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I'm your host, John Chidjie,
and my guest host for this,
the 50th episode of Pragmatic is very special.
Not only do we have a few odd things in common,
like an eye for detail,
and speaking of eyes, horrible eyesight,
my contacts are now minus 4.25X,
but anyway, that's to compensate for an astigmatism,
apparently. Anyway, okay.
So both of our first computers was a VIC-20.
Neither of us are excited about air travel
for similar reasons and so on and so forth.
Anyway, my guest host originally became internet popular,
I suppose you could say,
through his writing on Ars Technica,
writing brief commentaries on OS X releases,
and more recently for a podcast called Hypercritical,
which had 98 actual episodes, but ended.
Currently, he's host of the popular
Accidental Tech Podcast with Marco Armit and Casey Liss.
I'm of course referring to John Siracusa
and thank you, John, for coming on the show.
- I didn't realize this was episode 50.
That's exciting.
You should end your podcast now.
- What? No, no.
- It's a nice round number.
It's not how we do it, we just stop.
- Yeah, well, you stopped at,
okay, but just remember you stopped at 100,
but technically it was really only 98
'cause one of them was a public service announcement
and one of them didn't have you on it.
So, you know, I'm just saying.
- Episode number in the RSS feed says 100.
I stopped at 100.
- That's all that matters.
- Yeah, I suppose so.
But I go back and forth on this if numbers mean anything.
It's kind of like an age.
I mean, how many cycles around the sun have you done?
It's just an arbitrary measure of something,
but nevermind that.
It's okay.
No, I'm not stopping now.
Anyway, right, lovely.
Okay, so I thought it would be wonderful to get you on
to talk about something that we've both experienced,
although I think you've been through a tougher time
than I have, and that's repetitive strain injury,
or RSI for short.
But before we get stuck into that,
how much did you love that VIC-20?
'Cause I love mine.
I miss mine sometimes.
- My memories of my VIC-20 are very vague.
I think the only concrete memory I really have of it
is there was pressing the keys
that made blocks of color on the screen.
There were some keys that would like make,
you know, like a yellow cursor shapes.
You could do yellow, yellow, yellow, blue, blue, blue.
And I don't, you know, that's a vague memory.
Did it even have that many colors?
I don't know.
And writing basic programs of just, you know,
printing your name across the screen and that's it.
And like the shape of the thing, the color of the thing,
what it felt like, where it was in living room
in relation to the TV, but that's about it.
I was young.
- Well, I was young too,
but I played with it for years on and off
until we got a, I hate to say real computer,
'cause it was a PC running DOS, but nevermind that.
Yeah, it's what I had, so there you go.
But the VIC-20, now the memory I had
was the silly expansion slot on the back,
which had a more like an edge connector PCB connection
So it was very rough around the edges, shall we say.
And we had a game on a cartridge called Race Around the Block
and we had a memory expansion cartridge which you needed to play certain other things.
So of course you only had one slot and my memory was inserting and removing those cards was physically difficult
and didn't always work reliably.
So you'd put it in and it wouldn't load and you'd have to remove it and try and clean the contacts and push it back in again.
It was... anyway.
That was a while ago.
My VIC-20 was a rental. We didn't own it. It was rented by my family.
Wow.
They didn't want to take the plunge and spend all this money to buy a computer at that point.
I was like, we'll just rent one and see what it's like.
That was back in the days when you plugged it straight into the TV set because monitors weren't a thing.
Well, I don't think that was so much of a thing for the home.
Certainly not a thing for a family that's renting a VIC-20.
No, no, true. Anyway. Well, there you go.
So, RSI and one of the funny things in doing the prep for this episode
I found myself involuntarily shaking out my right hand
I'm getting our phantom RSI pains and I know they're phantom RSI pains
but I'm still getting them
It's like don't think of the white elephant, right?
What do you think about?
That's part of the whole thing with repetitive strain injury
is thinking about your body parts as part of dealing with it
Exactly. So the thing is, there's a the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, which, you know, it sounds like it's for old people, but we're not old. So anyway, anyway, their public employees occupational health and safety program defines RSI as an injury to the musculoskeletal or nerve and nervous systems that may be caused by repetitive tasks, forceful exertions, vibrations, mechanical compression, or sustained or awkward positions,
which is long-winded but pretty well covers it all
but specifically not the hands, only the hands
which is a common thing that everyone in our line of work is
mostly concerned about RSI as it relates to hands and arms and so on but obviously it can
apply to any part of the body. So we're apparently first identified in the 1700s by
an Italian guy by the name of Bernardino Ramazzini
sounds Italian and he described RSI in more than
20 different categories of industrial workers in Italy, including musicians and desk clerks.
But carpal tunnel syndrome is a specific sub-category within RSI. It was first identified
by a British surgeon, James Paget, in 1854. So it's not a new thing. But the first recorded
mass incidence of RSI was actually in 1912 in America with telegraphs cramp from the poor
telegraph operators sending morse code all day long. And I can completely understand that since
I've learned Morse code.
And fortunately that didn't send all day long
'cause it was just too slow and tedious
and talking is a lot quicker.
As well as one of the things that I didn't understand
about amateur radio, because it's like,
here, talk in Morse code.
I'm like, but I can talk to you verbally.
Why would I choose an inferior method of communication?
But okay.
- Yeah, RSI is basically, it's not meaningless
but it's close to meaningless because it is such,
it's an umbrella term and it's such a huge umbrella.
It covers anything, like the definition is so incredibly broad.
The only reason it has to be there is because you're like,
I've injured myself by doing the same thing over and over again.
And that covers such a wide spectrum.
And when you say you've suffered from RSI, it's almost like you've, you know,
I'm I'm suffered from suffering from bacteria or a virus.
Like those are pretty broad categories.
There's a lot of different viruses, a lot of them bacteria,
and they're of varying severity to, you know,
what they're going to do to you, how long they're going to take,
are they going to kill you? Is it just going to be the sniffles?
Exactly.
So, yeah, exactly.
And RSI is one of those, as you say, an umbrella term that sort of covers
so many different types of injuries.
So what I want to do is in a little bit, I'll break out
some of the classified subtypes, but yeah, there's actually quite a lot more to it.
But just to try and keep this down and focused,
I just want to specifically talk about the RSI injuries
that would be sustained in computer intensive jobs
because well, A, that's both of our lines of work
and B, a lot of the listeners to the shows lines of work.
That's a lot of possessives there.
The point is that I think it's probably of most interest.
So we'll just focus on those.
But the bottom line,
I guess I'll get into the bottom line at the beginning,
but lots of bad habits will lead to damage
in much less time,
whereas very few bad habits will prevent injury
for a significantly long period of time,
but you can't actually,
there's no set of rules that you can follow
that will guarantee you will never get RSI.
And this is the thing that people say,
"Oh, you use an ergonomic keyboard,
"you can use an ergonomic mouse
"or use a Dvorak layout of all things,
"and you won't get RSI."
But that's just not true.
At least, yeah.
- It's like motion sickness.
Motion sickness is another,
a very similar parallel to that.
Some people get motion sick all the time.
I'm one of those people.
any kind of motion they get sick, right?
Other people like, oh, I don't get motion sickness.
I'm fine, right?
But that's not the case.
Everybody gets motion sick.
It's just a question of what it takes.
For some people, it would take going up, you know,
into a jet fighter plane, which is something
that people are never going to do, right?
So you're fine.
So basically when you say, I don't get motion sickness,
that's basically true for, you know,
for any reasonable definition, because you're like,
look, do you have to do something incredibly extreme
to my body to make me get sick?
I basically don't get motion sick.
repetitive strain injuries like that too. You say, I don't get
repetitive strain injury. Some people through genetics or
whatever, any normal activity they do, they're fine. But
anybody can be made to throw up by being moved around. And
anybody can be made to get a repetitive strain injury by
doing some very awkward thing over and over again. It's just
a question of how much it takes. And so it really is a
continuum. And that's why until you know where you are in that
continuum, you should never say, I had nothing to worry about. I
I don't get motion sick.
And then you go out on a crab boat in the North Atlantic.
And then you're like, well, actually, I
do get motion sick, but here's my threshold.
So repetitive strain injury, the only way
you know what will cause you to get injury
is by getting injured.
So you shouldn't be like, I've never had a problem before,
and I've been doing this my whole life,
especially when you're younger, like a teenager
and your body's growing.
Eventually, you will stop growing.
You'll become an adult, and you'll
become more susceptible to injury
because your body's not constantly
repairing itself like it did when you were 11 years old.
So yeah, some people are lucky enough
that no normal computer using activity
will probably affect them,
but you don't know if that's you
until you get injured basically.
- Yeah, when you were younger,
did any older people say,
"You're gonna be old one day, Sonny."
Did anyone have something like that?
Did anyone ever say that to you when you were a kid?
- I wish more people had told me I was going to get RSI.
They told me to get off the computer
'cause it would rot my brain.
They did occasionally mention posture,
but nobody said stop typing and using the mouse
because you're gonna get repedestrian.
'Cause it wasn't a thing that people knew about
when I was a kid.
And I used the computer like crazy
with terrible ergonomics for my entire childhood
and I was fine.
'Cause when you're a kid,
you can do a lot of things and be just fine, right?
Yeah, you bounce back really quick.
Then you get older and everything slows down
and it's not quite so,
yeah, the glory days are over kind of thing.
And that can, like, especially if you start with computers
like we did when we were, you know, the VIC-20,
you start when you're young
and you spend basically your entire life
that you can remember using computers
pretty much as much as you want,
you're like, well, obviously I'm one of those lucky people
for whom normal activity does not cause injury.
'Cause look at me, I spent my entire life
playing video games, playing with computers,
and I'm just fine.
And that's the wrong thing to think
because you don't know that you're gonna be fine.
Like, RSI hit me when I was in my mid-20s.
And up until that point, I, believe me,
I had been using the computer plenty.
And it was like, I guess I'm just one of those lucky people
doesn't have that those things that I hear about you know mm-hmm
well see my case yeah exactly and my in my case I didn't start having problems
with RSI until only a year ago so although admittedly you know now that I
felt what it feels like a little thinking back it actually started
earlier than that but it's one of those things that you choose to ignore or you
can't it's like I can't plug into someone else's brain who's had a certain
kind of injury so I know how that injury feels so until I learn how that injury
feels I can't actually enunciate to anybody that that is actually what I'm feeling is
that injury.
And until we become the Borg, I'm not suggesting we necessarily should, but if we did, then
that would make that certain diagnosis a lot easier, I guess.
Yeah, that's the big thing about people who like, until you sort of pass the point of
serious injury, we're like, okay, something is seriously wrong.
For months or years leading up to that point, those people, including myself, have been
suffering from symptoms and been basically totally unaware of them, ignoring them, not
associating them with anything, thinking, oh, I'm just tired, whatever.
And you know, it's like you just you just shake it off.
You're just like, oh, well, whatever.
Like I felt a little stiff and then like you don't even think about it.
You just like I go to bed.
Boy, that was a tiring day of computing.
You wake up, you're fine.
The next morning, you just keep going.
You just don't think about it.
And as soon as you you know, you something you do get injured seriously and you have
that flare up, all of a sudden, if you're, you know, eventually you become hyper aware
of every part of your body that is connected to that part of your body that's injured.
And you realize, you can feel yourself creeping up to that again. Like you become aware of
things you weren't aware of before. You start to look back on your past self and say, "How
was I so oblivious to the signals my body was sending me for this incredible amount
of time that I didn't even notice this?" It's almost insane looking back when you
think about it after you've actually been injured,
while you felt that injury, it is strange,
but it's one of those things.
So, okay.
Now you have spoken about this on an episode
of Hypercritical, it was episode number six,
and it was between 50 minutes and 30 seconds
and one hour and six minutes,
which is a sum total of around about,
you know, well, 15 minutes and 30 seconds, roughly.
So feel free, there'll be a link in the show notes
to go and have a quick listen to that if you'd like.
But there's a lot of stuff in there,
a lot of stuff about RSI that you didn't discuss
some of the other mechanizations of it.
I really wanted to sort of dive into that a bit.
But before I start too far down this track,
I guess I'm curious, at what age do you consider
that you learned how to touch type?
'Cause you sort of, you can, based on what I've heard,
you can sort of touch type, maybe you can.
- Yeah, I don't type correctly.
