Hardware

My first printer was a Star LC-20 nine pin dot matrix that I received as a Christmas present when I was 15 years old. That’s the kind of nerdy teenager I was, folks. All yuletide long our home rang out with the deafening noise made by those pins rapidly and repeatedly punching through a flimsy ink-soaked ribbon. Incidentally, Radio 4 are forever running features about the ongoing decline in audible birdsong in the English countryside. Personally, I think it’s a travesty that a whole generation of kids will grow up unfamiliar with the nerve-shattering noise of a built-to-last dot matrix, the inimitable caterwauling of a 33.6 kbps modem connecting to a dial-up BBS, or the satisfying clunk as a 3.5 inch floppy is gleefully accepted by a disk drive. Moving to an SSD may have provided an incredible boost to my development productivity, but there’s a part of me that misses hearing the faint humming and scratching sounds of traditional hard disk heads moving across a highly-polished platter. But I digress… ...

Almost everyone who has wandered past the various desks that I’ve occupied over the last year has passed comment on my Wacom Bamboo Pen Graphics Tablet. So, let me say a few words about my experiences with that. For the longest time, I had been perfectly content to use various Logitech VX / MX mouses as my secondary input device, occasionally using a Microsoft Arc Mouse (very convenient to carry around in my rucksack). ...

It occurred to me recently that I’m not getting any younger, and that sitting hunched over a keyboard for a dozen hours a day will probably lead to some form of RSI sooner or later. So I started looking for ways to improve my daily working environment. Unlike John, I can’t afford a Herman Miller chair, and even if I could, I’m a freelancer rather than a telecommuter1 so I would have to regularly carry the chair on the train to client sites, where they would probably ostracise me for being a weirdo who brings his own chair to the office. So I looked for something a little more portable, and decided that perhaps it was finally time for me to try one of those fancy split ergonomic keyboards that I’ve always scoffed at. After reading a few review on Amazon, I plumped for the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. ...