My Peripherals
As early as 1997 I started suffering from RSI related pains, I had been touch typing for almost 5 years by that point & typing almost every day since about 1990. I'd tried several "natural" keyboards, trackballs, and assorted ergonomic peripherals. Nothing seemed to help me one bit.
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Keyboard
In 2005 I came across the Kensington SlimType Keyboard while browsing http://newegg.com to see if anything new had come out. I love the feeling of laptop style keyboards, the low amount of force & the minimal action required to complete every single keystroke. I purchased my first one for about $40 & instantly fell in love. I now have 3 of them, one for my iMac, one for my ITA Workstation & one at home for my Home Server & anything I need a keyboard for. Since I've been using them almost exclusively outside of my laptop time I can type about 130 words a minute & all other keyboards feel mountainous!
Mouse
In 2003 I started working at Sabre Systems supporting mission planning software. With that job came a drawer full of trackballs that no one was using, as well as mobile systems that had the same trackball packed in with them. I installed one on my work workstation & fell instantly in love. These also helped my ex-wife with her rheumatoid arthritis which meant she could go from spending 15-20 minutes at the computer to a few hours. This also kept me from experiencing what I can only explain as twangs in my wrists & a decent amount of pain after a few hours of use.
- B00005NIMJ
This wonderful little thing
External Hard Drives
If the house is burning down & I'm home, I'm going to grab at least 3 of these on my way out of the door.
WD MyBook
I've owned several Western Digital MyBook USB drives & have yet to have a problem with any of them. They're passively cooled, nearly dead silent & look nice on a shelf. I've owned a 400GB & 2 500GB in the past & have upgraded to a pair of 1TB drives connected to my home server. Over USB 2.0 I get sustained 22MB/s transfers & both drives power down when the host machine is off.
Macally Enclosures
I purchased a pair of them to house 2 WD 320GB SATA drives I had laying around from my old server. I have them daisy chained via the Firewire 400 port on my iMac. My only issue is that they don't always appear on the Finder, though they're accessable.
(duncan@brainguy:~)$ df -h /Volumes/WD320* Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/disk2s1 299G 46G 253G 16% /Volumes/WD320-1 /dev/disk1s1 299G 75G 224G 25% /Volumes/WD320-2
