

The latter has one, thumb operated, magnify button on the side. Which fires up the Intellipoint (MS mouse software) magnifying glass. Which is another big help. It can be just the tool to find that little pesky typo in a query.

The magnifier can be fired up with another mouse as well. In the configuration dialog you assign the function to a button. It took me my new mouse to find that out. In Vista the magnifier is part of the OS itself.

There is one thing which can be improved in this scenario. The mouse configuration lets you select one type of mouse and its button configuration is used for all mice attached. Enabling the magnify button on the laser-mouse turns the forward button of the other mice attached into a magnify button as well. I just wish I could configure the three mice independently. Beside the buttons it would make a lot of sense to set precision and acceleration different for each model. Something to check in Vista.


Published Apr 28 2006, 08:10 AM by pvanooijen
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Comments

Sahil Malik said:

Peter,

What I've been doing is, I keep the trackball on the floor. I've gotten really good at manipulating the mouse with my foot, and frankly that speeds up my work. Now I can type and use the mouse @ the same time. Needs some practice but worth it IMO.

SM
# April 28, 2006 8:47 AM

pvanooijen said:

LO(very)L

Finished laughing: It could make sense.. should try that..
# April 28, 2006 8:54 AM

Sahil Malik said:

LOL :). But what if your foot starts getting RSI as well? Then there's no bodypart left that isn't overused. Only choice is to give up computers alltogether huh?
# April 28, 2006 9:02 AM

Adam Vandenberg said:

I was a Microsoft Mouse fan for many many years, but I recently started trying out some Logitech models and have found them very comfortable.
# April 28, 2006 9:37 AM

Joshua Flanagan said:

I also use 2 mice, but I don't use them with the same hand. I have one for the left hand and one for the right. I don't use them simultaneously - I just alternate throughout the day. It was only awkward for the first hour or so of mousing with the left hand; it wasn't long before I was equally comfortable with both. I've found that it helps with the rsi pain.
# April 28, 2006 9:51 AM

pvanooijen said:

Having a mouse on the left side of my kbd would require a desk cleanup :) Not a bad idea either. A great pro of a trackbal over a mouse is the amount of desktop real estate it requires. I'll give it try.
# April 28, 2006 11:10 AM

johnwood said:

Sahil,
You do WHAT?! Wow man that's impressive. No wonder you can type so fast, you probably use your toes to double your speed.
John
# April 28, 2006 1:17 PM

Peter's Gekko said:

Working  a lot with a computer has a couple of health risks, which get bigger and bigger over the...
# June 9, 2006 5:11 AM

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