Maybe some ergonomics

When I try to look something up on the web and I can't find it, and I later find the answer myself, I feel like it's my responsibility to put it out there.  That's how this got started.

The question: would an Apple Magic Trackpad fit comfortably in the middle of a Kinesis Freestyle split keyboard.  The answer is yes, there's plenty of room.  An older review I found made it sound like there was barely enough room, maybe they've made the cable longer.  They say 8", and the max. separation between the halves is at least that.  You'll probably angle them a bit which opens up most of the gap even further.

A wider question is why?  The short term answer is two-fold: first, I switch back and forth between mouse and trackpad a lot and wanted to see if I could make room for both on the keyboard tray.  My preferred keyboard since the mid-90's has been some version of the Microsoft Natural ergonomic keyboard, but the current version is huge (Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000).  And like most keyboards it has that annoying numerpad on the right that just takes up space and makes you reach further for the mouse.  If Microsoft sold the same keyboard with the numberpad on the left, or a detached numberpad, I'd probably never buy anything else.  But they don't.  (I've thought about trying this but I think it would be more difficult with the current version.)  This has annoyed me for years, especially the last 8 or so years when carpal tunnel syndrome has occasionally caught up with me, but wanting to use the trackpad is what finally pushed me over the edge and sent me off looking for the best approximation I could find to a smaller footprint ergonomic keyboard.

A bit of background: my previous job had me at a keyboard most of my waking hours -- frequently from 6am until midnight, sometimes more -- remotely overseeing operations of an instrument on a telescope several thousand miles away, jointly operated with some folks several thousand miles away in nearly the opposite direction.  We communicated via various chat clients so I'd be typing nearly all that time.  And my carpal tunnel syndrome really took off.  My employer had various keyboards I could try including the Goldtouch split keyboard and the Kinesis Contoured (but not the Kinesis Freestyle).  I didn't really like the Goldtouch although today I can't recall the specifics, and the Kinesis Contoured was a bit too much of a change for me.  I preferred the Microsoft keyboard to both.  I did change out mice a lot which was a huge help, and maybe I'll get to that in a bit.

My current job is much more mixed, I might be at my desk for a few hours but then I'll be off in a lab working on some hardware.  The lack of so much constant repetitive motion has mostly kept the carpal tunnel syndrome from flaring up, it only really happens if I strain my wrist working on something.  I point this out simply because ergonomics are a concern but are not currently the driving force they once were in determining my setup -- if they are for you, you should keep that in mind.  Having said that, I did something to mess up my right wrist yesterday and it was pretty uncomfortable this morning but has been getting progressively better as I type this post, so it can't be too bad.

Here's the full setup, with the Kinesis Freestyle for Mac, VIP attachment, and to the upper right the separate keypad.  (Click on the photo or visit the Flickr page for a larger view.)  My initial impressions: the trackpad fits there nicely, but it's lower than the keyboard and a bit awkward to access, I'll probably try to find some way to prop it up.  I do find myself at times using the trackpad and mouse simultaneously, trackpad to scroll and mouse to point.

As for the keyboard itself: the wide split feels comfortable but is going to take some getting used to.  It forces me to move my hands less (reaching over to the wrong side is just too much of a reach) so that's probably a good thing.  I'm also not much of a touch typer, I'm often glancing at the keyboard as I type, but strangely I find myself doing that less with this keyboard even though it's new and unfamiliar.  I guess my hands just don't have as much space to get lost.  Since it's not a fixed keyboard, if it doesn't feel quite comfortable you can easily shift it around a bit and try a different angle, that's nice but I'm not sure I'll ever stop fussing with it.  (Mixing things up may well be a good thing to avoid repetitive stress though.)  I miss the larger keys on the Microsoft keyboard, the biggest hitch being the command (Alt on the MS keyboard) key -- for copy, cut and paste I'd hit that with my thumb, that's not very practical now.  The forward and back delete keys next to each other have caused some unexpected deleting.  I'm not used to the somewhat exiled ESC key position yet, but I'm getting there.  If you're coming from an MS Natural keyboard, one nice thing is that (other than the F keys) the keyboard is split in the same place.

