does anyone else miss rollerball mice? [...] Keep the ball and rollers clean and they still work best,
Not really, no. Could clean them every day, and they still run bumpy because of mouse boogers.
But I give you that the wired ones are no battery guzzlers, and beyond thousands of products to chose from it's even harder to find a good mouse as it's to find a good keyboard (I am in topic
) - which is also right for cars, shoes, beer, and all the other
products crap.
We live in a time almost nobody produces anything good. There is, but you need to search really hard for it,
besides popular brands. If you finally find something, don't tell anybody! It may become popular. If so the brand will be captured, and also transformed into another crap outlet. Quality is wasted money since almost nobody has real quality awareness. All what counts are lots of new models (at lower quality aka "optimization of production cost"), more useless features, and the most important thing of all: cool looks.
What you cannot make a foto of and post on snoutbook, instagrim or whatscrap is both worth- and meaningless.
I wonder when it becomes hard to find a bed you can actually sleep in, while everbody else wonders why I always complain so much. "This new beds are so cool, so great. They look most cool with their permanent changing color illumination. Gives you a warning or approving sound every time you turn around to tell you you're lying wrong or right." It awakes you unasked in the morning, when amazonk thinks you need to get up to get to work. After the first update there will be no differences anymore between work days, weekends and holidays. After the next update it always and unchangeable wakes you every morning at 3:17 am. And after the last upgrade the alarm cannot be turned off anymore. So you need to buy a new bed after exactly two years and one day, which cost you four times the bed you used before for over thirty years, in which you slept like a baby. But there simply were no suiting mattresses anymore. So you had to buy a complete new bed. And there are no others anymore but those fantastic new ones. The new ones all come by series with this great massage feature. Which not only sucks large amounts of electricity, but whirrs all the time. Of course it cannot turned off. Once they're there only morons want to switch off features. You can play with the settings, but not shut the crap down. But for that it comes with an app for your dumbphone. After several hours watching dilletant videos on youpoop other customers explained how to not get lost in the illogical jungle of the intuitive UI, you're sitting in your iCar, trying to keep at least one eye open on the street for hopefully hit the breaks in time before the AI decides to cut a red light or lost keeping track on temporary construction side markings the rain displaced, running your car into a group of garbage cans, while downloading new massage programs for your great internet-of-crap bed, finetuning those, checking detailed statistics of how good your sleep was, shown as diagrams of body temperature and fart frequency, reminding you not to drink so much beer before you go to sleep, so not get you up so often in the night for peeing, and receiving unasked ads for books about how to get a healthy recreational sleep, wondering where your heavy tiredness may come from, while chuckling over me, the always complaining old grey-beard from the stone-ages, because I started sleeping on my old, ugly, army green camping equipment from the 90s.
Back to topic: There are several options:
You may try to grab the good things from the old stuff, like IBM Model Ms - if you're lucky to get one functioning for a reasonable price (not to mention a local layout.)
Store (well) functioning hardware. Of course I don't have 120M IDE HDDs anymore, but several keyboards, mouses, graphic cards, housings, cables,... even a T23 Thinkpad (no Lenovo, IBM! with the original docking station; maybe I try NetBSD on it, and see what still it can be used for.)
But above all: Always look and be open for alternatives.
Since I changed from Windows to FreeBSD I use less mouse and more shell, play less, and no shooters anymore, so less need for a mouse, more focus on the keyboard, changed from mouse to trackball,...
There always is another way. You just need to find, and go it.
"swim against the tide" - which as a FreeBSD user you're already used to
I'm looking for a keyboard. For FreeBSD. I can't figure out which is preferable: radio or Bluetooth? This one will work: A4tech Fstyler FBX51C
Some may paranoid while they say keystrokes of wireless keyboards can be logged, so get your passwords. Maybe so, maybe not. I don't know, I don't care, 'cause all my keyboards are wire-lashed. Besides they consume less energy I simply don't like the situation of having suddenly no reaction, and need to figure out first only the battery is depleted.
However if you like my recommendations for a keyboard you might check out:
- try to get an old IBM M
- or get an almost equal new one from
Unicomp
- I also like the
Delock 12672 for second keyboard (laptop)
- scissor switch keyboards are worth a try!
- currently I'm using a
Varmilo as my main keyboard (Cherry switches; tactile feeling is not as good as buckling springs, of course, but also very nice. and quiet.)
Edit: Just seen:
Switch Test Pad so you can test the feeling of a selection of different switches before buy a whole new keyboard (great idea!)
keysniffer.net
.
www.greenocktelegraph.co.uk