I took typing classes from, you know,
very young age, single digit ages,
'cause that was kind of a prerequisite by my parents.
Like, well, if you wanna have computers,
you're gonna learn how to type,
because typing is one of those things
you have to learn how to do on computers.
So I learned to type on like, you know,
the IBM Selectric little ball typewriter type things.
Remember those?
- Yeah, I know, yeah.
- And you know, typing, took the typing classes,
did all the things you're supposed to do,
fingers on the home keys or whatever,
but like, I just suffered through those typing classes,
and I hated them, and I didn't actually learn anything.
Instead, what I continued to do
when I was out of that class
was whatever the hell I felt like,
and I do it to this day.
I type entirely incorrectly with my fingers
on all the wrong keys, only using probably like,
occasionally my pinky to hit a modifier,
my thumb for the space bar, and my first two fingers,
and so like, if you saw me type, it's a mess.
But bottom line is, I can type while staring at the screen
most of the time.
I can program while staring at the screen most of the time,
which involves, you know, curly braces and parentheses
or whatever, I don't have to look down at my hands,
and I've been like that for years,
but I'm not doing it the correct way.
- Okay, so when you say you took lessons--
- So I've never learned to touch type the right way.
Okay. But when you say you took lessons, you mean like in an actual classroom environment with a bunch of...
Yes. An actual classroom with a teacher.
Yeah. Like not just one, many classes, many typing classes over many years.
And just I was a very stubborn child.
So what's this actually?
Like I did the exercises, you know, and it just never, I never, you know, I just did what I did to get through the class.
And then I went back to, you know, how I want to use the computer, which was different.
Okay. Well, see what I, my experience was,
I started out with a typing tutor program,
not on the Vic 20.
Oh, I don't even want to imagine how bad I was in the Vic 20.
I was, would have been hunting and pecking.
But as you say, memories of that age are a bit fuzzy.
But when I got to the PC,
I started on a typing tutor program, which, you know,
I thought I was doing okay.
But then when I got to high school,
grade seven, hang on, eighth and ninth grade,
I actually did take typing classes,
but they were school classes.
And the weird thing for me was learning
just how bad I was when I got in there.
I thought, oh, I've done typing tutor on my computer.
I'm pretty fast, I'm pretty good.
And that's when you learn, okay,
you're typing on a typewriter,
you've got to have a correcting,
you've got a correcting tape on some of them.
And when I started the first six months,
I was actually learning on manual typewriters
because they hadn't gotten rid of all the manual typewriters
when I first started learning it.
And so we were learning on those.
And of course, there's no correcting tape.
So you don't want to make a mistake
and your accuracy has got to be greater than 95% or 98%.
It was weird for me and it was also cool because I was one of three guys in the entire grade doing typing
Anyway, but I learnt how to type relatively well but my biggest failing is my index fingers keep crossing the imaginary line
where my teachers often threatened to put a physical divider between the keys which they did for some problem students to stop their fingers from wandering
wandering. But so far as looking at a document and then typing it out,
I have this thing where I can do about 50-60 words a minute if I glance
away from time to time. But if I can trust myself to not look away
from the keys, then I can sort of get an extra 20-30 words a minute because that
looking away really slows you down. So I do okay, but I don't do as much
programming these days as I used to. And most of the programming that I do do is
is more graphical based as in, you know,
it's PLC programming packages these days
are all object, drag an object to link this up.
It's more mouse driven than it is keyboard driven.
And I haven't done too much of that recently.
I do have some scripting stuff.
I spent most of my computing time using the mouse too.
Like I, that's why typing was so disconnected
because I wasn't using a command line.
As soon as I got my Mac in 1984,
it was all about using the mouse
and then there's some modifier keys.
It was just not a lot of typing.
Even a text adventure game,
you spend most of your time thinking and reading
and then a little bit of time typing.
- So are you blaming the Mac
for not having a command line interface initially?
- No, I just said like, that's like computing for me
was not about typing.
'Cause I didn't really start programming in earnest
until I was in college.
Like I just played around with it until then.
So, you know, using a computer meant using a mouse
and I'm really good with a mouse,
not so good with typing.
- Yeah, I sort of, yeah, no, that's fair enough.
I used to, I was the other way around.
I started out spending too much time in DOS.
So I found the mouse to be a little bit odd
in the early days, but I guess I've got used to it
and I'm a bit of a convert now.
I like track pads, but that's another story.
We'll get to that.
But anyway, right.
So two broad categories of RSI,
musculoskeletal disorders and diffuse RSI cases.
So musculoskeletal disorders.
I just wanna list off some of them
and some of what the conditions are.
So first one is a bursitis.
A bursa is a sac containing fluid
and that allows the two surfaces to move joints
without much friction in separate directions.
But it's most often located in parts of the body
where muscles or tendons glide over joints
like knees and shoulders.
Bursitis is therefore obviously inflammation of that sac
and it's just caused by continual friction of the bursa.
So that's one specific one.
Now this one, next one,
I have no idea how to pronounce it exactly.
I looked for a pronunciation, but it's someone's name.
I think it's de Quervain's syndrome,
also referred to as mother's wrist
or and wash a woman's sprain,
which looking from this point in history backwards,
this sounds very sexist, but irrespective.
An inflammation of the tunnel
that encapsulates the two tendons
that moderate the movement of the thumb.
'Cause it's actually separate tendons
that drive the fingers versus the thumb and the pinky
as well, I think from memory.
So sufferers have a tender and swollen thumb
and that affects your ability to actually grip objects,
which doesn't sound particularly pleasant.
Next one on the list is,
oh God, I'm gonna struggle with this one too,
Dupertine's contracture,
which is the inability to fully straighten your fingers
into an open flat palm.
Usually the ring and the little finger
are affected the most,
caused by an accumulation of scar tissue
underneath the skin at the base of the finger
where it meets the palm,
and the tissue thickens and it shortens over time.
Eventually, the tendons lose free movement and in serious cases,
fingers can't be straightened at all.
Obviously, that's going to be a bit problematic.
Dystonia, more commonly referred to as writer's cramp.
Actually, that's one. Have you ever had writer's cramp?
No, I felt my hand be in pain after writing longhand, but that's a long time ago.
I don't write with a pen at all or pencil at all.
Yeah, I had the same thing when I went through uni.
I would go through, you know, it was like a day of lectures,
like six hours of lectures, and it was all handwritten notes,
overhead slides, blackboards, sorry, chalkboards,
or I suppose in the last year
they started retrofitting whiteboards.
Like, yeah, that's new fandangled stuff, that is.
And I used to write pages and pages and pages of notes
in my lecture notes books.
And at the end of the day, my hand was so cramping up,
it was so sore.
But the funny thing is now recently,
if I were to try that, I would get maybe a quarter of the page down and I'd be my hand
would be cramping because I hardly write anything anymore.
Who does?
That's what keyboards are for.
Exactly.
So anyway.
All right.
So yeah, right as cramp involuntary muscle spasms, involuntary hand tremors and twisting
movements by the fingers and sometimes even other parts of the body are affected.
But the tension in the hand and the arm can cause an unnecessarily strong grip on your
writing implement.
Most likely a pen, I suppose.
oddly really prevalent amongst riders. That's strange. But it's also seen in musicians and office workers. So, okay, Games Keeper's Thumb.
Also known as Trigger Thumb or Skier's Thumb is caused by strain under the ulnar collateral ligament. It causes swelling and pain specifically to the thumb.
Ganglions.
A friend of mine had these once. Cyst forms when tissue surrounding various finger and wrist joints become inflamed and they swell with fluid.
It's usually painless,
but it
causes some discomfort because the cyst is sort of in the way and if it's directly on a joint and you physically bump it,
it against the heart surface, it can sting quite a bit.
And ganglions can increase in size over time,
but they usually disappear of their own accord
given enough time.
But the mechanisms that cause ganglions are the same
that are generally thought to contribute
to rheumatoid arthritis.
So development of ganglions could be a predictor
of future arthritis.
It's more of a causal link than anything, but anyway.
Okay, Raynaud's disease.
Blood supply to the bodily extremity
is interrupted or inconsistent,
usually due to damage to the nerve endings.
And it's associated with prolonged use
of vibrating machinery.
It sometimes can be preceded by an infection
caused by the low blood flow or working in cold conditions.
Not so much a problem where I live,
but perhaps more of a problem in your neck of the woods.
But it usually affects the fingers
and fingers can become sort of blue or white
due to the blood vessel constriction.
Anyway, it ranges from like a tingling sensation,
like pins and needles to being very, very painful.
some cases have been reported where gangrene sets in. That's horrible. But anyway, definitely
not haven't had that one. Okay, a few more. Tendonitis is an umbrella term for the swelling
of the tendons in the body from overuse causing tears in the tendons. And a number of more
specific RSI conditions are grouped under tendonitis as a category, such as carpal tunnel
syndrome or epicondylitis, which is the next one that's referred to more commonly as golfer's
elbow or tennis elbow affixing oddly the elbow. Anyway, caused
by inflammation of the tendons that connect to the bone
exacerbated by the repeated strain, the forearm muscles that
extend down to the arms, the wrist and the fingers and
everything. Anyway, the extension and twisting of the
arms, the biggest contributor. So, it's more common amongst
sports people. So, I said we're gonna focus on on computing
injury. So, I should keep moving. Cubital tunnel syndrome
caused when the ulnar nerve is pinched along the elbow's edge
and this compression causes the tingling and painful feeling in
in the fingers.
It generally affects the ring finger and the little fingers.
So finally, the big one,
which is the one everyone goes on about,
carpal tunnel syndrome.
And that's the median nerve,
which runs from the forearm to the palm of the hand.
And it becomes compressed or squeezed at the wrist.
And it affects the first three fingers primarily.
Now, the thing about this is that,
and some of these is that
they're most commonly genetic predispositions.
So there's a narrowing of the tunnel.
And it's three times more common in jobs
requiring assembly over data entry or keyboard related jobs,
which is something everyone thinks,
oh yeah, I'm working on a computer all day
and I've got RSI, therefore I've got carpal tunnel syndrome.
And that's just not true.
The other thing that's interesting that I didn't realize
and I was doing research for this topic
is that women are actually three times more likely
to develop this than men are for some reason,
which is interesting.
Anyway, so the result,
it's a result of the combination of factors
that increases pressure on the median nerve
and the tendons in the carpal tunnel.
It's not actually a problem with the nerve itself.
It can be caused by trauma or injury to the wrist,
overactivity of the pituitary gland, hyperthyroidism,
rheumatoid arthritis, of course,
mechanical problems in the wrist joint,
repeated work stress,
repeated use of vibrating hand tools,
and fluid retention during pregnancy or menopause.
And on that topic,
my wife actually was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome
when she was pregnant with our fourth child.
And it was quite extreme.
she had to wear a wrist splint every night for months.
Start off in one wrist was prevalent in the left
and then in the last month of the pregnancy,
she ended up wearing one on both hands.
So, yeah, that's pretty severe.
And it's more or less at this point
that I'm curious what you were diagnosed with.
Was it any of those?
- It's actually difficult getting any sort
of solid diagnosis for repetitive strain injury
because you'll end up going to your doctor
with a series of like vague symptoms.
and they don't have x-ray vision.
They can't tell exactly what's going on in your body,
and most of the time you have a little bit of some of these.
So tendinitis was the diagnosis
that would most readily be given.
The only thing you can do for the more exotic ones
is rule out things like carpal tunnel functions,
because like I said, carpal tunnel is actually very rare,
just in general, a rare and repetitive strain injury.
And there are specific motions with your wrists
and tests that you can see.
If you have carpal tunnel, this will hurt like hell.
And if it doesn't, then you don't have that.
And it's really easy to eliminate those.
But then what you're left with is like,
well, this hurts and that hurts
and that hurts and that hurts.
And the difficulty is they're like,
well, you probably have some mild tendonitis
and maybe you have this and maybe you have that.
And the most exotic thing I think about diagnosis
is that very often where you are feeling the pain
is not where the injury is.
You just mentioned, which I forget which one it was,
like a cubital tunnel or something
where it's like something, a nerve in your elbow,
you feel it in your in your pinky and your ring finger. Yeah, I had that one way back when, you
know, sort of numbness or tingling in your in your pinky and ring finger, but the injury is not to
your finger or your hand, it's farther up and and what is it, there's a whole series of like things
called thoracic outlet syndrome where like all the all the nerves and stuff that go through basically
your shoulder. If that if you have bad posture, and you're all hunched up over there, and everything
is all pinched up in your shoulders, you will feel it lower down in your wrists and your hands. But
But the problem is not there.
