hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3762.txt

Episode: 3762
Title: HPR3762: Existence is pain
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3762/hpr3762.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:06:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,762 for Tuesday 3 January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Existence is Pain.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 22 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, RSI Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Ergonomics.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
Don't have a ton of time here.
This is going to be pretty quick.
Episode 78 of Urandom Lawson Bronx was talking about, you know, repetitive stress
injury and issues he's had in foresight.
Yeah, with first I would start out by saying, you know, if you've got kids or if you know
people in the industry that are in IT, on keyboards all day, you need to tell them to invest
in proper equipment and spend money in a nice chair and things like that.
So I want to go through as quickly as I can because I have a fair amount of stuff.
First started out with sitting in properly, leaning back on the chair, probably 20 years
ago now.
I did 12-hour shifts, leaning back on a chair and I had what I call, I think is forward
next syndrome or a mouse shoulder and you can look for exercises on that.
But mouse shoulder is essentially not getting support from your body for your arm.
So your arm is not resting somewhere, you're not getting support.
So all that weight from your entire arm is pulling on your back and all the muscles
in your back.
And you start to feel pain and your shoulders and your shoulders, you know, you get up
and stretch your shoulders back.
There's tons of exercises for our mouse shoulder.
Specifically, we try to do yoga every day that will help your basic stretches, find which
stretches work for you and just do those whenever you're waiting for something or sitting
in line or whatever, yeah, you look awkward but, you know, we're getting old.
So that kind of started, you know, not probably 20, 15 years ago.
And I think I was kind of okay.
I started with just having shoulder issues and shoulder muscle tension all the time.
My wife actually gives me adjustments probably every three days and just cracks the top of
my back which gives me a fair amount of relief here in the past, this is probably a year,
two years.
And I noticed seeing my appendages getting cold, my feet and hands, so I'm on 42 now.
So my feet and hands were really cold.
I've managed to get my feet from being frozen all the time.
And that's helped a little bit by just wearing really good slippers.
There's some North Face indoor, North Face slippers that are like shoes on the bottom.
And I use them for slippers because they're half slipper, half shoe, they have actual
soles, not like you're crappy slippers.
So invest in some good slippers, like some good shoe slash slippers that you can wear
around the house that you only wear around the house and not outside to, you know, fetch
dog poop.
So that helps with the feet.
I started getting pain in my left hand and, or started getting numbness in my left hand
and coldness.
So if you really, if you start feeling fatigued from anything, then it's a sign of you need
to stop doing whatever that is.
You're not supposed to sit for a long period of time, you're not supposed to stay in for
a long period of time, you're not supposed to do anything for a long period of time, you're
supposed to be hunting, gathering, right?
So that whole dynamic is all broken because no matter what you do, you're not supposed
to be doing it for a long period of time.
So having a standing desk, I chose a dual motor desk with no table so that I could just
drop-ship the desk and then I can get a go-to-lose home depot, have them cut you a mbf board
is what I like.
It smells for a while, but mbf board is good, and I use that for standing desk, so I'll
stand sometimes, I'll sit sometimes, just depending on how I feel.
If I start out sitting, I try to get up, set timers to a walk.
I take a walk, try it every day at 12.
Try to take a walk, get some energy going, if your impenages are cold, do jumping jacks,
that is as stupid as that sound, jumping jacks help out a lot.
My left hand is the one that really got screwed up.
I started to notice fatigue in the right hand, which is my mouse hand, I'm actually left
handed, but I'm right handed mouse of course, started noticing fatigue in my right hand.
So I switched to a ergonomic left handed mouse, now we talked on, you know, loss and
box talk about those left handed mice.
I wouldn't go hard on a left handed mouse, I would actually feel like the diagonal mice
are better, because the left handed mouse you're completely working against gravity and
you're using muscles that you wouldn't normally use, and there's not a lot of good actual
ergonomic left handed mice that I can see out there, maybe right handed, I don't know,
but there's a big up stink about, you know, non-left handed peripherals, especially for
gamers and things like that.
