The input animal.

My usually white Microsoft Internet keyboard was looking a bit dark, being toned-down by layers of dust and oil (courtesy, my hyper-active sebaceous glands). Since I've been looking forward to rid my keyboard of 'keyboard dandruff' for sometime anyway, I got a screwdriver, some soap water in a mug and some shaggedy old rags for the clean up. After painstakingly removing all the keys, I washed them individually in the soap water, put them out for drying in the shade and then wiped each key seperately with a clean cloth. Try doing it sometime and you will be surprised how much pain can accumulate in your fingers in one day!

I gave my 'input animal', aka my Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical, a quick sponge bath too. But, alas, my keyboard had drowned in the sudden deluge of my loving care, while my corded pet survived. The keyboard had lost sense under the space key and the up arrow key. I tried to go on with these handicaps at hand for sometime. But, as is usual in a murphy-law-abiding universe, there suddenly seemed to be too many things that involved the use of precisely those keys that went kaput. So, interring the fallen keyboard in its original box, rather unceremoniously, I embarked on a journey that would help me buy a new and better kbd.

My mouse, though surviving my rigorous clean-up unscathed, was never in an awe-inspiring state. The middle scroll wheel, feeling that it hasn't been scratched for sometime, decides to scroll down one notch, by itself. It's especially irritating when you are playing Quake III arena, and you find yourself with a gauntlet when you were sure that you were holding a rocket launcher just a while ago. Or, when trying to follow a confusing IEEE paper, you suddenly don't have a clue of what the sentence you were reading means (quite understandable?), just to realise that the mouse had taken the liberty of scrolling down a few lines. So I planned on making it a double purchase of keyboard and mouse.


The mouse hunt:
I always wanted one of them mouses that had plenty of buttons on the sides. They looked cool. And I could do with a mouse with higher resolution as well, as I can cover more screen real-estate with as little wrist movement, and hence fatigue, as possible. For the keyboard, I wanted one with more accessible special shortcut keys than the current one. My desktop (like in wooden furniture) has a sliding pad for keeping the keyboard and I don't always extend it to the fullest. So the top-row special shortcut keys were seldom used. I also want the keyboard to be comfortable for 24/7 coding and gaming. So a palm-rest is compulsory. Initially I wanted a white keyboard as I am quite a nocturnal (read: 24/7) computer user. But, the model I came to like (more for it's cost-effectiveness than the drool-factor) looked not quite 'neat' in white. So I embraced the black one instead.

Next, there's the issue of chorded and non-chorded 'mouse devices'. (courtesy microsoft support. I didn't know if it was mice or mouses.). I've never tried a cordless mouse. I didn't know if they would be practical, as in
- battery life (how long before I have to recharge),
- range (I hear bluetooth ones can have a large enough range),
- orientation(u know, without the tail that I was used to),
- latency (I've heard ppl in forums talking about a noticeable lag in high speed fps games)
- etc (?)

So, after much online and offline window shopping, I bought an iBall Laser mouse. Like the one below:

Pretty neat, IMHO. And my HOs are freakin' damn good :p

Being a laser mouse, it works on the principle of 'Laser Interferometry'. Based on what I can put together, a laser mouse basically splits a single beam of laser and bounces one beam on the mouse-pad surface and the other onto a standard reflector assembly. When the beams are recombined, they form an interference pattern. An interference pattern is formed because of constructive and destructive interference of light waves. This pattern changes based on the path length of one beam. No prizes for guessing that it is the beam that went out of the mouse. Depending on the laser's wavelength and the quality of the sensor, it seems that you can monitor movements as small as few nanometers! Imagine the cursor moving accross the screen just because a clump of atoms moved under the mouse!(yeah, I am exaggerating.) In any case, the interferometer used in our 'mouse devices' are dirt cheap ones [link], so no worry.

According to the iballonline website, this mouse features:

• a 1600cpi (counts per inch) laser which, I am told, is 30 times better than my old optical mouse. This helps very much if u have a large screen resolution and frequently run out of mouse pad space to move that cursor accross the screen.

