neata!

Two years have passed since my last post. I’ve seen some doctors, done some tests and at least for now nobody knows what I have, where do the pains in my fingers and wrist come from. Well, to be honest, the wrist hurts much less, while the fingers (notably the index) can hurt as hell when I click. So here’s an updated list of things I did/tried in order to allieviate some of the pain.

– In Windows I replaced the double click of files/folders with the one weblink – like click – hey, sounds stupid but it cuts an enormous amount of clicks in half.

-In found out that in 3ds Max (maybe other softwares do it as well), one can map shortcuts to the numbers on a Numeric Pad, adding at least 10 commands to the 1 key shortcut realm. It wasn’t obvious to find a NumPad that had an Esc key (quite useful in plenty of softwares) – apparently on Mac one has more options. In the end I settled for this

– I do have a keyboard with a scroll wheel on the side – it can help a lot in Autocad for zooming. Unfortunately Autodesk has integrated the drivers for the 3dconnexion mice in Autocad (starting with Acad 2011) and they are crap, so I still need to zoom/pan with something else

– I tried the large 3dconnexion mouse, the Space Pilot Pro, hoping I could assign a lot of shortcuts and functionalities to all the buttons in features. Unfortunately my left hand (wrist and fingers) started to hurt after very few hours of use. The problem was that the ergonomics of the “thing” were ruined by the large piece of plastic on which the left hand rests. It changes the position completely compared to the Space Navigator…to the worse. So a word of caution to those who want to upgrade – test it before you buy it!

– I got the Wacom Intuos 5s tablet, the one that has touch functionality embedded along the classical stylus one. Well, I must admit, it has a lot of potential – unfortunately it’s not fully exploited yet – sort of like the first iphone. The gestures it recognizes are ok, but not fully customizable in the sense that one can start to cutomize only gestures with a minimum of 3 fingers. All the simple ones, with one or two fingers are assigned to the default Windows features and you cannot change them…yet. I hope Wacom will unleash to full potential of this tablet by allowing full customization of all the gestures. If that happens it will become a great tool. Until then, I take advantage of the fact that the Intuos 4 and 5 share the same stylus, allowing me to keep them side by side for the time being.

-for painful moments, usually in winter, I found some relief in using these Thermoskin gloves -  they keep the joints warm with some compression, fingers included which is really helpful.

Other episodes can be found here:

Episode 0 (in Romanian) – Episode 1 – Episode 2