So anyways, I would recommend something that's big, bigger the better, I have a big hand,
I'm sick something, but I have a fairly long, linky hands in these tiny little mice, don't
do it for me.
So yeah, get a big mouse, maybe a track ball, you can try that, actually try different things,
so maybe you use a track ball, and it's annoying, and training your whole body to use a left
handed mouse is actually pretty bad, it took me close to two weeks, and I would say maybe
a month of solid left handed mice, and switching to the vertical.
The problem with that is you're using muscles you've never used before, so you're going
from never using your left index finger to click to using your left index finger to click
all day, and you're working against gravity, so I think that's some of the problems with
the completely vertical mice, is that you're sort of working against gravity, and you're
kind of straining to click that button, whereas if it's down, you're just, you're working
with gravity to push that button down.
That's the feedback that I've gotten, and I feel like the same way, so I went extreme,
left handed, extreme, vertical, so I had issues with my hands, and I was doing something,
and that day I was like, oh, this isn't good, any of the next day, or the day after that,
I played a switch game, which you had to hold one of the triggers on the top of the controller
and use the joystick, whatever, what happened when I did that is I played for about 20 minutes,
and I had just bad pain, like pretty bad pain in my left hand, and that was pretty much
it.
I've been suffering from that pain, basically any time I get on the keyboard and use my
left hand to type, I will have pain within 30 minutes, an hour, if that within 30 minutes,
15 minutes, I will have pain if I start, so I've been trying to use just my right hand
to do keyboard mouse, it's again, it's a result of not listening to your body and doing
the right things and having the right posture and things like that.
What I will say is, take breaks, set a timer to do walks, do yoga, every night if you
can, every morning, whatever, and take breaks, do stretches if you can, whatever you can,
idling the, as far as the, the carpool goes is, I don't know if I'm going to be able to
repair this without having surgery, but I use a FU, F-T-U, F-T-U, U-R-O, 3M by 3M, they
make a, a little wrist strap thing, and I'm trying to see if I can track everything
that I've purchased for this ergonomic stuff.
I bought a future O night wrist support, and that's the love, both hand, left hand, right
hand, it's a, what do you call it, amidextrous thing.
So F-U-T-U-R-O night wrist support, they say that's the best thing you can do.
If you wear it, wear it every night, don't wear it too tight.
It kind of keeps you unconsciously aware that it's there, and it keeps you from like
sleeping under a wrist and causing more damage.
I can't seem to get anything, I don't know if I'm getting better, it's been a month
now, but I'm going to try to take care of it, and you know, people can say, you know,
up to, up to a year, six months to get kind of summary leaf from doing that, but I know
I'm pretty much, pretty much screwed at this point.
So the night time wristband, I bought another thing that's a future energizing wrist support.
So F-U-T-U-T-U-R-O energizing wrist support, left, so they have, and I got the extra large,
and it doesn't even feel extra large, it comes with a metal plate, and that metal plate
was excruciating, so I had to take the metal plate out.
The thing purchased is Dr. Fredrick's original arthritis flubs for women and men.
They start out tight, but eventually they will loosen up.
I got the large ones, and again, I have a pretty decent sized hand.
I don't have big hands, big sausage fingers, I have lanky fingers, so you'll probably
want to get like an extra large, if you're a sausage hand, or dude, you read the comments.
I also got a Linux-L-U-N-I-X-L-X-3 cordless electronic hand massager with compression
six levels, probably.
That one, I don't think it's actually helped me, it just ends up hurting more.
I think it's supposed to do arthritis, pain relief, carpal tunnel, I guess if you've
had a really bad day, and you've ignored your symptoms or whatever, you use this stuff.
It's fairly expensive for what it is, and I don't think I've reaped the benefit from
it, or are using it right.
It does feel good to have that hand massage, but it is definitely doing more harm than
it's good, I don't know.
Physical therapy, look online, there are stretches you can do, put your hand up against
the wall, and then you turn your neck the opposite direction, and that will stretch that carpal
tunnel out.
Tons of stretches you can do for carpal tunnel-specific stuff for your wrist.