The problem is in your shoulders.
So by stretching out your shoulders
and doing these exercises to have a better posture,
suddenly your hands feel better.
I've had a menagerie of these things.
And so it's not like if they can tell you,
even if they could tell you,
oh, I can do fantastic voyage,
you go into your body and tell you
this precise tendon is inflamed.
It's not like this,
oh, now I have a specific pill for you or something.
Like there's almost never,
the only good thing about carpal tunnel
is there are surgical procedures to help fix that.
that like if we know this is exactly the problem, we can go in there and open this up and make
it a little bit better.
But if you just have sort of, you know, tendonitis and a bunch of parts of your body are all
pinched up squeezing on your nerves and tendons.
There's no one thing you can do to fix that.
So that my diagnosis were like mild tendonitis and some nerve constriction causing you know,
blood flow constriction, nerve constriction and limited motion from muscle shortening
up and you know, the works.
but no, you're almost never going to get
a very precise diagnosis
that you know exactly what you need to do for it.
It's always kind of like a whole body solution.
- Absolutely right.
And we'll get to that
when we start talking about ergonomics shortly.
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Okay, so the next thing to talk about
is the other umbrella category.
So there are two categories of RSI.
And the other one is diffuse RSI.
And this is the one, I hate this,
but this is just a reality.
And the reality is that every categorization system out there
pretty much seems to have a category called general.
And I refer you to episode seven of this podcast
of that title.
Inevitably, as medical sciences knowledge increases
on any kind of disorder,
specific subtypes are classified, named,
individually diagnosable,
and they can have more specific treatments in some cases.
Ultimately, there's an umbrella term that's left over
for those that they haven't reached that point yet.
And that's what diffuse RSI is
for the one of a better description.
It's the, we don't know what it is yet diagnosis.
So yeah, and that's what I got.
Okay, so ergonomics.
Do you consider that you have an ergonomic setup, John?
- Not really, it's better than it was.
There's definitely a dividing line
in my history of using computers.
Before I had problems with RSI and AFTR
and my before setups were just universally awful.
My after setups are reasonable,
but I don't have a special ergonomic keyboard,
I don't have a special ergonomic mouse.
I'm using just stock equipment,
I just have it better positioned,
so that, better positioned for my body,
so my body's in slightly more neutral position.
The reason, by the way, I don't have an ergonomic keyboard
or anything is 'cause I'm such a terrible typist,
And I can't type at all on ergonomic split keyboards.
I bet they would probably help me,
but like you talked about crossing the line.
Like if I try to type on an ergonomic keyboard,
I'll reach all the way across that gigantic gap
and type the keys.
Like it's terrible.
Like, so I mean, maybe I would, I don't know.
I just never got past the barrier of trying those.
They would probably help me a little bit
as probably would an ergonomic mouse,
but old dog, new tricks.
- Yeah, well, we'll talk about those in a minute,
but I actually did used to have a Microsoft natural keyboard
which is supposedly ergonomic.
And I had exactly that problem
where my finger would go across the other side
and my fingers would start to like bump into each other
'cause I was crossing the line
and it really slowed me down until,
'cause the number six was on the wrong side.
And I say the wrong side,
some people would say it's the right side
and say, "Where do you draw the visible line?"
But anyway, all right.
So let's go to start somewhere.
So let's start with the desk and the footrest.
So just to run through the ergonomics,
the good ideas, the not so good ideas.
So desk and footrest.
So the idea of a footrest is it lifts your feet slightly
so that you can maintain a right angle of your knees
if you've got the correct desk height.
And the desk height should be adjustable
to ensure your arms are 90 degrees
when your chair is correctly positioned.
And I say the desk height should be adjustable.
Up until recently, in fact, every company
that I've worked for until the one I'm currently working for,
none of their desks were height adjustable.
Does your company have height adjustable desks?
- They're all over the place now.
I remember standing desks are all the rage
and the standing desks are also height adjustable.
Obviously they go all the way up to standing position
but they also go down to lower positions.
But yeah, this is the first company that I've worked at.
But this has been a trend,
there's been a long time coming
and now finally adjustable height desks.
But before that, what you do have usually
is adjustable height chairs
and that's where the footrest comes in
because you can move your chair to the right height
and then if your legs are dangling,
then you can get a foot rest
to try to sort of complete the picture
while keeping your desk at whatever height,
it's just fixed that.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think it's great that the desks
are now height adjustable
because that's one of the things that led to my problem
was having a desk that was way too high.
So yeah, adjusting your desk height is important
and you should take the time to do it.
I know it's a pain in the neck for a lot of them.
I mean, the motorized ones, the electric motorized ones,
you've seen those ones,
you can push the button up and down.
- Yep, now that's what we have at work.
- Jeez, you're lucky.
Now we've got the ones that have got the pin in them.
So the pin in there is like,
be about a dozen preset height selectable holes
on each of the, well, the bottom of the desk
is actually a U-shaped piece of metal.
So you take the pin out on one side
and it kind of sets, it's sort of connected.
So you slide two up at once
and you put a pin in the front, pin in the back.
It's a bit of a pain to set it up
because someone has to lift it
while you adjust the pin height.
So we don't have the super flash ones you've got.
- That's barbaric.
Yeah, you need the electric ones.
They're neat.
- I'll petition for it.
- I don't actually have one at work,
but there are a lot of people around me do have one.
I'm actually hoping to get one when I move my desk
in the coming year, but yeah.
- You're gonna get a window view?
Window seat?
- I'd probably die.
- Why do programmers, we never get the window seat.
Oh, he's happy in his cubicle.
But no, we're going off.
- I'm usually cold by the window.
I would rather just have an office
for the door that closes.
- Yeah, okay, I hear you on that, that's fair enough.
Why is it companies are going to a more open plan too?
I mean, are they doing that?
- That's why.
- They still wanna pay for partitions.
- It's not that the partitions cost money,
although they do, it's that you can pack more people
into a smaller space.
That's what it is.
- Yeah, the height of the partition
seems to be getting lower though.
I always figured they were just,
I'd like to know if there have been any decent studies,
topic for another episode maybe,
and see whether or not there's actually a difference
between in terms of productivity
from having a cubicalized culture
or having a semi open office culture.
- There was a good story on that recently
talking about open versus closed offices
and young versus old people and whatever.
I'll try to dig up the link and send it to you after.
- Yeah, that'd be interesting.
'Cause I've noticed this trend
and it just irritates the heck out of me
'cause I started out when I was working in North America,
I was working at Nortel in Calgary
and they had cubicles that were probably five foot,
maybe five and a half foot tall.
So, you know, they were, you sitting at your desk,
you saw nothing of the outside, anything,
except the little crack in the door.
Well, it wasn't a doorway,
it was more of an open area that you could walk through.
But yeah, some people actually got those xylophone,
not xylophone, you know, like a stretchy door that folds up.
I don't know what it's, you'd think I'd know that,
but I'm an electrical engineer.
- Accordion?
- Yes, like an accordion door.
Yes, like an accordion door then.
Is that what they're technically called?
I don't know.
That's a musical instrument that it folds up.
That's it.
Let's run with that.
It's an accordion door.
Everyone will know what we mean.
OK, anyway, I'm getting sidetracked here.
Right. So, right.
So you mentioned standing desks and I did actually have a look into that.
So standing desks should be at a height where your arms are at 90 degrees when you're standing.
And but the thing with standing desks, though, is that they're a bit of a mixed bag because there's no lumbar support, obviously, because you're standing.
And you need to correct your own posture.
But some people report that they have better posture when they're standing at a standing desk than if they were sitting, despite the fact there was no lumbar support.
So the interesting thing is, though, if you look at your reaching envelope and that is to say, you know, I can lean over and reach much further when I'm in a standing position than I can have a sitting position.
And people say, "Oh, I've got wheels on my chair.
I can roll my chair across," and so on and so forth.
But some carpets that you will sit on,
that the wheels are sitting on
may have an annoying coefficient of friction
and take a lot of energy to actually move across.
So you tend to lean further and it's bad ergonomically.
So there's no question that your reach envelope
is larger when you're standing.
And there's therefore less energy required to fetch
or refer to other nearby information
when you're standing rather than sitting.
But there's more energy required to stand than to sit.
And a lot of companies that I've worked at will not give you a standing desk.
Just they want you know, you can ask for it, but they won't give it to you.
Maybe that's different. Maybe that's something that's like you say, is a long time coming in North America.
Maybe it's coming here. But these desks that I've got, they're height adjustable, but they're not.
You can't make them standing desks.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag with standing desks.
I'm not totally sold on it.
And ergonomically, there's no real significant conclusive proof that standing is necessarily better.
It's certainly better for some tasks than others, but that's about as far as I'd go.
Well, there's all those studies that say that the amount of time you sit per day is correlated with like how soon you die and all these other crazy, you know, sort of, you know, they're not it's just it's just correlations, but they're strong correlations and you're not people get freaked out about them.
So that's why I think all these standing desks are appearing.
Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And it's drawing the incorrect conclusion from the data
and that's a trap. But honestly, yeah, we'll get to the conclusions towards the end
but honestly, yeah, just getting up and moving around from time to time is probably just as good.
So, alright, chair.
And this is the thing that really annoys me, is that people say, "Well, I've got an expensive ergonomic chair"
and it's like, well, okay, a well-adjusted cheap chair is better than a badly adjusted expensive chair.
So, you know, I just, I shrugged my shoulders
because people say I've got an ergonomic chair, therefore I'm fine.
And I see some people that just don't adjust.
Either they don't know how to adjust it properly,
probably, or the company hasn't taken the time to...
Like ergonomically, we had an ergonomic specialist
working at a company I worked at previously.
And within, I think it was the third day that I was working at the company,
they would come around to do an ergonomic assessment of your workstation
and set everything up properly for you.
And some people refer to them as the ergonomic Nazi,
because if they came around and found that you were sitting not ergonomically,
there was like an invisible strike against you.
And they would like give you a really evil glance
as they walk past you in the corridor.
But do you have an ergonomic specialist where you work?
We don't. I kind of wish we did.
But then hearing about you, they're coming by giving dirty looks.
They would probably grade me very poorly on my posture.
I would like to have my things like I try to adjust everything,
you know, just my seat myself.
I like the chair that I have at work.
I picked it out of the many different models of chairs
that are available over the years in my office.
I've picked the one that I like the best.
I've adjusted it for myself.
It's reasonably good.
But I sit in it like a lazy bum half the time.
My posture is bad.
I realize it is.
I just get lazy.
I mean, and I'm not even the worst.
Like we have in our office a lot of like actual furniture,
furniture, and everybody has laptops.
So a lot of people spend all day,
and I don't know how they do this.
I guess they're young people,
sitting on a couch or like in like a beanbag chair
or in a love seat, or like actual squishy furniture
with their laptop on their lap, which looks comfy,
but then it's just like--
- No, it's not.
- Yeah, it's not, that's not the best, I don't know.
Anyway, I'm in my regular office chair.
I mean, for chair stuff, the most important thing,
I think, is height.
- Yes.
- Because chair height influences,
it influences the angle your arms are gonna be at
and everything, and you know,
if you get just that part right,
then worst case, you can do, you know,
I have a bunch of those big exercise balls, too,
and we have those things that work as well.
Worst case, if it's just the right height,
then just sit up straight,
don't have anything touching your back,
just sit up straight with a good posture at work
and you'll be okay.
Like it's just, it's like sitting on a ball, you know,
there's nothing on your back.
There is no back support.
You don't have to worry about
if the back part is just right.
It's just a flat surface for you to be sitting on
that's at the right height for you.
And that's half the battle.
- Yeah.
So I think we sort of mentioned it
and you just did about the angle of your arms
being at 90 degrees and the angle between your thighs
and your back being 90 degrees,
wrists held straight and in line with the forearms.
And a lot of that comes back to the height of the chair.
And in terms of distance back from the monitor as well,
about 18 to 24 inches back from the monitor.
And you'd think I'd be quoting that in metric,
but nevermind.
Anyway, so,
(laughs)
dear chairs.
So as you said, at a minimum,
absolutely need to be height adjustable.
Gas lift is the most common these days.
