After hours Toolkit

Story: Rupert Goodwins' Diary

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I have to agree with you about the mouse- I had a Logitech MX1000 Laser mouse for a while, well, actually I had a pair...

They are nice, they are comfortable to use, but they have too many buttons. I like a normal scroll wheel, that is useful at times for fine scrolling, but the motorised scroll wheel sounds like overkill.

The biggest problem I had with the MX1000 was that it ran out of juice too quickly, every 1.5 days on average, and I'd always forget to stick the thing in its recharge holder over night. Then there are the cables, plural! You have the base unit, it has a USB cable (or PS/2) and it has a power cable to run the recharger. I had a pair of them (one for each PC on my desk), that's an extra two power outlets.

In the end, I gave up, I prefer the single USB cable of my good old Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0. It still has too many buttons, but I just use the two main buttons, and use the "third" button (click the scroll wheel) to open new tabs in Firefox or Opera.

I still miss the simplicity of my old Apple Mac (original 9" mono single box Mac) - I miss its keyboard as well.

Technology really seems to have gone downhill in the input department over the years. Keyboards are dirt cheap, but have a horrible feel, or they are expensive with lots of media keys,. and a horrible feel. Mice are becoming more and more expensive, getting more and more features, but the quality of the overall assembly is also going downhill...

Still, I bought an Apple USB keyboard last week and it has a nice minimalist look to it (only nod to multimedia is a volume control) and it works fine with my SUSE 10.1 installation. The feel isn't too bad either, although still not a patch on an original Mac keyboard.

And the amount of desk space I've recovered using a minimalist keyboard and a basic wired mouse is amazing!

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