Some people swear by this tart, cherry tart, dynamic health brand, cherry tart.
I tried it for two bottles worth, and I don't think it did anything.
They also have glucose amines, and your arthritis type of stuff doesn't seem to make any
difference at all.
Really the best you can do is the yoga, the stretches, trying not to piss off whatever
it is and maintain good posture.
That's all I'll say about the carpal stuff.
As far as general posture, your eyes want to be kind of right at the top of the screen.
I'm actually more comfortable with it towards the top third of the screen, not the very
tip top, excuse me.
For some people like it with a very top, they have to kind of look down.
I like it at the top one third, so it really just depends on how you sit in your posture.
I got a nice Harmon Miller Aero chair used.
They can sort of kind of buy them used.
If you have a furniture shop or a office supply place, you can call them up and see if they
have a bone yard, and they might be able to help you out and get you like a bone yard
chair for relatively cheap.
If you do experience that solder pain, there's two things you can try.
You can try raising the side part, the elbow support.
There are tons of tutorials out there, but really your feet need to be flat.
Your hands need to be kind of like at a 90 degree, and your elbows need to be supported.
Now, I think some of that has consequences, so I kind of switch back and forth.
My work desk has support now, or a little bit of support for my shoulders, and my home
desk has no support for my shoulders.
I found that if I get the support for my shoulders, it starts to, if I rest my elbows
on the arm, I have shoulder issues for whatever reason.
I don't know if it's a response of just tensing up those shoulder muscles, or just something
else is going on, but I found that when I drop the arms, I'll have a little bit of
I will have some of that shoulder pain to go away, but it's about being dynamic, finding
what doesn't work, staying away from that, and then everything else being dynamic.
If you find that your chair at the office sits really low, then maybe put the chair at
your house a little bit higher, or something like that.
You don't want to get stuck in a static position for a long time.
I have a standing, I have two cubes, ones of standing desks that I stole, and another
one is a standard cube.
So I'll transition in between there.
If I start to steal like today, my shoulders are tensed up.
I haven't done any exercise in three weeks, because it's been wet here in Atlanta.
I get out on the bike, that helps loosen everything up, is a great way to loosen stuff up, because
you're unintentionally using muscles you don't use.
You're jiggling up and down on the trail, and all of your stuff is forced to just relax
and get ironed out.
Honestly, high baths actually work, soaking those muscles.
If you have a chronic pain, you want to use a heat.
If it's an inflammation pain, you want to take some Advil, any ibuprofen, your timeline
is going to be for pain, your ibuprofen is going to be for that inflammation reducer.
If you have pain, that's not chronic pain from joints or whatever, bad back or something,
then you always want to do cold, and you always want to do that ibuprofen, the inflammation
thing.
That will help with some of the posture stuff.
I will say that I've got a fancy keyboard, it's like a Kinesis Kinesis, I don't even
know if I can find it, let me see.
It's a Kinesis keyboard, it's a two split two keyboard ergonomic that has, you can buy
an additional little attachment that elevates it, so it was stupid expensive.
It is a very sturdy keyboard, I have two gaming keyboards that are clicky keys.
This one is a very softer touch, obviously.
It's a split keyboard setup, so you can adjust however you want to adjust it, so depending
on where your shoulders are and where your shoulders are apart, I don't even use it the
way I'm supposed to use it because I can't even use my left hand right now, or I do not
want to use my left hand, I just want to do my physical therapy and try and get this
healed up before I switch to the Kinesis keyboard.
It's a weird keyboard, it doesn't have a number pad on the right side, but it does have
like the page up page down stuff on the left hand side.
I've also have on my GitHub, just do GitHub, freeload 101, FR-E-E-L-O-A-D 101, you can
find under the scripts folder, I'm an auto hotkey script that I'm working with that changes
hotkeys around basically, changes functions around.
So instead of the problem with a lot of the keyboard setups is Ctrl-V, if you can
imagine stretching your fingers all the way across Ctrl-V and Ctrl-C, those are very
long distances.