In the greater scheme of things the feel of the keystroke is in the same ballpark as the MS keyboard, neither are my favorite ever but I vastly prefer it to the current line of Apple keyboards for instance.  Initially I thought these keys felt a little more, I don't know, soft and vague, but after a morning of typing they feel fine and I feel like I'm typing faster than on the MS keyboard, so I think it's just the initial impression from these keys taking a bit less force.  A huge bonus to me is having a keyboard with the keys in the right place for OS X and the additional mac keyboard volume etc. keys -- in other words, a Mac keyboard instead of a remapped Windows keyboard.  Things will be a bit weird when I boot up in Windows, but Windows is all about confusion, frustration and discomfort, so I doubt I'll notice.  (Or, to be fair, it's simply never concerned itself with being the opposite of those, but I'm getting off track.)

You might notice I have a small collection of pointing devices -- as I mentioned briefly before, when my carpal tunnel syndrome was at its worst I found alternating pointing devices was a big help.  The least stress-inducing was the Evoluent VerticalMouse 2.  You can read my review here, the short version is yes it works to reduce inflammation but that's the only reason I'd use it, and as you can see it's not even on my desk now.  My favorite mouse is something like the (ancient) Logitech MX510 -- I really prefer a minimum of 6 buttons and the kind of accuracy those mice give when, for instance, working on a photo in PhotoShop.  I can't use the VerticalMouse at all in PhotoShop, maybe the newer versions are better though.  The Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 (soon MS product names will be full paragraphs complete with specs) is a reasonable compromise, the pointing is a little more sloppy but it's more comfortable, and I alternate between that and the Logitech mouse.  If I'm just browsing the web the Apple Magic Touchpad is great, for photo editing it's great to use for scrolling around, and the gestures in OS X make it a pleasure to use in general.  But as a precision pointing device, a mouse is better.  (And with "Magic" in its name, you might be disappointed to find that its use is not accompanied by singing pixies and dancing unicorns.)  Finally there's the Apple Magic Mouse, which seems like it might be a nice compromise between the trackpad and the mouse, but every time I start using it the lack of a middle button kills it for me.  (And again, no pixies etc.)  I guess I should try this at some point.

So I'll see how this works out and I'll update this post or add additional posts or something.  I've put this on my pretty-much-never-used blog instead of my pretty-much-never-updated webpage in case anyone wants to ask any questions.

Mostly Not

Apparently I'm not very good at this blog thing. At least this blog anyway. It seems like I need to have a picture to talk about something. So I post a lot on my Flickr page and not so much here. I probably should be using this space to provide some context to the photos. Maybe someday.

Cerberus

This cat can not be defeated. Seen on Flickr.

Cerberus
Originally uploaded by Latente ★ Il Futuro è nel baratto

And now, a photography blog?

I've finally decided to start writing something here, for a few reasons. I used to write my own web page, with lots of stuff including photos of rock art. Then I started posting photos on Flickr because (a) it was so much easier, and (b) it made it easy to link one photo (like a closeup) to another. For instance:



What I wasn't expecting was how much of a benefit the Flickr community was -- my web page always brought in a lot of email, but the more immediate feedback aspect of Flicker made it much more interactive. The web page felt much more one way, Flickr was more like a conversation. So that's the first reason for writing things down in blog form -- if I have something to write down, it would be nice to have some feedback.

And following from that, the second and more immediate reason is that I now have some stuff I want to write down, mostly for my own benefit. I've been learning a lot over the past two years about the whole digital darkroom end of things. Well, maybe learning isn't the right word, since it might indicate that I know what I'm doing . . . but my workflow has evolved a lot. I keep trying different things. And in the last week I've realized that it hasn't always been for the better, that apparently I've completely forgotten some of my old tricks which work better than my new ones. I used to process my images pretty much exclusively for the web, without a great deal of care, because I thought if I ever actually wanted to print anything I should go back to the original image and work a bit harder at it. That's probably true, but I'm now at the point where I want to try to make some prints, both for myself and for other people who have asked, and in two of the three first images I went after I found I was unable to reproduce aspects of my earlier work. In one case I think I've figured it out, in the other I'm still only left with guesses. So I better start writing this stuff down for myself. And I'll do it here so that you can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

I'll start with what I learned today: if I'm scanning slide film of rock art (ocher pictographs at least), when it comes to color, VueScan does a much better job than Nikon Scan.