I remember I used to have an old screw lift chair
and I used to hate that.
You know, the ones underneath
we had to turn the damn screw thing around a hundred times
to get it to move.
- Yeah. - Half an hour.
Yeah, gas lift is the nicest
'cause it also has a nice cushioning sort of effect.
But the downside is that a lot of people
will use a gas lift chair
and you find yourself sinking during the day
and there's a leak, just get it replaced.
Set it to the right height, it stays at the right height,
everyone's happy, but anyway.
The lumbar adjustment can help to keep your back straight
to prevent that lower back pain and slouching
but it's really there as a preventative measure.
As you said, you really shouldn't be touching it,
but it's there to stop you from,
it's sort of like the warning, you know,
whoops, you shouldn't be slouching like that.
So it's handy to have.
I find that having a tilt on the seat
can help the angle of your legs sometimes,
because some chairs, it just seems to be at a funny angle.
And I'm not sure how to describe a funny angle,
but in order to get that 90 degrees right,
I found that the seat tilt,
I only adjusted like five,
let's say plus or minus five degrees
from whatever it came as, factory default seat, I guess.
I assembled it.
Anyway, point is that seat tilt I find also helps.
But the funny thing is that for a while there,
I was reading a lot of ergonomic studies
saying that armrests were helpful ergonomically.
And I've done a bit of digging into this
and I've found that's not necessarily the case.
- Not just armrests, but wrist rests.
- Yes.
- Remember when people were like,
"Oh, carpal tunnel is a thing."
Everybody get these gel wrist rests
in front of your keyboard.
You should not have your wrist touching anything
while you're typing.
- Exactly.
- Not a wrist rest, not anything.
And arm rests, I have the arms,
I unscrewed the arms from my chair at work.
I don't like arm rests at all.
I don't think you should ever be resting your things.
It's just putting more pressure
on all the little fleshy things that are going down
from your shoulder to your arm to your wrist.
And I don't want any of that being compressed
or pressed in any way.
And sometimes it hinders your motion
because you can't have your arms in a natural position.
So you're trying to avoid the arm rests or whatever.
just no, I want them gone.
Every work chair I've ever had,
I have removed the armrests from.
- Yeah, exactly.
And I actually, in my early career,
I bought into some of that and I remembered saying,
oh, we really should have armrests.
And then the older I got,
the more I realized that they're actually
a pain in the neck.
And then I've read a few studies
that armrests don't actually add any value at all,
ergonomically, or immeasurable amount of value.
So I now feel dirty, of course,
having like 10 years ago, once advocated armrests,
but no, no, ditched that.
And they can stop you from getting your chair
in the right position because depending
on where your desk height is, sometimes the armrests bump
into the desks or the armrests are above the desk
or below a desk or right in the desk
and you can't pull in the chair enough.
Or sometimes the armrests bump into the desk
until you sit on it and you press down
on the little gas thing and then your armrests
go underneath them.
They get caught under the desk.
They're just in the way of you getting everything
in the correct position.
I don't understand why they're on chairs at all.
I guess people just feel like they want them.
If your arms are small enough,
like they fit inside the armrest,
then no harm done, it's not a big deal,
you're not resting your arms on them.
But wrist rests are just the worst,
because you see them everywhere.
They take up room,
and people actually rest their wrists on them.
And not only is resting your wrist bad,
because you're, again, you're pressing against your wrist
and squishing everything up in there,
like you do not want the stuff that's in your wrist
to be squished up as it slides back and forth
while you're doing your typing.
But resting your wrist there
means your arms are not in the right position.
You're tilting your,
basically tilting your palms out like Iron Man,
you know, that you do not want to put your wrists in any sort of non-neutral position
and then wiggle your fingers repeatedly all day. You want your wrists to be as neutral
as possible, you know, just kind of like as they would be just kind of flopping at your
side. That is perfectly neutral, right? Anything you do to change that position, including
resting your wrists and then your fingers, you know, or keyboards that tilt upwards and
then your wrists are on a wrist rest, terrible, bad. Do not put your wrists on a wrist rest.
right. And just on a side note, the suggestion there is that Iron Man has...
The Iron Man suit causes him to have bad posture, potentially.
Well, like when he does the little...
He's got the things on the palm of his hand, you know, he's like shoot stuff out of them or
whatever. He's picking his hand up like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's just... It's not good.
I still want one of those suits, though.
But anyway, it's not repetitive.
You just do a couple of times. It's not like you're thousands of times a day doing keystrokes
while your wrists are in that position.
No, that's true.
I didn't actually have wrist rest sound, but I'm glad you brought that up because that was an oversight on my part.
But yeah, I've never used.
OK, I did retry.
I actually did sit at a desk once that had a wrist rest.
I used it for about 60 seconds and then I got rid of it because I just you're
trying to avoid compression in that area.
So why are you compressing it against it?
Please explain. And it's putting things in the wrong position.
They even have them for the mouse.
You ever see those like they have kind of like a crescent shaped one that you're supposed to put like at the bottom of your mouse
and then rest your wrist on that while you wiggle the mouse around.
Yeah, build into a mouse pad sometimes.
The only good thing that one by your mouse might do is avoiding that wrist rest
might help you put your wrist in a better position because again, people use a mouse,
they'll like lay their arm against the flat of the table and then your hand is lifting up
to get to the mouse and then you're moving it around clicking the button.
It's better if you, you know, lift your entire arm up off the table so it is floating
and then your hand goes down onto the mouse.
Yeah, I have my wrist rest so that I can avoid touching it.
That's what someone needs to do.
They need to rename it.
Wrist... Wrist-Avoid or I don't know, whatever.
The worst. Okay, so just to wrap up on armrests,
there was a study by Cornell University and it showed that there was no significant improvement
to wrist posture as a result of having armrests on the chair.
So, there's a link in the show notes if you want to pore over the findings.
It's an actual genuine study where they actually did try to study it impartially.
So, there you go.
Okay, trackpad versus mouse.
Now you love trackpads, is that correct?
I do not. I hate trackpads.
I'm widening you up. I'm sorry.
I knew you didn't like them.
That's very mean of me.
I'm sorry.
But how about you start by telling me why you don't like trackpads?
It doesn't have anything to do with ergonomics.
I'm not sure where the ergonomics fall down on trackpads.
It's just because I'm so much less efficient.
I feel like it is an impairment for me
to have to use a trackpad than to use a mouse
because maybe it's 'cause I'm more experienced with a mouse,
but I just think the mouse is a better proxy
for pointing to something on the screen with my finger
than the trackpad is.
'Cause in the trackpad, it's more like me shoving around
a rock in a little Japanese garden full of sand, right?
You know, push, push over there.
Like the cursor is this thing,
and as I swipe my little finger around,
and every once in a while, as I'm moving it on the trackpad,
it's kind of connected to the cursor,
but then you got to pick up and I don't know if it's the acceleration curve or the the the fewer
Muscle groups that are involved in me just moving my finger around a few square inch area
Whereas when I use the mouse, I've got my my arm my shoulder my wrist my fingers every part of that entire system
Depending on what kind of move I'm making fast sure and you know in
Combinations like throwing a baseball every part of your arm shoulder elbow wrist fingers are all involved at different points to get that one
big motion to get the ball going fast. And when I flick the mouse to the corner of the
screen, maybe I'm using my whole arm, maybe I'm, I'm just using my fingers, maybe I'm
using the my palm as leverage and flicking with my fingertips. Again, nothing to do with
ergonomics just to do with like efficiency. All those things that I do with the mouse
are probably terribly terrible for me ergonomically, but they're incredibly efficient. And you
know, it's it's what I'm used to in the trackpad. I just well, I feel like I'm less efficient.
because I'm less efficient, I feel like I get stressed.
Like, you know, like stress hormones are released
because I can't, like, I gotta go over to get that.
Like, my wrists start to hurt in sympathy
when I think about having to use a laptop
just, you know, with the trackpad in front of me
just to go type, type, type, then go over, swipe, swipe.
And then having to like hold down the trackpad
with like my thumb, you know, now that it's all one button,
but either way, hold down and then swipe
with the other finger, that, just the tension of that
It's so much greater than the tension of me
just having a mouse, holding down a button,
just to drag a window from one place to the other.
Doing that with a track pad feels worse to me.
I don't know if I'm using the track pad wrong
or the stress about it is just because I'm less efficient
and I'm getting frustrated that I'm not able to do things
as fast as I can think of them,
but track pads do not work for me on many levels.
- Okay, well, just on a couple of those points there
that you made, I agree with some of what you said
because pressing down, and the problem is,
it's turning moment affects the amount of force that you have to apply.
So the further away your finger is, or rather, hang on,
because the actuation point is at the furthest extremity from the pivot point,
and the pivot point being the edge of the trackpad that's furthest away from you,
it's much, much easier in terms of the amount of force required to push down the actuators
at the end that's closest to you on the trackpad.
And that's, you know, like, okay, I get that, fine.
But the problem is that that means that if I want to use the minimum amount of energy to push down the trackpad,
I have to then draw my fingers down to the edge of the trackpad that's closest to me before I click them,
which means I have to expend more energy in moving my fingers down to that point before I can actually click.
Whereas on a mouse, my finger is always on the trigger finger and it requires the same amount of force,
irrespective of the position of the finger on the mouse button, pretty much.
So and also you have to spread your if you want to go to the bottom edge of the trackpad,
which now when the track is all on button,
it's like you said, but it used to actually be
an actual button that was down there.
If your finger happens to be at the top,
now the distance between your thumb
and whatever point you're finger using is increased.
And now you're trying to hold down way over there,
but then also precisely move your finger way up there.
And so again, it's opening your hand up
into a non-neutral unnatural position
and trying to do precise movements
with your fingers extended in that way.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
And I guess I never got the hang of using my thumb
as on the button.
I just didn't,
'cause I didn't start using trackpads seriously
until the multi-touch trackpads,
which didn't have the button at the bottom.
So, yeah.
But the other thing that I do to overcome these problems
is I use tap to click.
I turn on, I go into the system preferences
and I turn on tap to click.
I was gonna say, yeah, like the alternative,
the lower impact alternative of trackpads is tap to click
where everything gets softer and sort of,
you don't have to use as much muscle force to do things,
but what you're trading is now you have to be super careful
because now it's like any kind of missed,
a finger that happens to drop down or move,
like you can accidentally click things
to accidentally do stuff, and I find that maddening.
If I ever accidentally have a finger lands on a thing
and interpret it as a click and it happened to hit a button
and it dismissed something that I didn't even see
what text was on it or I accidentally deleted something.
again, with the stress and stress, mental stress is actually a huge part of RSI that
books talk about in vague ways, but I found that is, you know, it's a big connection to
me how sort of worked up you are about anything doesn't matter what it is, that affects how
tense your body is. And you know, like just stress hormones and inflammation are all you
know, connected into one big long thing. So if you are worried that you're going to accidentally
graze your finger on the trackpad and inadvertently click something you didn't want to click,
all of a sudden everything gets a little, not much more tense, but just a little bit
more tense and that builds up over time.
And so you're always looking for is just relax, comfort, you're not pressing the keys hard,
you're not doing anything furiously typing or mouse or anything like that.
And for me, I'm just not comfortable with tap to click, even though I know it would
be a lower impact way for me to use trackpad.
So I just I just avoid them entirely.
Yeah, it certainly does increase the amount of accidental clicking.
And I'm not going to sing anything to do with accidental anything.
Anyhow. OK.
The other thing that is also is that you mentioned the click and drag.
You can also enable the three the three fingers to drag,
which I which I do regularly.
But I think a lot of it comes back down to, you know, on that accidental thing
is it comes back to precision.
And I find that the mouse is much better for precision
pointing and precision clicking.
And there's a lot less accidental clicking going on.
And that's, you know, I suppose it sounds like
essentially the majority of your argument.
And I can't disagree with that,
but the problem that I've got, sorry,
don't wanna put words in your mouth.
Some people, I was gonna say, some people,
like this is just me,
some people who've been brought up with trackpads
just find the mouse weird and prefer the trackpad massively.
Like they've only ever really used laptops.
They grew up with laptops
and the mouse seems like an anachronism to them.
And that's what they like, they are more relaxed with the trackpads and you know, like, I think for those people
maybe they're just chill about, you know, doing the gestures, second nature to them to do, you know, the sort of drag lock behavior
where you're like, "Oh, now I'm dragging" and now they can drag without having to hold down with a finger
and they're okay with accidental clicks or they're better at not triggering them or whatever, so
I think that I can't really tell.
