The 2 Keyboards for Side Lying Computing

Get some double-sided mounting tape (sticky on both sides). Study the pictures. Notice that I laid down enough strips (some on top of others) to create a level platform to hold a Logitech Marble Mouse, which I got for under $20. Of course, I had to remove the Littlefingers' trackball and ring first! MouseWare software drivers came with this Marble Mouse trackball, which I put in the PS/2 port. I disabled the HID-mouse—which is the USB trackball in the Littlefingers keyboard.

The Logitech Marble Mouse works like a dream! By far, the most important feature is the drag-lock. You can change the function of any button. I left the big left button alone, changed the big right button to double-click, changed the small right button to right button, and changed the small left button to drag-lock. The both-big-buttons-at-once setting I set to auto-scroll. There are very good health reasons to make sure there's a nice big double-click and a convenient drag-lock. Holding down a button while you move a cursor with a

trackball, or double-clicking with a finger all day are bad for the hand, wrist, arm, and so on—and may give you carpal tunnel syndrome. So we strongly recommend setting up the mouse the way we do, where all double clicks are transformed into single clicks of the double-click button and all dragging is done with the drag-lock on so you're never holding down a button.

The good news about Littlefingers is that it is smaller which is perfect for kids or side-lying people, and it has a trackball (if you buy that version) which is damnably convenient—especially because of the built-in drag-lock conveniently placed. Here are the weaknesses of the system:

• if the keyboard is used in a tilted position, which the side-lying are likely to do, the trackball tends to slip rather than properly move the cursor, and as it gets older, the problem worsens
• it's old technology: nowadays people use OPTICAL mice or trackballs because of all their advantages, such as you rarely need to clean them, cleaning is quick and easy, they don't slip when tilted, they have five or more buttons to program, all buttons are programmable, and they're cheap
• it needs lots of cleaning
• there are no programmable buttons, so you cannot have a sorely needed double-click button
• the use of the blue "function" key to get the delete, page up, page down, home and end functions is a nonstarter; they should have left those keys where they are in bigger keyboards, since they're a hassle to operate and slow one way down

But there is a way to deal with the loss of these critical five keys: get a D-System's Keyboard Remapper (KR) off the Internet and program home into the F7 key, end into the F8 key, page up into the F9 key, page down into the F10 key, delete into the F11 key, and & into the F12 key; then program enter into the tilde key for good measure. The latter is great for side-lying people who need to hit enter a lot but half the time the last key before enter is way over near the left side of the keyboard. Think of 891 (enter). You see why tilde changed to enter makes great sense and saves time?

Beware of KR's bugs. On my computer, if you experiment in their test area after setting up a keyboard, it won't work and you have to redo it and restart your computer as well to get KR to behave. So you'll want to start fresh, DO NOT TOUCH the test area, use the refresh icon after the keyboard is set up, and then use the save icon to save your keyboard and LEAVE KR! And be careful about the alternate keyboard scheme. The more you mess with complexities, the more the bugs will mess you up. It took me three years to get the 5 function keys programmed to make up for Littlefinger shortcomings. I tried about everything except the avoiding of the testing, which, as luck would have it, turned out the be the critical rule—at least on my Sharp laptop. But now with these KR-programmed 5 function keys plus 2 enters and ampersands (& is used a lot in HTML programming) and the Marble Mouse, the Littlefinger's weaknesses are barely noticeable.

As of 2005-2006, I dumped KR and installed KeyTweak, which is for XP and NT and Windows 2000. It's a much better program. Go here to get it!

Hopefully Datadesk will get the word here and install only OPTICAL trackballs, dump the blue function key nonsense and put the standard layout back like it should be, dump the reset key which is easy to accidentally press so you lose all your work, and build in at least 4 if not 6 totally programmable mouse buttons so people can get the keyboard to ADJUST TO THEM, rather than them having to adjust to the keyboard.