• 6700 frames/sec scan rate gives you great control over the mouse cursor's position. This is especially important in intense online FPS gaming sessions, where it's virtually a matter of your mouse's speed that determines whether you ar your enemy gets headshot.

• Upto 20 Gs of acceleration recognized. This too aids in moving that cursor where you want.

• Laser interferometry's resolution is so high that the mouse can see bumps where you cannot. This means that you can use even your ordinary opaque mirror or glass sheet as mouse pad!

• The mouse also features 6 buttons: 3 normal buttons, 2 butons on the side for 'forward' and 'backward' navigation (in browsers, itunes, etc) and one MS Office shortcuts button. This last button displys a circle of shortcuts for a fixed number of tasks. I am not so sure whether OO.org users will be pleased though as I was not able to change the list of office icons displayed. When u click this 6th button inside one of the MS Office apps supported, you will get a different set of shortcuts. There is an utility provided for changing this shortcut list though. Here's a couple of screenshots of the shortcut lists; first is the generic one and the next is the one you will see inside MS Word.

The mouse, being as radical as it is, needs some getting used to at first:
The first thing to get over is the fact that, your mouse is a *very* twitchy little creature that is over-enthusiastic to go to wherever you want it to. It might make you think of your previous mouse a stuborn mule. But all the lightning response can get to you, as you need to allow some slack for your 'positioning muscle' 's waver. So in desktop modes, you may be better off scaling down the sensitivity a bit. Else you will find yourself overshooting your target. You can max the sensitivity before starting a game.
The second issue is a bit more of a complaint. Even with a very high resolution mouse like this, you will often find that you need to "lift and drop" the mouse to the center of the mouse pad. But with this mouse, the laser's range is a bit too high, which effectively increases the "lift height" during such operations. The manufacturer can amend this situation. I know this because, the logitech lazer mouse devices used to suffer from this very same issue. Now they have the issue no more.
The mouse cost me Rs.725 after a quick haggle from Rs.780. But a forum friend told me that his friend had bought it for Rs.600 :( I am no good at bargainig.....barganing....whatever.

Keying the (i)tunes:
Coming to my new keyboard, there isn't much to say. Not that it isn't good. I love my new keyboard, but it isn't exactly new technology. Here's my keyboard's profile. And here's a photo of it which I was able to google up:

I really like the multimedia buttons on it as I always run iTunes in the background. It used to be tough, for example, to move to the next song if I wasn't in the mood for the current song, or if I wanted to pause the song when I answer the phone or door. The volume control is also god-sent as my speaker unit usually involves a bit of a stretch to reach.Now I can just minimize iTunes to system tray and be working in Visual Studio or in 3D Studio Max and still be able to control iTunes as if it were on the foreground! It seems impossible to think that I lived without these facilities for so long. But I have to mention that, sometimes, the keyboard seems to be unable to find the iTunes window to send the api calls to. But after I bring the itunes window to the front once, the issue dissolves.

There are a variety of other shortcut keys, as you can see, and they are totally configurable. Absolute control indeed. The function keys are actually 'dual-function' keys (heh). By default, the function keys behave as shortcuts for various word processing and email related tasks like undo, redo, new, open, close, reply, forward, send, spell, save and print. To turn this upside down world the right side up, press the F-Lock toggle key and you get back your old Function key functionality. Interestingly, the Scroll-Lock LED is missing. In its place is an LED to indicate to you the state of the F-Lock key. Who cares? I can truthfully say that I never used scroll-lock, except to check if the LED glowed, perhaps.


My next keyboard?
Assuming this keyboard lasts for more than a year, I would like to buy the new Microsoft keyboard with built-in zoom slider and other cool features. But I would not say no to this drool-inducing piece of gadget, the Optimus, too. Take a look:

Drab? I see that you under-estimate the optimus. You see, the Optimus has an OLED key surface. It means that, not only can you change a key's function via software, you can actually change the key's display (color, font, image, animated icon) too! Now, it's no longer drab, is it? And, you've got to love that extra block of colorful keys.

Here's the optimus in Quake 3 mode :p~

Here's a look at the colorful block:

For the money-minded:
Microsoft Multimedia keyboard = Rs.1050
iBall Laser Precise mouse = Rs.725