I still say that I could if we did like a, you know, sort of a test
where you had to click on squares as they appeared on the screen or some
some some kind of laboratory test for like accuracy and speed.
I still feel like mousing would be the trackpad people.
But in the end, what matters is what you feel comfortable with.
And so I see a lot of people, especially younger computer users
who are very, very comfortable with trackpads and just terrible with the mouse.
And for them, the trackpad actually is the right answer.
Will you wait till the the iPad generation or tablet generation?
I should say to be non brand specific,
but the tablet generation,
they look at the trackpad and the mouse as being ridiculous.
'Cause I mean, it's like,
you're indirectly moving a pointer on a screen.
Why wouldn't you just touch it?
- But they can never hit those window widgets
with their fat fingers.
- That's an operating system design flaw, not a, anyway.
- It's a different operating system.
I know they said window widgets.
We don't have window widgets.
We don't even have windows.
If those people are gonna become programmers, guess what?
There's a trackpad or a trackball
or a mouse in their future.
for now there is. For now, yep. But if they're alive today, I
think it's probably in their future. No, that's fair enough,
I suppose. But okay, with a bit of an aside there, but still an
interesting discussion. The bottom line though, so far as
ergonomically goes, I did come across this German study in the
mid 90s that concluded that trackpads versus mice, and they
concluded that trackpads were marginally better
ergonomically, but I couldn't find anything more recent. And
that would have been back before multi-touch trackpads and
gestures and a lot of other stuff. So I, you know,
and if it was that close, they saying it's marginally better,
then it's really not that much better. So, um, honestly,
my feelings for as RSI goes is that incorrect use of a track pad and incorrect
use of a mouse can just as easily give you RSI.
None is really seems to be any better than the other.
Switching between them could actually reduce your overall risk because they'll
generate subtly different strains from different usage patterns of different
devices. So, uh, and this is the,
the thing is I find that precision pointing in and clicking is easier with a
mouse. So there are certain activities I do with a mouse and other ones I do with a trackpad
because the trackpad I find easier for switching windows and you know, just being able to bring
up the launchpad or you know, app switcher or whatever. You know, I just, I prefer to
use or switching desktops and so on. So switching between desktops.
So in the German study, where were the trackpads? Because the trackpad itself as a concept is
one thing, but what I'm thinking of when I think of trackpad is a thing that is centered
under the keyboard, kind of towards your belly button when you're using a laptop.
Yeah.
And that is perhaps the worst position for a trackpad to be in, because it is not
natural for you to have your hands sort of closer to your body and have them tilted
inward.
So they're right in the middle.
Like you'd want the trackpad to be kind of where the mouse is, arms at right
angle, straight ahead.
Your hand should fall on the trackpad.
But in practice, most people who are using trackpads are using them centered
underneath their spacebar, which is a very awkward position, and makes everything different
about about, you know, mousing, you know, swiping around with their fingers on the trackpad.
I, I would I do have a magic trackpad, actually, I don't use it. I bought it for an OS 10 review
way back when but I mean, who if you gave them a magic trackpad would choose to put
it underneath their spacebar right in front of them? No, you always put it on to where
the mouse is, right? So laptops are necessary, necessarily an ergonomic compromise for portability.
And yet that's what most people use.
That's what most people buy as laptops.
- Yeah, but the other thing that I find odd,
and you're right, actually, it is a bad spot for it,
is that some of the, I think it's HP,
have theirs off-center.
And I look at that and that's even more bizarre to my eyes.
'Cause I mean, doesn't that then therefore suggest
that your users are right-handed rather than left-handed?
'Cause they're usually offset to the right.
- You can never get it to the right spot
because if it has to fit on a laptop,
it's always gonna be, it's gonna be like,
given the shape of a laptop, yes, the keyboard should be up there and the trackpad should be
down there. Like the powerbook arrangement is the best you can do with a laptop. But
if you're going to put the trackpad somewhere and the laptop isn't in the question, you're not going
to put it anywhere underneath the keyboard. You're always going to put it to the right or the left of
the keyboard, but you can't do that on a laptop. You don't have anything to the right or left of
the keyboard. It's empty space. The laptop ends there. So they do the best they can. And the
offset ones is like, you know, well, well, most people are right handed. Maybe they sell left
left-handed models, who knows,
but that's such a minor difference.
Like even if you put it in the far right side
of the laptop, it's still in a bad place.
- Yeah, exactly right.
Do you remember those laptops in the 90s
that had a track ball and it was,
you could click it onto the side of the laptop?
And yeah, you remember those?
- 'Cause those were like computers designed
before they thought using a pointing device
was something that was important to do.
They're like, oh, well, it seems like people
actually do wanna use these, you know,
Windows or whatever with the pointing device,
but our current laptop designs have no accommodation for it.
I know, we'll get this semi-circle shaped thing
and we'll click it onto the side.
And ergonomically, it was like a track ball.
At least that was off to the right
and you could kind of use your thumb on it or whatever,
but it was obviously, it was tacked on
like the analog sticks were tacked on
to the PlayStation controller.
(laughing)
The only difference is that PC laptops
very quickly learned to copy the market leader, Apple.
- And put their track pads, A, implement track pads,
and B, put them below the keyboard.
whereas the PlayStation didn't learn that lesson.
But anyway, different show.
- Yeah, I was gonna say,
I'm not gonna let you turn this into a gaming thing.
Maybe another time, not this time.
Okay, so, all right.
So just to let you know what I do is I actually cheat
and rather you could argue that this is a sign
that I'm neither bought into either alternative
or either option, but I don't care.
I have a mouse and a track pad
and they're sitting right next to each other
and I use one for some things and one for other things.
So there you go.
I have my Magic Trackpad right next to my Logitech Darklight
which sounds really sinister, but it's not
What do they call it? A dark field?
Hmm, anyway, whatever
Okay, I did use a Magic Mouse for a while
and I really am considering a ceremonial burning ceremony for it
because my hand hurts so badly after using it for a few weeks
I just had to stop using a mouse altogether for a whole week to recover
It was that bad
So are you a fan of the magic mouse?
I don't think I've ever used one like I've never I never used one as my main
computer thing, whenever I've seen it in the store,
it looks like a beautiful piece of sculpture,
but it's way too low and way too low for me to use.
And it also seems like it's too heavy.
And so I've never even seriously considered using one for anything other than
like display purposes. I do like the gestures on the top.
I do like the idea of kind of a combination of, you know, you've got a little,
because I do like gestures, but I can't use that. It's just too low.
Beautiful piece of art, not a great mouse.
- Yeah, exactly.
No, totally agree on that.
Okay, so when I did have my issues with RSI
about a year ago, I switched temporarily to an Evolant.
I think it is Evolant.
I don't know how to pronounce that anyway.
Vertical mouse for the Bluetooth model.
There's a link in the show notes.
And the link in the show notes is to the US Apple store,
Apple online store.
And there was a comment from someone,
Stelios M from Lincroft, anyway.
And they had exactly the same problem that I did,
the Bluetooth side of it.
It kept disconnecting,
it stuttered when it was going across,
the mouse was going across the screen,
you'd need to bump it to wake it up enough for it to work,
it would sleep like really quickly.
So maybe if the wire, there is a wired model,
maybe if I'd chosen the wired model,
that would have worked out better for me,
but I actually stopped using it mainly for that.
And by which time I switched jobs,
I had an adjustable height desk and my RSI went away
after I got the correct height desk
and correct height chair anyway.
So I stopped using that mouse, but in any case.
And you already told me that you still use your, you use stock standard stuff.
What sort of a mouse do you use?
Did you say?
I'm sorry.
I've just got an old Logitech.
I don't know what model this is, but it's really old.
Two buttons, scroll wheel.
That's it.
Okay.
It's much higher than, than most Apple mice.
You know, it's like logic mice.
They usually like large and kind of fill your palm up.
It's not one of the ones that's gigantic and shaped like a snail.
It's more of kind of symmetrical type one, but I bought a couple of these mice, one
for home and one for work.
God, must be 10 years ago or something.
They're a wired mouse, they're optical,
but they're nothing fancy and they just continue to work.
When they break, I don't know what I'll buy,
'cause every time I look at current mice,
I can't use any of the Apple ones 'cause I don't like them.
And the Logitech ones, my main problem with them is
they seem to have, they're just bristling with buttons.
They have buttons everywhere.
There's buttons by your thumb,
buttons in between the two main buttons.
I just want scroll wheel, middle click the scroll wheel,
And like, I do not need all these side buttons
for navigation and back or whatever.
I would just want to disable those
and I don't even want them to be there.
So, you know, I suppose I'll find one.
- Yeah, I did the same thing.
This mouse I've got here has buttons on the side.
I'll disable them because I'll accidentally bump them
and I flick between workspaces or something,
or spaces, whatever, and I'm like,
I didn't mean to do that.
What are you doing?
You know, I was squeezing my mouse.
You're changing my screen on me.
So yeah, I find it to be more of a pain than a help.
But in any case, they were trying to help us,
but it just didn't work out.
Anyway, so just quickly on track balls.
And a lot of people swear by track balls
'cause they can find movement to almost entirely the thumb
and they keep the arm at a safer angle
'cause it's fixed and doesn't require moving around.
And that's probably good.
It's good in terms of less pressure on ligaments.
But yeah, the truth is that it's really a different set
of muscles that you're using
when you're just moving your thumb around
than you are when you're moving a mouse.
So what were you really doing is,
if you developed RSI as a result
of using a standard mouse badly over a long period of time,
then switching to a trackball will alleviate that,
but that won't stop you from developing RSI
as a result of using a trackball too much.
Yeah, I think you're limiting the number of muscle groups
that go into using a trackball.
It's gotta be much smaller than the number of muscle groups
that could go into using a mouse.
Like, there's nothing you can really change up
on the trackball.
It is where it is, you could put it in a good position,
but then, like, you're not gonna be using your elbows,
and it's not like you're gonna be using it
like you use the trackball, like a centipede game
where you're just, you know, or like golden tea or whatever.
Like it is not a whole body experience.
It's all confined to just your fingers.
That's what people like about it.
I've always found them.
I've always found that I'm not very accurate.
Do you remember the old Mac track pads from Kensington
with the four buttons on them and the corners?
That just feels like trying to use a cursor
while, you know, walking on ice skating rink.
It always felt too slippery to me.
I didn't feel precise.
And it was just all in the fingers
and maybe a little bit of the wrist.
And I just, you know, I would not,
I've never used that long enough to get RSI from it,
but I would, I prefer something that lets me
change things up, change how I'm using it more.
Even a trackpad gives you more freedom than that
'cause you could start moving, you know,
keep your hand relatively still and move your shoulder
and your elbow to move your fingers around,
or you could just move your fingertips or whatever,
but the trackpad is, or the trackball is very limiting.
- Excellent, absolutely.
Did you ever come across one of those
or try one of those things,
Toshiba call them an AccuPoint.
It's like a little rubber knob
in the middle of the keyboard
that you sort of like you can push
and you apply pressure on.
Yeah, you try one of those?
Yeah, IBM had them on the ThinkPads for a long time.
Yeah, that's it.
They're not as bad as,
like they work surprisingly well.
They have the similar problem to the trackball
in that it feels like you're driving the cursor
around the screen like it's a little car.
It doesn't feel like an extension of your arm
and you're grabbing stuff.
So it's kind of like using a joystick to vector the cursor around.
Again, it's, it's a tiny little thing.
It's only in one place, there's a limited number of muscle groups that you can contribute
to making that move.
It's basically you're just going to be putting one or two fingers on it and applying pressure
in different directions.
It's good because there's not a lot of motion.
I've also never haven't used one long enough to you know, get RSI from it.
it seems like it would be working a very small number of
muscles, tendons and nerves to get the job done
because it is super limited,
but it has the advantage of not taking a lot of pressure
and not having like, it isn't the center of your keyboard,
so it's kind of an awkward position,
but you have a lot of freedom with how you sort of meet up
with the little nub, you know what I mean?
And then all you have to do is meet up with it.
You don't have to manipulate it,
it's simply applying pressure.
So ergonomically, I think that probably be pretty good,
depending on how you end up turning your hand over to use it.
