Duct Tape And Turing Machines

Or, Who Let The Author Near A Hacksaw?

I’m one of those unlucky people who’s naturally prone to RSI symptoms. I’ve managed to get ergonomically-minded workstations set up both at home and at work, so I’m doing pretty well these days. That said, over the last month or so, I’ve noticed that my right shoulder has been having some pain, particularly where the deltoid and trapezius meet. After a bit of experimentation, I traced this to the fashion in which a large keyboard forces me to hold my mouse arm.

The Microsoft Natural Keyboard has been been seriously awesome for the health of my arms and wrists since I started using it. However, it has one flaw: with the home-row keys centered in front of your body, the number pad and arrow/home/delete keys all take up a bunch of space on the right of the keyboard, thus forcing my shoulder to be turned out at an angle greater than ninety degrees. (Lefties may begin pointing and laughing now.) For anyone who’s not doing data entry, there’s not a lot out there that’s totally essentially for writers, programmer, or normal users; the delete and arrow keys are about all.

I took a hacksaw and cut ‘em off.

Ok, it’s not quite that simple. You can’t just take the saw and go straight to town on the keyboard- you’ll saw through the USB cable and about half the circuits for the other side. Instead, I disassembled the keyboard first and removed everything but the shell and keys. It’s not as hard as it sounds- most of what’s inside are flexible mylar sheets with circuits printed on ‘em and plastic with little key-nubbins that makes contact between the mylar sheets when keys are pressed. The screws that hold it together are a bunch of different lengths, so I traced the outline of the keyboard onto a sheet of cardboard, punched holes in it to store the screws and used it to remember which one went where.

Once all of the innards were removed, I reassembled the plastic shell, clamped it between two boards and used a hacksaw to cut off everything to the right of the enter key. Finally, I put the circuit sheets back in- there are little guide-holes punched in them that make it very hard to mess this up- and screwed the whole thing back together. At this point, you’ve got the mylar circuit sheets and some of the flexible plastic hanging out the right side. The excess plastic can be safely cut off, and the mylar can simply be folded around and taped to the back side of the keyboard. I put a sheet of paper in between the two layers to make sure no accidental contact was made.

So, what about all the keys I lost?

This was a great excuse to figure out how to make some keybindings I’d been using in Emacs for months work system-wide. I’d taken the really common keys I constantly reach for with my right hand and remapped ‘em to key combos that are right under where my hands are normally. So Alt-H became backspace, Alt-P became delete, and Alt-J,K,L,I became left/down/right/up. Much easier on the wrists.

OS X and Linux users can use native tools to get this done, but unfortunately a bit more is needed to accomplish this under Windows. Microsoft evidently feels that remapping key-combinations to non-alphanumeric primitive key signals isn’t something mere users should be able to do via it’s keyboard layouts. After a bit of research, I found an excellent GPLed macro program AutoHotKey that fit the bill. You can grab the script I use to rebind these keys here.

I’ve been using a pair of these modified keyboards at home and at work for about a week now, and my shoulder is feeling much improved already.