Plaidophile

My new keyboards arrived; I got one each of the PC and Mac versions of the Kensington SlimType. So far I rather like the Mac one, and I expect the PC one will be just as good at work.

The key action is firm but doesn't take a lot of force, and has very little travel. The layout is non-stupid for the most part, though it'll take some getting used to the cursor keys being right below the right shift key and the enter key not being the furthest thing to the right (since home/pgup/pgdn/end are there). It has the complete keyboard layout and then some, including an entire selection of multimedia hotkeys which are separate from the function keys, and it has a separate number pad. The really odd thing is that on the left side, there's two Ctrl keys right next to each other; the bottom-row modifiers are ctrl, ctrl, alt, cmd. On the PC version it's ctrl, win, alt, \|, which will probably be a bit annoying but I can live with that (though it's mystifying as to why they put a second \| there, since there's already a \| in the usual rightful place above Enter). The double ctrls on the left on the Mac version are probably just to keep it feeling consistent with both normal keyboards and Powerbook keyboards, and I think it's overall the right thing to do since it keeps alt and cmd in the correct places as well. And I don't really care about those ctrl keys anyway since I always remap capslock to ctrl to begin with.

This is definitely a comfortable keyboard, though, and I think this will help with my wrists a lot. It's also a bit narrower than a normal keyboard, though I'm not sure if it's narrow enough to put my mouse back on the right. However, I've gotten pretty used to having the mouse on the left (at least the Mighty Mouse on my G5; the Logitech wheel mouse I have at work still gives my left hand trouble, but I don't use the mouse as much at work since I use my ultra-keyboard-centric pwm configuration anyway), and I think it's a good thing to have the switch-off anyway.

One thing I definitely need to improve at home is my chair. The armrests on my chair at home are too high and hard, and not adjustable, so I'm going to have to remove them, like I did on the chair at work (the armrests were adjustable and somewhat padded, but their lowest position was still too high for me, and I'm 5'8" which isn't excessively small or anything!) I should just go to Office Max today and look for something better. But I was also going to check out a condo...