I mean, no one has made like an external nub
where like you'd put it to the right of your keyboard
in a better position or whatever.
- Yeah, and what does that tell you?
- Yeah, I mean, that would just seem silly, I guess,
but it's kind of like your vertical mouse.
You know what I mean?
If you can imagine,
imagine your vertical mouse was securely mounted somewhere
and it was like an F-16 flight stick.
I think that's the one that like doesn't actually move,
but it's just pressure applied to it, right?
Yeah.
You could have a vertical mouse that didn't move
that you just applied pressure to
that would work kind of like a track pad.
And it would feel like you're driving the cursor around,
which would be a little bit weird,
but it might be ergonomically pretty good.
I personally can't wait for the neural interface.
Those experiments where they put a cap on your head
and you can sort of like learn how to move the mouse around
by looking and thinking in your brain.
That would be awesome.
I wonder how far off that is.
Not in our lifetime, it seems like.
No, don't say that.
I really hope it happens in our lifetime.
But anyway, all right.
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So quickly, I wanna talk about typing technique.
We already talked a little bit about this before,
but, and studies on this are all over the place,
but it's generally accepted that a good typing technique
will reduce RSI, but unfortunately,
whether it's a useful or measurable improvement
is difficult to say,
because it's so difficult to quantitatively measure it.
You know, fingers crossing,
inefficient key selection, et cetera.
It's very difficult to devise a test
that actually accurately connects that with RSI,
because typically the people
that learn to type as fast as possible,
people that are typing at very high rates are exposed
because they're typing so much more frequently.
It's like one exacerbates the other.
So it's hard to separate those two, I think.
And that's probably why there are so few studies that genuinely try and quantify that,
unless you're aware of any.
I didn't come across any.
No, I've just had my own theories about that, like I've always thought that
using fewer fingers seems worse because you're concentrating all your motion into a smaller
number of fingers. But on the other hand, using fingers like your pinky that are sort of
have smaller and weaker parts.
they're not as sturdy as your bigger fingers. And they're often asked to do the most awkward
moves to sort of, you know, go for a modifier while hitting a key with the other thing or
whatever. And that's bad, like people using our EMAX users and are constantly going for
the control key in the corner, which is why so many people remap control to caps lock
or whatever. So I don't know either I would love to see it because I don't know how those
two those two balance out with each other. Is it is it better to use all your fingers
evenly and spread the wear? Or is it worse because you end up like because your smaller,
fingers end up getting, are more susceptible to injury than your bigger
ones, I don't know. Yeah I don't know either and I'm just trying to think
about how you would devise a test to actually determine that that had any
kind of statistical significance. I can't think of an ethical one, I can think of
ways to do it, you could just teach a bunch of people to type with varying
numbers of fingers and then you know just you do that enough then you're
you're sort of intentionally injuring half of your group there because you're
teaching them to do something the wrong way but you don't know which half so
Maybe it is ethical. I don't know. I'm not a scientist.
Tape up your index finger and your tape together two fingers
and see how far you can, how fast you can go. Oh, God. Yes.
Anyway. All right. Keyboards. Got to talk about keyboards. And
essentially, I went down this road and I found things that
were not what I expected. So I always love it when I'm doing
research for this and I discover things I didn't expect that were
non intuitive. So, okay. Two measurements actuation force for
keys and actuation distance. So just a little quickly about some
of the different actuators real quick, maybe I'll do an episode
on keyboards at some point. I don't know if anyone really
cares, but nevermind. Cherry Corporation in Germany make a
lot of the mechanical keyboard switches that everyone, I say
everyone, lots of hardcore programmers love their
mechanical switches. And anyway, they range in force between 45
grams to 60 grams of actuation, and actuation force and distance
of travels, right about two millimeters for your initial
sensing distance and four millimeters before you bottom
out. The traditional, and I say traditional, IBM Model M keyboard if you consider that
traditional but it's been around a long time, anyway, uses a buckling spring which is a
very unique sound and it is exactly what it sounds like. You push down the spring, it
compresses eventually, the spring buckles and that's what causes a little latch to flick
down and actuate the key. It's a very unique sound. I don't really like them to be honest.
65 grams of force and the actuation distance
but varies between 2.3 to 3.7 millimeters.
Alps or Mitsumi mechanical switches were used
in the Apple Extended 2 keyboard.
Actually, you mentioned, I think,
that you used an Apple Extended 2 for a while.
- Yep, that was from the time of my SE30
up until, I guess, the time of,
oh, it's gotta be like maybe 1999.
So I ran C30 until 1999.
It was even longer than that.
When did I switch to USB?
Maybe on the blue and white G3, maybe.
No, no, I still use it, but that was not an ADB port.
As soon as they got rid of the ADB port,
that's when I finally got rid of the Apple Extended 2.
Well, you could have bought an ADB to USB converter.
That's what John Gruber does.
Yeah, but I didn't.
Yeah, I guess that means that the dual, the Power Mac G5,
that's when I stopped using the Apple Extended 2.
Okay, cool.
Fair enough.
Fair enough, the travel distance of those is about 3.5mm for the Alps models because
they made those out of two different manufacturers and they were slightly different between them.
I couldn't find any information on the Mitsumi key switches so if you've got that I'd be
curious anyone who's listening.
So scissor switch over a rubber dome, also referred to as a pantograph switch, and that's
the type that's used in the Apple aluminium keyboards or aluminium keyboards if you prefer.
65 grams of actuation force, a pretty standard,
but the big one is the one to two millimeters
of actuation distance.
So it's less.
So the scissor switch keyboards have the balance
of that tactile sort of feeling,
but they come along with that low travel.
And some of the keyboards
have much lower actuation force as well,
but it depends on the model.
The Apple model, not so much,
pretty much the same as most mechanical switches.
and even though buckling spring.
So anyway, the lower travel leads to a lot of people
who've learned on older keyboards to bottom out regularly.
And I suffer from this, unfortunately.
I try not to, but I can't help bottoming out
on these keys all the time.
So do you find that's a problem for you?
- So that's the reason I switched
from the Apple extended too, which is I still like better.
That's still my favorite keyboard.
I would still be using it today.
But what I found what happened with them is that
I would end up typing harder, like pressing more,
partly because I felt like I needed to press more
to make the clicking, partly because there's more pressing
that needs to be done for the long travel on the keys.
But you find yourself again typing furiously
because you've had a brainstorm about something
or because you're under pressure to do something
or whatever, that is the worst thing ever, just the worst.
And when the aluminum Apple keyboards came out,
I immediately liked them because I felt like
they forced me to type more gently, right?
Because like the bottoming out type thing,
if I feel myself doing that, it's like,
you're typing too hard now.
Whereas I didn't get that sensation
with the Apple extended tube,
because it's all about bang, bang, bang.
And it was also super loud, it would drive my wife crazy.
And so the aluminum keyboards, they're also very flat,
which is another big thing.
A keyboard should not be tilted.
The keys that are farther away from you
should not be higher than the keys that are closer to you.
If anything, you might want to have a negative tilt where it goes down, but at the very least
you want it to be flat.
So the aluminum keyboards, they are slightly tilted, but barely compared to the huge wedge
that is the Apple Extended 2.
So these things are flat and they take very long.
I type on them more gently.
And if I'm not typing gently enough, I feel it and I say, "You should be typing more gently
now."
And so that's what I've stuck with since then is just the Apple Extended aluminum keyboard
because it's my gentle typing keyboard.
And the less I press on the keys, the more gentle I am with them, the better it feels
time I rest. Yeah, exactly. It gives you the ability to correct
yourself if you're hitting them too hard. And I find that when
I'm in a hurry, I tend to hit the keys a bit harder. And I'm
always sort of shaking my head at myself. And I know I should
be typing more softly. But the thing is, I typed a lot on a
typewriter in the early days, I used to be even worse. But I've
gotten better with age, I think. Well, I like to think so. But
anyway, and you brought up noise. And that's another thing
is some people swear by the mechanical keyboards, but they
are almost always a little noisier, almost.
There's some models that are quieter,
but depending on the different kind of switch,
but generally mechanical keyboards are louder.
And in an open office environment,
I remember I had the last company,
oh my God, two companies ago, time flies.
I don't actually change companies that regularly.
It may sound like I do, but I don't, but anyway.
And he was a big fan of his mechanical keyboard
and he was probably about seven or eight seats away.
And you could always hear when he was typing
from that far away.
Is it, it's just, now imagine every single keyboard
in the entire office is one of these louder keyboards.
Makes me think of the old typing rooms back in the--
- Yeah, sounds like the newsroom in the old movies.
- Yeah. - That was the background noise
they were putting in, because everyone would be typing away
on their mechanical keyboards.
- Yeah, exactly.
So anyway, but nevermind.
Okay, so I did talk briefly.
I used to have a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.
I also call them Microsoft, Microsoftic.
That was interesting, anyway.
And I used to get annoyed by the sticks
being on the wrong side,
but I eventually stopped using it
'cause it got water damage.
I didn't really think it was that great a keyboard
to be honest.
And I used it way before I had RSI.
I used it because my mother had bought it
because she had been suffering from a bit of RSI.
She had a job which involved a lot of typing
and she got it and then she didn't want it anymore
when she stopped working there
and there's no point for her to practice her typing anymore.
So it's one of those things I find is a bit of a trap
to assume that if you just use an ergonomic mouse
or an ergonomic keyboard that'll stop you
from developing RSI, and that's really not true.
And yeah, the tent angle on these ergonomic keyboards
and all these different little,
they'll tell you that the ergonomic keyboards
are so amazing and everything,
but my experience is that they weren't.
And I didn't find, there's no objective studies
that I could find.
All the studies you'll find are typical manufacturer blurb.
You know, it's like this keyboard is guaranteed to,
you know, I don't know, save your wrist from dropping off
or something insane.
It's like, well, of course you'd say that it's your keyboard.
You know, I don't trust that that is an objective test.
And so I'm not gonna quote any, I haven't linked to any.
And I honestly have my doubts.
I think that the force of which you type
and how many breaks you take is far,
and the adjustment of your seat is far more of an influence
than when they have an ergonomic keyboard
or an ergonomic mouse.
- Yeah, but all of the things being equal,
the ergonomic keyboards do put your wrist
in a slightly more neutral position.
And the biggest thing I think ergonomic keyboards do
for people who are having problems
and they're using a standing keyboard
is it simply changes their environment.
If someone was using an ergonomic keyboard
and started to get RSI,
changing them to a non-ergonomic one might briefly help.
But it does, what it's trying to get,
like if you think about your hands,
they're coming from a width that's wider than a keyboard,
'cause most people's shoulders
are wider than the home keys, right?
So you're coming in on an angle,
and then your hands are,
you're making like a triangle with your hands,
but then you straighten your wrists
so your wrists are facing forward.
So now you're bending the tendons in your wrists
at a different angle, then you're putting them down.
The ergonomic keyboard is like,
all right, let's relax that a little bit.
Let's let them be in a little bit more of an angle.
Let's let you not turn them over as much
so your palms are facing straight down.
And the corrections to those angles are so slight.
It's slightly, it's not exactly parallel anymore.
Now there's a little bit tilted.
And how far tilted up are they?
Not very high.
They're tilted up just a tiny little bit.
And sometimes that's all it takes to alleviate it,
the problems that people are having
if they have very minor problems.
But like you said, there's so many other things
that could be going wrong.
you have an ergonomic keyboard and you put it on your desk and
it's way too high. There, you have much bigger problems. And
the thing is, people get an ergonomic keyboard and they say,
I was having problems, I got an ergonomic keyboard never had a
problem again, that could be true for them because their
threshold for injury may have they may have just been crossing
over and just making this minor adjustment while keeping all
their other bad habits was enough to put them in that
threshold, you know, again, with the motion sickness, we're like,
fine on planes, I'm fine on cars, I'm not fine on crab
boats, right? And it's like, well, just don't go on crab
boats and you'll be fine. Right. Or go on crab boats on
calm days and you're fine. Right. And so they found sort of
their medium, or at least for now until they maybe get older
or whatever. But the main barrier for the ergonomic
keyboards, though, is can you still type on them? And the
answer for me, unfortunately, is so far, no.
Exactly. Keyboard layouts, just quickly. Now, I, again, read a
whole bunch of different things saying that Dvorak was better
than QWERTY. And in terms of efficiency, and in terms of
Therefore, the logical supposition that,
well, sorry, it's an incorrect conclusion
to draw from the facts, whether you can call them facts,
is that it's therefore better for RSI.
