Perry's Blog

Way back in 2009 (or so it seems) I purchased and wrote about a more ergonomic keyboard / mouse set up.

The bad news is that unfortunately the rollermouse has waited untill it's 30 days out of its 2 year warranty period before it stopped working (stopped clicking to be accurate). What's more of a shame is that the customer service at Contour Designs seems to have fallen over completely (no replies to emails)

The good news is that the set up completely fixed my sholder pain, so I was very keen to maintain the basics of the set up.

So I was thinking about a track ball in the middle of the keyboard... or... oh, wait... before getting the rollermouse I was thinking of a track pad... maybe the new Wacom Bamboo might work?

When searching for good prices I found Harris Technology had the Wacom Bamboo Touch on sale for only $24!! This is price is a no brainer (I mean compare AUS$24 Australian with US$220 for a new RollerMouse)!! Any questions about whether it'd fit in the situation I needed didn't really matter... but the good news, the great news... is that it's perfect!

Using the Touch is also so much better than any other mouse alternative I've tried... very much more intuitive, so that you can get a lot more done with your gestures.

Funnily enough, the Contour RollerMouse came with these risers to lift up the keyboard (if necessary), I didn't use them with the FreeStyle but they've come in very handy now! I've put them on the bottom of the FreeStyle's two halves and the smallest ones on the back edge of the Bamboo. This gives me the ability to align the three bits closer together and allow using all three at the same time... well, nearly... when typing it's an easy "stretch" with my thumbs to move the cursor And I find the "mouse acceleration" extremely helpful in navigating my three monitors .

Note: The edging on the desktop is not really as bad as it looks in the above sweep, it's just a software anomaly.