I started reworking this photo yesterday, here's the version I posted on Flickr long ago:



I scanned that with my old scanner, a Nikon Coolscan IV. With that scanner there was a trade off between dynamic range and resolution -- I could do a single pass scan and see resolution limited only by film grain in many films, but also a lot of noise in the shadows. Or I could do a several pass scan to bump up the signal in the darker areas. But that scanner didn't support multiple pass scans, I used VueScan to do that. The scan head wouldn't always be perfectly realigned for each pass though, so multiple passes would soften the image a bit. On average, the more passes the softer the image but the more dynamic range as well, something in the 5-9 pass range seemed best. For posting web and even wallpaper sized images that was fine, at that resolution all I lost was grain noise. (My new scanner is actually a lot more work because of that.)

I also used VueScan for a second reason, one I had long forgotten due to the multiple pass thing that I need VueScan for anyway. Whatever version of NikonScan came with the IV in general did a pretty poor job with color and exposure on slide film. It was great with prints, but not slides. That's what drove me to get VueScan in the first place, since it gives you a lot more control over the color profiles that are used. But I'd forgotten that until today.

Now I have a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED. (Seems like they need an additional "ultra" or "mega" in that name somewhere. "Plus" at least. "MegaPlus.") It supports up to 16x oversampling in a single pass, so I no longer have to choose between resolution and dynamic range -- with Provia film I get some 19 megapixel scans that look pretty ok at 100%. It also seems to have a better implementation of IR dust and scratch removal than the IV or VueScan, and unlike whatever version of Nikon Scan I started out with on the IV, it seemed to do an ok job with slides. So I'd taken to using the Nikon Software again.

Back to the image -- I need to reprocess it, and my old scan from the IV was pretty soft, so I decided to rescan it. One slight hitch I should mention here -- I recently upgraded my G5 mac to OS X 10.5 Leopard, and NikonScan is currently pretty buggy on Leopard. I never successfully scanned a slide at all until I reinstalled it, not it finishes but at can take 20 minutes or more for a single scan.

Anyway, I scanned the slide with a few different settings for various levels of grain reduction, compared the results (for this Velvia 100 slide, GEM=1 was a good compromise) and went off to working on the image. In fact I worked on it for a couple hours, and when I was close to happy with the result I compared it to my old image . . . ugh. While the resolution and contrast looked great, and overall the image had a lot more pop to it, the colors just really sucked in comparison. Enough that I preferred the old image -- it has wonderful reds that were just faded bruise purples in my new one. I was up until after midnight trying to figure out what I had done to the original, but no matter what I did, the reds were just not there in the new versions. So I saved what I had and went to bed.

This morning I wondered if some of the auto color routines in PhotoShop had changed from CS2 to CS3 (another recent upgrade), but a quick check showed that the results were indistinguishable. Then half way through the day today (probably in an attempt to avoid cleaning up the house -- Amy has been gone for 2 weeks) it occurred to me that maybe the difference was in the scan itself, either the hardware (I hoped not) or the software. I brought up the original scan from the IV, and in no time at all (because I used to spend no time at all, compared to the time I spent now) I had the colors. Step 2, rescan the slide with the new scanner but using VueScan instead of Nikon Scan. And there is was -- same wonderful reds, I could see it in the raw scan without any processing, and it only took about two steps of processing to fully reproduce the original result in terms of color. Mystery solved, lesson re-learned.

I guess this means I should also write down all my VueScan settings, but I really do need to clean up the house some. For now I'll just say that for media I usually use "Image" instead of slide film and "none" for color balance. With a good dynamic range multiple pass scan, that usually gives me something with reasonable but unsaturated colors and thus a lot to work with Photo Shop.

Now I just need another free afternoon to rework that image . . . because I really want to get a print of that.

Testing

This is just a test. Hello world.

How about a link? GSCam