The old story goes, and just to perpetuate the old story,
that QWERTY layouts were favored
by typewriter manufacturers.
I think it was Remington, actually.
And it was designed to overcome the tendency of fast typists
by pressing common letter combinations close together,
such the hammer's jammed.
But the theory that was at Remington tried to lock in users
that were trained to use theirs by their keyboards
on their typewriters because, you know,
by using a unique keyboard layout, and of course it stuck.
Didn't stop other manufacturers from copying it.
Now, honestly, I don't know if either of those
is actually what's happened or if that's actually true.
There's so much out there about this to and fro,
I just don't know what to think.
So what is undeniable though,
is that the QWERTY layout was never developed
with speed ergonomics balanced or tested
with any kind of rigor whatsoever.
It just wasn't.
Or if it was, they kept it to themselves.
But the funny thing about the Dvorak layout
was that the Dr. August Dvorak,
who may or may not have been born in August,
in 1936 published the simplified Dvorak keyboard layout
claiming vast improvements in speed and reduced fatigue.
But the original study was cited by the US Navy and that sort of, you know,
pushed Dvorak during World War II.
But when I went digging for this thing, turns out no one can seem to
find it, which is a bit of a worry.
And there was an interesting study in 1953 by the Australian Post Office that found
that Dvorak keyboard, if you look at the results carefully, was of marginal benefit at
best. So.
I guess to me, what makes sense is you're not reducing the total number of finger
flexors, if you want to call them that to type a word, you're just marginally reducing the lateral
finger movements. And that may not actually play as big a role in RSI as was previously kind of
thought. At least that's my take.
Have you come across, have you looked at this?
I know a lot of people who do use Dvorak and it's kind of, yeah, it's mostly like I've heard that
it's more efficient. I'm interested in efficiency.
let me try doing that.
And you know that it does, you know, if you're writing English words,
lets you keep your fingers more on the home keys
because there's more useful things near there and keeps the common characters
easier, makes them less of a stretch.
But like you said, you know, the absolute number of keystrokes is the same
if you're typing the same thing.
And the curse of increased efficiency is people don't just take that
and continue at the same typing speed if you are gaining any efficiency
from say not having to take your finger off the home row for words when you used to have
to take them off. All you're going to do is most people are just going to trade that efficiency
for typing speed, right? So now you're typing faster than you were before. So you're not
really controlling all the variables. If you're saying like, well, we tried this and we tried
that and marginal benefit, you know, like it could be that the Dvorak people are because,
you know, it takes less muscle effort for them to type and they just simply type faster
then or or they type in quicker bursts and really their their total typing speed is the
same but they have longer pauses between words and individual words come out faster because
they just feel so much more efficient I mean humans are weird like we'll just you will
you may think the only difference is we just changed the keyboard layout but your habits
will change based on layout and then of course most people learn on QWERTY and then you secondarily
learn Dvorak so who knows if it will ever be as comfortable for them as their thing
they learned on.
And so these type of tests are so hard to do,
especially if the expected difference is going to be small,
that you're just never able to control for everything
to a degree where you're not going
to get some kind of slam dunk result where you're like, wow,
that is a huge change, and it's noticeable,
and we don't even have to control for that much.
You can just see it's just a question
of how big the difference is.
So I'm not convinced that it's that much of a win,
but I could be convinced that if you could snap your fingers
now and say erase all the current humans and erase all the current human keyboards and
make them all Dvorak, I would be fine with that because it does make a little bit more
sense to me, at least someone thought about it a little bit.
Yeah, exactly. And that is great. Unfortunately, whether or not that amounts to anything more,
I mean, the figures that I saw in a few studies were 1 to 2%. Yeah, that's not much of an
improvement. It's an improvement, but it's not much of an improvement. So I don't know.
At least they thought about it, but still.
And whilst the majority of keyboards in the world
are not Dvorak, there'll always be an argument against
'cause otherwise what are you gonna do?
Shove your Dvorak keyboard in your backpack
and take it with you?
So you ever at someone else's computer,
"Hang on a second, I'll go get my keyboard
before I can start typing."
- Everybody I know who does that
just uses a QWERTY keyboard,
but just changes the input thing,
in the little input menu,
with a little flag in the menu bar or whatever.
And just types the wrong keys.
So if you come up to their computer
and try to type something,
comes out as gibberish because they're using a QWERTY keyboard
with a Dvorak key like that.
Yeah, but then the keys don't match.
Like if you're pushing a K on the,
in the K position on their keyboard,
what's the letter K, but you're not seeing a K on,
just like that's confusing the brain.
That's just how they work all day.
That's just insane.
These people are special.
I could not do that.
Maybe I look at my keys too much.
That's the damning indictment right there.
I've just admitted it.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of people work,
have a keyboard that has nothing printed on the key caps.
It's just all black.
You ever seen that one?
Wow, no, I haven't.
It's an entire like full extended keyboard where the keys are entirely featureless black.
That's intense. Wow.
OK, you should get one of those. It'll train you not to look at the keys anymore.
Well, that's true. If nothing else, that would definitely be a side effect.
OK, so after all this gear, chairs, desks, track pads,
track balls, mice, whatever that we've talked about.
BYO or demand your company pays for it.
And I've heard different things, people that believe
that they've got issues with RSI and companies,
some companies will pay for it, some people won't,
some companies won't, some of them require you to go
and get a medical certificate proving that you've got
or a doctor thinks that you've got,
which isn't necessarily proof, but whatever.
The point is that, you know, should you bring your own
or should you demand that your company pays for it
if that's what you're doing for a living?
Ultimately, in my opinion, it's just quicker and easier
to get the stuff you want if you do it yourself. And I guess the
the way that I try and approach this is if
my job or my hobby involves working on a computer, then I want
the right tool for the job or perhaps the best tool for the job to make
my job or my hobby easier.
And yeah, the computer is the tool of my trade.
So therefore, I would like it to be a good tool of my trade
and a better tool is just going to reduce my stress, make my life easier in the long run
beyond RSI, but obviously RSI, you know,
being the topic of this, the focus of this, but,
and I think that if you take the time
and a little bit of money to invest
in a better tool for your job,
even if your employer won't,
you'll get a better net result in the end.
At least that's what I think.
However, in some cases,
you're not allowed to bring in your own PC
or Mac into a company,
but generally they won't ban you
from bringing in your own mouse, keyboard, trackpad,
or ergonomic device of your choosing.
And I'm pretty sure they wouldn't argue
if you bring in your own chair,
but I, 'cause I've seen people who have done that.
They've just they've given up with the corporate red tape and said, you must justify
why you have to sit on an ergonomic ball.
And they just brought their own and said, yeah, whatever.
So. That's just my opinion,
I guess. Yeah, for companies like for paying for it, it's in the company's best interest
to do this in the grand scheme of things, how much it costs to have an employee.
This is peanuts and it is way less than paying for like disability,
you know, or having to not have that employees work
or having them take time off,
that costs the business much more.
Like, it is silly for them not to pay for that.
The downside of companies paying for it is,
very often it's difficult to get like
the exact thing that you want.
Like, oh, we have a keyboard tray.
If you want a keyboard tray, this is the one you get.
We bought a bunch of them in bulk, this is what you get.
And then you feel like, oh, well,
they're getting me this thing.
I guess I can use this one,
but I would actually prefer this specific one.
And it's like the worst of both worlds.
Like, well, we're giving you one,
but you're going to turn your nose up at it
and spend your money on your own anyway.
And then like you said, that gets into rules of,
am I allowed to bring my own stuff?
Like I've always kind of done a hodgepodge
of like company will pay for a lot of stuff.
I'll bring some stuff of my own in there.
Like at work, I use my own mouse
and it's sitting on a tray table that I brought from home,
which is the right height for my mouse to be at
because I don't like using the keyboard tray.
Often has this little tiny area for the mouse
and I want a much bigger area for the mouse
to have more freedom of motion.
So I have, you know, like cobbled together
what you need to cobble together,
but in the end, it's silly for any company
not to support its employees in being able to get
whatever working environment they're most comfortable in
because it benefits everybody.
It's win-win, it's the company and the employee.
- Absolutely, but the resistance that I've come across is,
and I've actually had IT people say this to me,
it's like, "Oh, well, if I give you that,
"then everyone will expect it."
And it's like, well, everyone will expect
a working environment where you're not going to cause
irreparable damage to their,
from excessively using bad gear or something.
I mean, I don't know.
I guess maybe that's an exaggeration,
but it just sort of stuck in my neck a little bit.
And I think that a lot of,
it's the same thing with screens and so on.
You know, the standard screen size is 17 inch,
Forrester 3, that's what you get, that's what everyone gets.
And I started bringing my own 24 inch monitor
'cause I couldn't be bothered trying to get one
the other way.
This is like six years ago, but anyway.
They're not that expensive either, but all right.
Okay, last topic before we close,
or the last element of this topic before we close is,
is it all in your head?
Because I got an email,
because I post the topic list
that I'm subjects I'm gonna be covering
and it's up on techdistortion.com/topics.
Have a look, check it out.
And this one was coming up
and I got an urgent email only a few days ago
when we were originally scheduled to record
and it got literally got in
sort of at the last minute as it were.
And they had been through an interesting experience.
So I think some of it's worth just quickly repeating.
And that is that, you know, if you do fall,
if you've had issues with RSI
and you've gone to a more than one doctor,
or, you know, if you've been suffering with it for years,
you know, and it's been defined as diffuse RSI,
so there's no medical reason that they can find
that's wrong, then it could well be psychosomatic in nature.
So, and the thought is that analytical people
or overthinkers, like me maybe, I don't know,
maybe at high risk.
But anyway, I found the show, didn't wanna be named,
but that's okay, sent in about this.
And in their case, their RSI got to a point
where they had to stop working as a programmer,
pretty much had to stop working as a programmer
for a period of time.
They could only work on touch keyboards,
like FingerWords TouchStream, which they mentioned
for a limited amount of time each day.
And they had, the pain was so bad
that in their personal life,
they had trouble pushing a shopping cart around
because of the pain.
And they went, after several years of talking
to different doctors, doing all sorts of tests,
different treatments, different ergonomic devices
of different kinds, it ended up being a psychosomatic issue.
And by visiting a psychologist that you're able
to potentially address those issues instead
and realize that it could be in your head.
So if you develop bad RSI, doctors can't diagnose it,
specifically it may be worth a shot
because it becomes self-reinforcing.
I think I'm feeling a pain,
therefore I'm gonna avoid doing this.
but the more you think about the fact
that you're avoiding it, then you think
that you're actually feeling it
when in fact it's not actually there.
Psychosomatic things.
Not a psychologist.
So this dividing line between physical ailments
and mental ailments is kind of like,
I think I talked about this on a hypercritical episode
way back when, the dividing line between doing things
in hardware and in software.
It's mostly nonsensical if you start breaking it down.
And what does that mean doing something in hardware or software like your software is
running on hardware, the GPU is hardware, you're doing it on hardware, because it's
being done the GPU, but it's software when you do it on the CPU, they're both hardware,
they both take instructions, they both pull data that you know, so mental and physical,
right?
Is it a physical problem?
Or is it a mental problem?
Well, your brain is part of your body, whether you like it or not, it is not a separate thing
is not cut off from the rest of your body.
In fact, is an integral part of your body.
things that happen in your brain absolutely do affect your body.
And it's not like, oh, you have a mental symptom
and it has a physical effect.
Mental is physical.
It is a physical thing.
It's not magic.
It's a big, fatty lump of things inside.
It's connected to the whole rest of your body.
So the idea that it's surprising that things
that go on in your head affect other parts of your body, all
of which are connected to the thing in your head,
is not crazy.
Just the simple thing is like stress
and what stress does in terms of inflammation,
that's something that's easier to understand.
And conditions that have anything
to do with inflammation can be exacerbated by stress.
Beyond that is like, well, I have anxiety about this thing.
I'm worried about this.
That's causing stress.
That's causing me to concentrate on this thing.
Or just tension, when you're tense about something,
and it causes your muscles to contract,
and your blood vessels to constrict.
And that could cause all--
you could get RSI-like symptoms from that type of stuff.
It's all part of the same giant collection of things.
