I’ve been pretty carpal the past few weeks. The Dr. said I should consider going back to my old regime of wrist splints, so I figured I might as well go for the whole ball of wax. But I had gotten rid of my old keyboard back when I was moving. So I bought a new one.
It is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. It’s as fancy as a keyboard gets (and as expensive) short of moving to wireless/Bluetooth battery-operated.
I haven’t tested out all the cool new features yet on a Mac, but using it just as a dumb keyboard on Linux it works fine. The wrist rest is very nice. The spacing between my two arms seems a bit wide but not too much. The backspace key feels a smidgen too far away, but that’s probably because I’m holding the rest of my hand in the proper place (for a change).
Why is it, I wonder, that MS makes such nice hardware, and such crappy software?
I took it to work today and (typical hardware product) it made me reboot my machine when I installed the new drivers. I had an uptime of 18 days. So sad. But the new drivers haven’t crashed my system, even though MS wrote them. (I suppose letting EE’s write software isn’t so bad, if the alternative is to have MS software developers do it.)
Having a ‘start/pause’ button on the keyboard sure beats just having a louder/softer/mute button, though.
And possibly (unless I’m imaginging things) it’s more comfortable to type with the new keyboard. The acid test will be when I write my sermon.