Title: Members' Experiences

It's nice to be in a ventilated room with a proper height-adjustable office chair; much better than the one provided in my college room, which is far too low and I'm usually kneeling on it (hence the hole that has developed in my trousers) (Silas' college has now recognised his plight and done something about it. FG). The only problem I've had with the office chair is when I accidentally knocked out the system power cable by turning the chair round while my coat was draped over the back, but that was just silly.

Wrist rests are good too. Personally I find them too low, so I stack two on top of each other, although because I have the monitor (a large one) quite close to my eyes, there isn't enough room on the table for both the keyboard and the wrist rest, so it's hanging off the edge and keeps falling off. I find it helpful to use a wrist rest for the mouse, and it is possible to buy mouse mats with wrist rests built in (such as the one made by AccuData).

Higher screen resolutions take up more video memory. Because I find that lower resolutions are better (due to my partial sight), I only use a fraction of the video memory for the screen I'm looking at, and I can take advantage of the fact that most modern video cards allow you to use the rest of the memory for a larger "virtual screen" that can be viewed an area at a time. The XFree86 implementation of X Windows allows this; if you drag the mouse off the edge of the screen, the whole screen smoothly scrolls in that direction, just by changing a few registers on the video card. You can also switch resolutions on the fly. One problem that this approach does cause is that it requires long, sweeping mouse movements, which can get tiring. I have found that a large trackball helps (not a thumb trackball as these can make the thumb quite weary). But it is difficult to position the cursor precisely with a trackball, so it's rather nice to have a conventional mouse as well as a trackball, somehow configured so that they both move the same pointer (I think the sysadmin did this by using USB).

I found that mouse "wheels", designed to assist with scrolling, are not particularly nice to use for a prolonged time, and some applications interpret a wheel movement as "move down by an unknown number of lines so the user loses track of where they are". Still, it's always nice to have a third mouse button when you're using X, and the wheel can be used for that purpose.

Because I get so close to the screen, I prefer a black background colour, since gazing into a white phosphor screen is quite tiring. It's remarkable how many programmers make assumptions about the colours (and fonts) that you will be using; they give instructions like "set foreground colour to black", assuming that the background will be something other than black. Since programmers can rarely perform extensive testing on how their applications cope with customisation, customising something is likely to uncover more bugs. I wrote my web access gateway (a CGI script that intercepts and modifies web pages) because many web browsers are like this. I find that Unix programs do tend to be better with customisation than Windows programs are, but this is not always the case.

The black on your monitor is not really black, since a CRT monitor cannot make itself any darker than it is when it's switched off. It only looks darker because of the contrast with the adjacent bright areas. If you have a black background then the level of ambient light becomes more important; if the black is not really dark then it can reduce the contrast and make things more difficult to read. Some newer monitors have a special anti-reflective glass that tries to reduce reflections from lamps and windows, but unfortunately it does this by scattering the incident light in all directions, so instead of getting a bright reflection at one particular angle, you get a grey colour at any angle and the contrast is reduced (you can see this by switching the monitor off and observing how pale it is). I've found that the way to fix it is to use a filter (one that is very close to the screen is best); it's ironic that glass designed to avoid the need for a filter actually makes one necessary. Of course, it helps if both the monitor and the filter are clean.