Onwards goes my ambidextrous shenanigans, I’ve had the odd stray thought about just going back to my old ways – as tempting as it is I’m determined to try this for a month at least, if not two, the grand finale will hopefully be a play-through of The Witcher 2 once version 2.0 has come out (including new DLC and whatnot). Though I’ve started to realise problems with the layout of things in my room…

Most notably, and the bane of my seating position is my drawers – the unit is to my rear-right and that means I can’t sit idly with my right hand laying on my mouse like I could in my old setup. It makes for an uncomfortable outstretched arm if I want to lay back in my chair. This is all primarily because some silly designer didn’t have full size keyboards, huge mousemats and ergonomics in mind when they developed this desk – and it was a huge oversight on my part – one I’m now regretting years later.

The size of my furniture means all of it only just fit into the tight space and there really isn’t room for any moving about. The draws also prevent me from having arm rests on the chair which would be a huge boon in this situation. Quite honestly I’d love to trim down the contents of my drawers and just have a smaller set giving me about a foot more floorspace for some freedom – and its something I’m seriously considering; its about time I had a good clear out anyway.

The title of the post “Mousing Pains” is simply due to the quirky aches caused by doing more subtle and controlled movements, initially on the first day I’d thought the WASD keys would be a huge problem, while they still are it seems aches and pains are going to have to be expected with the out-of-the-norm muscle control I need to precisely aim with the mouse. So thats interesting, though I hope the aches dissipate within a few more days.

Section 8 Prejudice was the game today, with a bit of Terraria – if my memory servers Terraria ignored Window’s mouse button settings when the hardware was swapped, the side effect is now the buttons are “correct” and its left me confused twice over, when I want to open doors I swing my sword back and forth (I can’t help but get the similar meme image “I swing mah hurr back un forth”).

This could be a long process just to get over the button confusion. As a lefty I used right-hand button configurations and it worked for me well, but the Roccat Kova didn’t acknowledge that, it just went and swapped them anyway – so I used Windows to reverse that and had to cope with games sometimes listening and often ignoring those Windows settings. Its an aspect of usability which seems to be in a grey area, and it could do with being brought forth. I was admittedly trying to break the hardware settings by reversing what the Kova had sown.

It seems no matter what hand is doing what, the knowledge of relative position of keys and buttons, and what does what is wired to work for both hands – the side effect is the e key is q, the f key is caps-lock… and so-on. I’d grown used to the impact of swapped left and right buttons in some games where I had to make do. I should probably be a science experiment (hence the tag).