So if we can minimize that impact in that stretching, which I think is primarily what
my issue is, is that stretching of the hand and the arcing of the hand and holding that
hand up will help.
So I've rebound keys like Alt-A is like paste or Ctrl-Z is paste, what's in the clipboard
and Alt-A is copy and Alt-S is paste and I've used the function keys to do stuff.
So I can do a lot of things with either my right hand or my left hand and I'm not having
to do like Ctrl-C.
I've tried various things like binding the number keys, those don't work because when
you're typing numbers, it can everything gets all jacked up.
So I've pretty much been limited to like using the Alt key and sometimes just the Alt key
and holding down that key and gives me basically a range of keys that I can bind to.
So with Alt, left Alt and right Alt, I can essentially rebind all of my high keys to
be ergonomically feasible.
I think that's a lot of problem with why people have carpools that they're stretching their
fingers all over the place to like do Ctrl-C and I do a lot of copying and a lot of pacing,
I do not do a lot of typing, I do a lot of copying and pacing.
Alright, we're already at 17 minutes.
I'd like to think, Stoney from the AOL Underground podcast, if you haven't checked that out.
It's hilarious.
Old school stories about AOL and just kids hacking on stuff and pulling everything.
But he has had some issues too and he gave me a lot of these links and stuff to try.
I have talked to my doctor and he said that surgeries could be an option but I haven't
extensively talked to him and I haven't talked to a specialist or anything yet.
So that might be my next step as I'm going to give myself like another 15 days, another
month and if I'm not getting any better and if I can't be on the keyboard but for five
minutes without having pain, I'm going to try to take that next step and see a professional
that can maybe do physical therapy.
Things just as simple as holding a cup can change the way that your symptoms kind of
flare up.
Anyways, there's some other stuff I have.
Again, the Staining Desk is an option that motorized Staining Desk.
I don't move the one at the house that often.
If I am going to be working on something I know is electronic in nature or not sitting
on the computer, I'll actually pull the desk up and if I'm doing it for research or on
my workbench, which is a, I call it a Murphy Workbench.
You can buy a, what I just, I just bought a sheet of MDF and then I bought these two little
they're say they're 500 pound, but they're little folding little elbow brackets.
I don't have to say they're not little by any means, but they're little folding brackets
and very sturdy and I got two of them.
I put a piece of MDF on top of that and then I put it at almost my shoulder level and
I'm 60 tall.
So the problem with working on things, soldering, electronics, I had the old man goggles
that you put down for in the light, have LED attached to him.
The problem with every single table is that the table I'm here in the office is, I don't
know, I feel like two feet off the ground, I can touch, I can pull my leg up with my foot
and touch the top of the table, like it's, it's way too low.
So all tables are too low for tall people.
All tables are too low to be working benches anyways.
So I took this idea that I would have like everything almost at arm level where my arms
come out, my shoulder level.
So I'm almost resting my elbow, my entire arm on the workbench at the level that it's
at.
So I can do soldering, I can do whatever I can zoom in and I don't have to worry about
cleaning over and having that chronic pain around, you know, leaning over the desk and
working on something.
So that's helps, fair amount.
But yeah, the biggest thing is, you know, exercise, do yoga, stretches, find some stretches
that work for you throughout the day, take breaks.
If you have to set alarms and then snooze them, I snooze some my alarms for up to an hour.
So like, I snooze them like six times.
But having that say, okay, I can't stop now, I can't stop in 30 minutes, but okay, it's
been 45 minutes.
I can stop.
Take a break.
The alarm keeps going off for me to go do something besides work.
That can help with some kind of timer that you can't, you can't avoid.
But anyways, I ran along enough, I hope this helps somebody.
It's not because nothing we can do for our old folks.
So what I would suggest is if you see a coworker who's a little younger or maybe they're
an intern, you tell them, hey, look, man, here's some links, a proper posture, start thinking
about it now.
Start thinking about repetitive stress syndrome, start thinking about our, um, um, carpal tunnel
because you are going to get it if this is your profession.
It's really a matter of time.
So it's, it catches us all right.
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