Skip to main content

Mouse Madness: Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse Review


 Ergonomic wireless mice! They look funny, but allegedly they help your hand and wrist not hurt so much. I use this wireless mouse for my laptop since about 2021. They don't come in a nice variety of colors and patterns like tiny Logitech mice, but they also don't break when I drop them.

My previous ergonomic mouse was a random shape with the company name Jelly Roll slapped on it. Now, the company name it bears is iClever, giving more credence to the theory of the glorified dropshipping warehouse that is Amazon.

To its credit, so far, I like it a more than the Anker, at least physically.  They may also be called vertical mice, although they look a bit more like Alienware towers than these.

 The Jelly Comb (Right) is a little bigger, with back and forward buttons are placed more naturally for a thumb to click. The clicks are not as loud.

Anker is on the left.

However, the JellyComb would randomly stop working, despite having batteries and lights indicating all systems go. The lights were on, but nobody was home. It wouldn't move the cursor around the screen or click without me pounding the button.

So, it was a funky looking fellow with a lack of usability in its older age.

I like the shape of the Anker -- Which you can find here -- and how the LED light is displayed through a stripe on the side.

The Anker is a little smaller, which would be okay if it didn't have a matte coating on it that makes my hands slide down the mouse. It may wear away over time with use, but how will it feel then?

Amount of times I almost dropped this mouse to get this photo = 4


I've accidentally knocked it off my table or desk several times. It's very slippery. On the table, there is a little ledge above the Anker logo that helps your palm bone rest.

After a week of use, the Anker is fine. My pinkie isn't scraping the table and my right thumb isn't cramped. One thing I find is that, on certain sites, if I click something and there's a popup, the mouse will virtually hold the button and highlight a lot of text. After further testing (using other mice, a keypad, etc.), it's a fluke with the site, not the mouse.

The mouse takes 2 AAA Batteries -- And it certainly doesn't use them efficiently. In less than 2 months of ownership, I already had to change them once. JC did last longer, but Anker did make it right.


Overall, it works. I like the style and the LED light on the side. I wish it was a touch bigger and had some low ridges to get a better grip.

EDIT: 09/12 -- For quite a while, it's been skipping and retracting on lines with the scroll wheel; See the Loom video here. It causes a serious pain in my hand to fight the thing.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H
Post a Comment
Read more

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory
Post a Comment
Read more

Building, Breaking, and Building A CRM with Retool

 I like no- or low-code solutions to things. I've often wanted to simply push a button or move some GUI around and have the code implement itself.  I've thought about building something that's like a customer relationship management (CRM) system for keeping up with my network better than my little spreadsheet where I click links and then go like something. The general idea in this CRM Development is:  To have a GUI to add people to a NRM (Network Relationship Management).       Attach it to a database (MySQL is what I went with eventually using Amazon Relational Database service, but you can use PostGRES, and probably others).     Make sure components are connected to each other in the retool interface. This video is a good start. Watching the tutorial video, heard some SQL commands and went 'Oh no 😳" before going "Wait I know basic SQL", which is good, because you'll see.  When you get set up, there's a plethora of resources you can use -- Incl
Post a Comment
Read more