Ben Skelton's Blog

Awesome Keyboard

In the last year and a half I have picked up a severe case of carpal tunnel. Part of the cause could be the aluminum wrist wrests on the PowerBook / MacBooks and the fact that I am a pretty aggressive typer. Brian at work thought that it was funny that I got carpal tunnel, as he thinks I have the type of personality that would assume that carpal tunnel doesn't exist, and people are just being lazy. He was right, I always thought it was something that was largely made up. Unfortunately I have determined it is not :(

I have been looking for a good ergonomic keyboard, but have always found the Microsoft ones pretty ugly and hard to type on (they felt like typing on a soccer ball). A couple of folks at work recently picked up a new model of the ergonomic keyboard which is much improved: the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. This is hands down (no pun intended) the most amazing keyboard I have ever used. It feels wonderful to type on, the integrated wrist wrests are great and it works on my Mac (and even includes Mac software for the special keys). I even use the special attachment for the front of the keyboard to place my wrists are in a more natural position.

The only downside to the keyboard is that it doesn't have a USB hub included, which is something that I find really useful. Even without a USB hub this keyboard is easily worth the $79.00 CDN that Best Buy charges for it. Anyone who spends any time in front of a computer should be using this keyboard!

I Don't ThinkPad So!

We have been doing a ton of usability testing at Habañero lately using Morae. Our lab has a dedicated machine for the participants and I haul my PC out of the closet and set it up in the boardroom to observe the tests. This has become a pain as we conduct more frequent tests. Our clients have also asked us to start conducting tests on-site, at trade shows, etc. As such I have decided to get a new PC laptop for usability testing.

I am looking for the PC equivalent of the 15-inch PowerBook. For the record the specs on the PowerBook are:

• 15.2-inch TFT Display at1280x854 resolution
• 1.67GHz PowerPC G4
• 512MB RAM
• 80GB Hard Drive
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (64 MB DDR)
• Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire 400 & 800
• 8x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0

The price for the above configuration is $2,899 (before tax) and I can upgrade the HD to 100GB and the Video RAM to 128MB making the total cost of the notebook $3,159.

IBM / Lenovo (T43)
I always believed that if I was going to buy a PC notebook I would get a ThinkPad T series. They are nicely designed, have great keyboards and are nice and light. The problem with IBM / Lenovo is that they allow no customization of their systems. They have five configurations of the T43 in Canada -- that's it!

The configurations IBM / Lenovo offers that are closest to the PowerBook are: