Curiouser and Curiouser!

Recommendation given: Avoid snake oil

Recommendation Wanted: Ergonomic Keyboard.

Recommendation Wanted: Ergonomic Keyboard

I pulled a 17 hour day yesterday of which I was typing probably close to 15 hours.  And for the first time since I learned to type in 1978/7? I went to bed with my right hand hurting enough that I iced it down.  And it still hurts.  So the obvious questions are:

• Do ergonomic / split keyboards really matter?
• Recommendation?

Note: Can't be USB since my monitor switcher is classic PS/2 interface.  Thanks in advance.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

As someone who has lived with wrist pain for about 15 years and has used many supposedly ergonic aids I feel reasonably qualified to comment.  No, for me ergonomic keyboard have made little appreciable difference to my pain levels.  That is to say the kind of ergonomic keyboards you buy for £60 at a computer store.  I remain to be persuaded about something like a Kinesis Evolution but then I don't have $600!

Two things have made a difference and you're probably not going to like either of them:

1. Type less
2. See a qualified practioner

For #1 I use a piece of software called BreakReminder (single license: $25).  This monitors my time at the keyboard and forces me to take short breaks (in the order of 30 seconds) every few minutes and then longer breaks (10-15 mins) at lengthier intervals.

Today I am having moderate pain and am in the middle setting.  10 x 30 second micropause, 4 minutes apart.  Followed by a 10 minute rest break.  When you work it out this means that in a period of 1hr I am typing for about 45 minutes.  That's not too bad (on more painful days I ratched it up and am maybe typing 5-10 minutes less per hour).

I use the short breaks to review my notes, to stretch, allow my eyes to focus on something else (I have noticed less eyestrain since I started using this program).  The rest breaks I go make a cup of tea, catch up on reading articles, etc...

For #2 I was going to see a chiropractor on a regular basis however I can't afford to do that now.  With money I would be going reguarly (I was up to about every 2 months before I had to stop going).

Messin with Trackback #2

I'm still messing with Trackback for Radio.  This time I have implemented my own standalone trackback server, both to round out the features needed and also to learn Python.  As you can see my posts now sport not only a Trackback link but also a counter showing how many trackbacks have been received for a particular post.  When I've pinged this point I'll know if that particular feature works.

Additionally my server generates an RSS feed per post and also a feed for all trackbacks to the weblog.  I'll be subscribing to this one so I can immediatelly see when people ping a post.

Radio Trackbacks via RSS

Testing the new trackback server. Matt's Movable Blog
A test ping against my new Python-based standalone trackback server.... [Trackback pings for matt_blogs_it]

Neat.  It's always nice when something works.  This is the first post from the feed being generated by my trackback server of all trackback pings to my blog.

The next step in this mini-project is to complete the Radio client so that it can both send pings (which it does not at the moment), encode the trackback ping url in the RSS feed (it is already doing that using the trackback module - check it out) and figure out what URL to ping using either a in the incoming feed or RDF autodiscovery.

At that point I think Radio will have trackback support which is the equal of MovableType.

RSS innovation with source GUID

We've not made much noise about it but something that Paolo and I have been doing is working within the framework of RSS2.0 to deliver what we see as useful functionality.  ENT 1.0 is one of those things, another is SGUID.

SGUID allows an aggregator to unambiguously identify the post that an aggregated post is referring to.  By default RSS2.0 only allows you to identify the feed.  The upshot of SGUID is that aggregators could implement simple threading and allow readers to browse back through a series of postings with ease. Whenever I repost an item from my aggregator now, my post get's the appropriate SGUID.

SGUID is simple.  We're hoping it is useful as well.