[Sussex] Rantting

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 18:54 +0100, Paul Morris wrote:
> I'll be interested in hearing about how you get on with the touchstream 
> keyboard as I also suffer with input device related pain. For years I was 
> unable to use a mouse with my right hand for more than a few minutes at a 
> time, without pain in my hand and wrist. When I started to get the same 
> symptoms in my left hand, I started to look for alternatives to the 
> conventional mouse. 
> I currently use a 3M renaissance mouse (http://www.3m.com/cws/renmouse.html) 
> at work and a Quill mouse (http://www.quillmouse.com/) at home. Both are 
> based on the principle of keeping your hand in a vertical position, with the 
> wrist relaxed and the larger arm muscles doing the work.  Using these 
> alternatives I no longer experience the wrist and hand pain, and I can now 
> even use a conventional mouse ( my family insist I leave one connected) for 
> reasonable periods with no ill effects. 

I'll let you know how I get on.

Apparantly you can also get keyboard that have the key's split into two
vertical panels for similar reasons - these are advised for people
suffering from carpal tunnel (especially touch-typists).

My problem isn't really with the mouse, it's more that I hit the keys
way, way too hard.  This combined with playing guitar on heavy strings
(I have a rather nice National resonator that _needs_ _big_ strings)
seems to have caused undue strain on the tendons and joints in my left
hand. So the pescribed course of action is for me to completely change
the way I type.  I have to learn to type with zero-feedback and
zero-force.  I could of got a Dvorak layout, but that seems like to big
a learning curve for the time being, and as it's possible to switch the
layout of the board dynamically (without chaning the computers settings,
AFAIK) I may change to this at a later date.

-- 
Geoffrey Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation