I’ve been trying to get my typing speed up so I’ve been practicing my skills anytime I can. I found a decent site at keybr.com that has a lesson style I’ve gotten used to, but it has some limited aspects to it, too. It teaches you all the letters in a somewhat random order and doesn’t move on till it feels you know the current letter well, but It doesn’t do practice lessons for punctuation or capital letters. So even though I’ve gotten my WPM up to 44 with them at other sites it’s still down in the 20’s (if I’m lucky). I find the lessons kind of fun so I do them often, but I need to find another site that will help me with all the aspects on a qwerty keyboard.
So most days when I am bored at home or want a break at work I will go to the site and practice a bit. All this typing has me looking at different keyboards now. I have relatively short fingers and small hands so I’m finding some keyboards fatigue my fingers quicker than others because they have to reach so far to get to each key. If I find that the keys are too close I feel like my fingers get cramped up from being scrunched up too much. If the keys are a bit stiff or need a bit more of a tap to respond to my touch then I find myself kind of punching the keys and that can fatigue them after awhile, too. I had never really thought about or noticed this all before since I wasn’t spending as much time on a computer typing for long lengths.
So, now I’ve started researching keyboards and the different sizes and styles out there. I’ve started with the “typewriter” style keyboards since I used to love typing on my mom’s typewriter when I was little. I quickly noticed there is a range of prices and themes for that particular style. Most of them boast round keys, many of them are wireless, several come with matching mice, and the pricier they get the more features – both useful and non – they boast.
The first one I’ve bought to try out was relatively cheap, in both price and materials, and is a bit smaller than I expected, but still a full size keyboard. It didn’t come with instructions at all, and at first I was a bit worried when I didn’t see the dongle that came with it and I couldn’t get my laptop to sync to it. Once my son pointed out my blindness to me and clicked the dongle in place I was up and running. They whole keyboard is plastic and the keys are round in the style of an old typewriter – which, I guess, is how it got it’s label on the website as a “typewriter style keyboard”. It’s keys are relatively quiet with no “clicking” sound that many others touted as a selling point. They only problems I can find so far is that the keyboard has no built in feet to give the board a slight angle if I wanted. So, I’ve been propping it up slightly onto my laptops front keyboard area. Also, I feel like since the whole thing is plastic that the keys can feel a bit sluggish at times. Like I have to push a bit harder on some while others feel very loose with very little push back. Not sure if it just needs to be broken in a bit or not, but I’m going to be taking it to work to use there this week anyways. I don’t really find myself on my laptop very much during the week and it would be easy enough to take the keyboard back and forth from work every Monday and Friday.
If this keyboard style ends up working out then I will see about upgrading to a much higher quality one with all the little bells and whistles. I must say the ones that have little LED lights under the keys make me happy and I have my eye on one of those models. Those babies can get up to $200 easily so that would be an E-Ticket buy for me and I would have to put a lot of thought into it first before I drop that kind of money. But if I do I will let you know how it goes. Till then I will be plunking away on my typing speed and hopefully will have gotten it up into the 50s the next time I write an entry. That and I hope my fingers haven’t permanently cramped up from all this sudden typing. š
Thoughts From An Exhausted Woman 