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Look, no hands

looknohands.me

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Re: Look, no hands

#31

Post by jeremiep »

arjie wrote: post #17

The elasticity of the brain is incredibly impressive. Very neat solution. My parents are surgeons, and I know they worry at least a little bit about the safety of their hands. While my hands are definitely very important to my being able to work I know I don't worry as much as they do. That's funny, because for the most part I think about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome as a career-ending condition. I recently suffered some a…

To me the most important factor is how relaxed your muscles are when working. That is, even while frantically typing on my keyboard my fingers spend most of their time resting. It's very easy to keep your muscle contracted the entire time and that's where the danger is.

This is something I learned from my music teachers. I would get nervous while playing and my muscles would get all stiff leading to missed notes and sounding dry and whatnot. Most importantly, I was thinking about how to position my muscles to get the sound I wanted rather than thinking about the sound I wanted and letting the muscles do their thing. They made me realize your muscles needs to breathe and to use the window between impulses to relax them.

I could have the best posture, best keyboard layout and everything else but if my muscles stay contracted the entire time I'm working I'll definitely feel it at the end of the day. Be it on the guitar or computer.

Re: Look, no hands

#32

Post by PhoenixWright »

bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

Stopped reading after I knew this wasn't going to be addressed. I get that the author might not want to divulge specific medical information but the whole point of this idea is dependent on not being able to use your hands. I think it is a very important part of the story if you want me to listen to the rest.

Re: Look, no hands

#33

Post by berdon »

zameerb wrote: post #28

Speaking as someone who has done quite a few of these Carpal tunnel surgeries, the story do not fit very well with it. The symptoms are worse at night and tremors are unusual. Common complaints are pain, pin and needle sensation, weakness

Carpal tunnel symptoms present in many different ways. For instance, I have no pain at night, only "buzzing" and numbness in my fingers with decreased grip strength.

Re: Look, no hands

#34

Post by bsimpson »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #29

I stopped using mice, knobs (IBM/Lenovo) and touchpads (built-in or external) probably twenty years ago. A few months into an intense design project I started to feel burning pain on my wrists. I was working 18 hour days, 7 days a week. Yes, if I was awake I was in front of the computer. This was a hardware and software project and I was doing it all. This meant lots of precise motion at times. Running Solidworks or…

I'd love to see a photo of that!

Re: Look, no hands

#35

Post by grimman »

userbinator wrote: post #6

I wonder if her neck started getting tired from all that movement. It seems that it's mostly people who grip their mouse really tightly/type with tense fingers that experience the most problems - I remember when I first started typing, my fingers tired too easily because the keys were heavy, and I was exerting a lot of force trying to get the fingers to exactly where I wanted them to go. Later, when I got a "looser"…

People's mouse grip varies immensely. But the one thing that should be easily controlled, in any reasonable case, is the surface.

A mouse mat will often reduce friction greatly, and you can augment your mouse with custom teflon "feet". Gamer peripherals, basically.

I see a lot of people who just run their mice across their desk, which no doubt works, but is sub-optimal in that it's not a particularly durable surface in most cases. This will lead to scratches, and thus increased friction on top of the noise and now ruined surface.

Another thing I've seen is a really nasty build-up of gunk (for lack of a better term) underneath the mouse. All of this adds up to increased friction and a "sticky" feel at times, which results in erratic movement and possibly a need for tighter grip.

Then, of course, there's always the option to switch the mice out. A wired option will obviously forgo the batteries, lowering the weight of the unit, at a negligible convenience price.

Re: Look, no hands

#37

Post by meepmorp »

Just reading the responses here - am I the only person who has zero problem using a trackpad and keyboard with my hands for >=8 hours a day? Maybe it's that I'm not a designer and so the precision of my motions isn't such that I'd experience problems like this. I think the only problem I've ever had was back when I tried using a Microsoft Natural keyboard, and my hands were sore after an hour.

Also, good for her, finding a solution that works well for her, strange though it seems at first blush. I like her work, too.

Re: Look, no hands

#38

Post by melling »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19
bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

I'll admit that bothered me too. RSI is real and it is crippling, although it is also almost completely curable with surgery and some physical therapy [1]. However, I found her story of working on tasks that typically need arms and hands, without them, pretty awesome. So on balance the story worked for me. [1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/carpal-tunnel-... -- If you feel tingling in your fingers when…

You are confusing RSI and carpel tunnel. You don't treat RSI with surgery.

Re: Look, no hands

#39

Post by imron »

colordrops wrote: post #20

I know that this is off topic, but what a beautifully designed website!

Beautiful maybe, but in my opinion, multiple columns for continuous text makes for a bad UX.

I've seen this starting to popup in a few websites recently and it always annoys me.

Re: Look, no hands

#40

Post by iamcreasy »

m48 wrote: post #24

I also have hand problems. I use speech recognition to type everything, including code, and a game controller to move around the mouse. The controller I'm currently using, a PS4 controller, has a trackpad in the middle, so I was able to mash that against my face and give her technique a shot. It works better than you'd think. The PS4 trackpad isn't exactly brilliant, but I can move around the mouse and click on what…

> don't bother looking around, the source code of this was never released

But the video like has a comment(1 week old) from Tavis Rudd linking github repository of his code : https://github.com/dictation-toolbox.

And about your setup, please do post it! :)

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