So I find it completely non-surprising
that things that go on in your brain
can affect your body in dramatic ways,
because so many things that go on, quote unquote, "in your head"
can cause huge changes to your body.
For people who have back problems, or anxiety,
or even heart conditions, all sorts of things
can cause big physical symptoms.
So I'm very aware of that in terms of RSI,
that being stressed or being tense or being intense
can be the difference between feeling fine
and feeling terrible at the end of a session
of using the computer.
- Absolutely.
Yeah, and I think that it was definitely worth mentioning
because it's so easy to fall into the trap of,
there is a medical scientific reason
for absolutely everything.
And whilst that may well be true if you drive down to the
finest level of details, okay, what exactly causes stress in the brain?
Okay, well, maybe you're getting stressed about something and that's causing a release of a certain
hormone and that hormone drives, you know, and so on and so forth.
I mean, maybe you could break it down to that level.
Whether there's value of breaking it down to that level or not, I don't know.
But, you know.
But that's the simplest case.
The reason we draw the dividing line between, quote unquote, physical and mental is because the brain is
so fiendishly complex, and we don't understand how it works.
And it's really difficult to figure out how it works,
because it's not particularly accessible.
No, it isn't, right.
And it is complex.
It is more complex than a giant muscle that squishes
blood around your body.
You know what I mean?
Like, in the heart, it's pretty complex.
So we draw this dividing line, because it's like,
we don't really know what the hell's going on in there.
All we know is that thing's hooked up to everything else.
And then something happens in there, you know?
And so then it becomes the realm of psychologists,
because they're like, well, we don't know how your brain
works either.
But we have a series of heuristics
that we can use to try to influence, you know,
they try to make you feel better mentally in that effect.
And so it goes off into this entire other realm
because it's not, you know, we have, we have,
the only way we have to influence the brain
is through like sensory organs, your ears, your eyes,
you know, you have to hear things, think like, that's it.
Like, we can't, you know,
we can't do the kind of things that we can do.
Like, you know, we can't ice it.
We can't put heat on it.
We can't splint it.
We, you know, we can't massage it.
We can't flex it.
Like, all you've got to do is like,
you've got to talk through it through this black box and you got it you know
so it becomes a different kind of science but it's not because it's it's
it's the same as the rest of your physical body we just have to treat it
differently because our understanding of it is so incredibly primitive compared
to our understanding of the rest of the body and understanding the rest of the
body isn't that great either so we're all kind of in the dark about our bodies
here we're just doing the best we can yep exactly well said I think we should
probably wrap it up and at this point oh you forgot one more thing oh yes one
One more thing, Lieutenant.
One more item on the RSI checklist
that I would think is perhaps the most important thing,
and is the one piece of advice that I give people
when they ask about RSI, like on Twitter or something,
where I don't have time to go into a big, long conversation
about it.
The snarky two-word reply is, type less.
This is perhaps the most important thing
you can do if you have any kind of RSI problems.
Whatever it is you're doing, and whatever it is that hurts,
do less of that.
And that's the easy one.
And the second one, which you already mentioned,
is if you're going to do the same amount,
do not do that amount contiguously.
Take breaks.
So do you, whatever it is that you're doing, do it less.
And while you're doing it, take breaks.
If that means getting a program that sets an alarm off
and locks your screen and makes you take a break,
do whatever it takes.
Those two things, in addition to all the ergonomic stuff
we talked about, I think they're equally important
with all the ergonomics.
Just do it less.
And how do you do it less?
Like, you're like, well, I gotta go to my job.
How do I possibly do this thing less?
If you are doing things that are not
part of your job that involve the same thing,
find other things to do.
So when I had the big RSI problem,
I said I program when I'm at work, and I program for fun,
and then I go to sleep.
And I said, I have to find something else to do for fun.
And it was an interesting phenomenon
where I was like, now I feel good about watching
a television program.
You know why?
Because watching a television program is not typing.
And so I'd be like, you should start getting into movies,
television shows, things do not involve you sitting in front of a computer and
using a mouse and a keyboard.
And I would do those things and I would feel good the way people feel good when
they eat their vegetables or go to the gym.
I'm watching a TV show, but it's like,
I'm doing something good for my body by finding a hobby that does not involve
typing, you know, or go jogging or whatever. If you want to do a double,
I mean like I'm getting exercise and I'm not on the computer, but just type less,
use the mouse less, use the computer less and take breaks.
Excellent. I know you can't see my notes because I don't share my notes either,
but that's okay, but that's pretty much exactly what was,
the simplest piece of advice is to just get up
every so often and take a break.
You know, however you, whatever that break,
you know, turns out to be,
if you wanna go and do yoga for 60 seconds,
well, it doesn't matter,
just change what it is you're doing
that's causing you the RSI issues
or could potentially lead to RSI issues.
And there's a whole bunch of different studies out there,
sort of percolated it down.
And the general consensus seems to be,
take a one minute break about every 15 minutes,
but extend it, so every second breaks,
every 30 minutes, extend that to five minutes.
So take a minute break, then work for another 15,
take a five minute break, then work for another 15,
take a one minute and so on.
And just taking that break, getting up and moving around.
Yeah, and taking a break doesn't mean,
okay, well, I'm typing away at this email.
Oop, now I'm gonna change and I am somebody,
using the same keyboard and mouse.
That's not what I mean, get up.
And I tell you, I've given, I sort of,
someone else asked me this a while ago
and they're like, I'm in the zone, I can't get up now.
I'm like, I don't care if you're in the zone,
get up anyway.
Even if you don't get up, even like,
I find that the breaks that they recommend,
you know, how often should I take a break
and how long should I be?
The worse off you are,
the more frequent your breaks would be.
Like taking a one second break every five seconds
for the entire day is probably better
than going for 30 minutes straight
and taking a five minute break.
If you're if you're bad off, like if you if you have a big
RSI issue, and it's a big flare up, like 10 seconds of
continuous typing versus a minute versus two minutes, that
can be the world of difference that can be the difference
between injury and non injury if you're in a delicate situation
where you're trying to recover from something like you know,
the total amount of time means like don't be sitting you know,
if you're sitting in front of the computer from nine to five
because you got it for your job, try not to be even anywhere near
computer between that use an iPad or something like use
something different, do a different motion do you know,
anything, get away from it. But while you're there, get one of
those programs that prompts you. And if you're having a
problem, dial it up to some absurd thing that makes you take
a two second break every 30 seconds. Like that sounds crazy.
But two second break isn't that long. Just give if you're a
programmer, it'll give you time to think give you time to
breathe. There are many fringe benefits, you can become a
better programmer by just chilling and thinking before you
type, you know, or thinking between statements that you type
now.
Yeah, that's it. And one of the things I'm looking forward to
with the Apple Watch is the it tracks how often you stand up
and sit down and it's got the nice little dial and it shows you.
So you can, you know, you could set timers and so on.
There's an app written by Jim Biancollo called Stand Up.
And that's one example of, I'm sure, dozens of different apps
that help to time to tell you, well, you know, it's time to get up and move around.
And go refill your beverage more often than you think you should.
If you have a cup of water, go dump out half a cup of water, get a fresh cup of water.
Just any excuse to get up and go walk someplace else.
And the good thing about liquids is if you consume enough liquids, then you have another motivation.
Exactly.
If you have to, you know, go to the bathroom, don't try to hold it in.
Just go as soon as you feel like any reason to get up and walk around is good because and this is fighting against the zone thing.
The whole it's like, I'm in the zone. I got to keep typing.
No, you will hurt yourself.
Like, that's it.
Maybe that's a young man's thing.
I remember being in the zone.
I still kind of get into it like that, too.
But I find that if I am, I find that if I'm in the zone
and I have to go home because I got to pick up the kids or something,
I'll have that whole day, you know, that evening and that night
and that morning to think about it.
And when I come back in the next day, inevitably I will do something.
I will undo whatever it is I did in the last, you know, 10, 15 minutes
the previous day, because I have now thought of something better.
And that's just something that comes with age and wisdom of like
knowing that if you give your brain some time to work on this problem,
that we'll come up with a better solution.
What you think is the awesome solution
is gonna work right now, probably would,
but if it's all coming in a big flash,
maybe think about it a little bit more.
- I think that when you're in the zone,
it gets very much tunnel vision
and you tend to focus in on,
yeah, this is gonna solve all the problems,
this is brilliant, I'm in the zone, I'm gonna keep going.
And you don't stop to think about the other ramifications
beyond the specific issue you're trying to solve.
And if you've got a bit of code
that's gonna have a lot of interaction
with other components, other objects,
and so on and so forth, then you'll tend to miss things.
And I, yeah, I totally agree.
I found exactly the same thing. I take a break, I come back.
I always churn out a better code than if I'm in the zone for, you know,
I feel like I'm in the zone.
I'm feeling like I'm doing great, but I'm really not.
The next day, like let yourself sleep on it, because what you'll find out is you had
an awesome solution to the wrong problem.
And then when you look to the big picture, like, does this problem
even need to be solved? What am I actually doing here?
Do I even need this entire class?
Do I even need this entire thing?
It's like, is this an actual problem or have I, you know,
have I framed the entire thing wrong?
And I got to delete all of that
'cause it's the wrong approach.
Even if it's like a brilliant implementation
of that approach, like I find that all the time.
And so yeah, taking breaks and thinking is beneficial.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So I find when I want to take a break from,
and one of the great things,
I know people have been ragging on tablets recently saying,
oh, tablet sales are slumping,
therefore it's the end of tablets or whatever,
but no, it's not.
But irrespective, the point is that
that is now a new different data entry method
using different set of muscles.
So what I'll do is if I get fatigued
or I wanna take a break from typing on a keyboard
and I'm at home, I'll get up and I'll continue working
on my iPad on the couch, different seating position,
different set of muscles, and that's another way
I can shake it up a bit.
And that works for me.
So I think that's great.
So if I had to put an order of priority on improving
and you had to get equipment, so beyond the free one,
the completely free one that costs you nothing,
I guess that's the definition of free anyway,
which is getting up regularly,
then I would start with the chair, followed by the desk
and your foot rest.
And 'cause everything flows from that.
Yeah, adjusting your screen height.
You know, if you can get an adjustable height,
'cause I know some people,
some companies will just give you the monitor
and the monitor's on a stand and it's sitting on the desk,
you can't really adjust the height.
Well, if you can get a monitor arm and adjust the height,
then that's a big help for me.
Just get a physician's desk reference,
get a bunch of thick books.
That's what I have at work.
Just, you know, you went to college
or you got some big books, stack 'em,
put the monitor on top.
Sometimes it's not the sturdiest in the world,
but it works.
- I actually worked for a company that,
can you believe this, actually banned you from using books
because they said the books were unstable.
They had to be company approved monitor stand,
like squares of plastic.
- They're probably right,
but as long as they're gonna give you
the squares of plastic, that's fine.
But I'm just saying, whatever it takes.
For things with height adjustments,
it doesn't need to be rocket science
to get things in the right position.
- That's true, that's true.
I do prefer the monitor arms though,
because I can position the screen in exactly the right spot.
So, but anyway, that's getting the nice to have
but not as important perhaps.
And now we're down the list to ergonomic mice
and ergonomic keyboards.
And that's where a lot of people start.
But honestly, I think you get diminishing benefit
from them anyway.
If you currently have RSI,
then choosing a different ergonomic mouse
or ergonomic keyboard could help,
but it depends on specifically what RSI you've got.
Try a few different ones and see what works for you.
That's the bottom line.
but don't think that just getting an ergonomic mouse
or keyboard is just gonna save you.
And then finally, when you're typing,
just use as soft a touch as possible
and the less strain, the better.
And yeah, that's it.
Any other parting thoughts, John?
Any other wisdom?
- We've solved the world's problems now.
- We have, yes.
- Go forth and type.
- Or take a break from typing.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- Cool, okay.
Well, if you don't wanna talk more about this,
you can reach me on Twitter @johncheegee and my site at techdistortion.com,
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I'd also like to thank my guest host, John Syracuse, for coming on the show.
And what's the best way for people to get in touch with you, John?
You can find me on Twitter, my last name at Twitter @saracusa, and you can see my website
where I almost never write anything these days at hypercritical.co, and you can also
find me every week on the Accidental Tech Podcast.
That website for that is atp.fm.
>> Fantastic.
Well, thanks for everyone for listening, and thanks again, John.
>> It's fun.
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