friends-of-mineral-town/drafts/ElecomHugeTrackball.md

title	date	categories	tags	draft
Elecom HUGE Trackball	2021-09-17T10:27:39-04:00	input hardware elecom	trackball black	true

I wasn't born using a trackball. It was something I had to learn to become proficient with, and the first week of using it after a lifetime of using a
traditional mouse was very frustrating, but now that I've gotten back up to my typical first-person shooter ability, (which, admittedly, was never very strong, but at least now I don't feel like I can "blame the controller,") I actually feel liberated. I no longer need a significant amount of desk space to operate a pointing device with comfort and accuracy.

I've always liked laptop solutions for pointing devices; before the trackpad, I am very familliar with IBM's "trackpoint," and heavily considered buying a TEX Yoda or Shinobi, but ultimately decided against it because I didn't want my pointer to be physically tied to a Cherry-MX style keyboard.

Admittedly, I am not big fan of the trackpoint's successor, the trackpad; I always find myself running out of pad while trying to click and drag an item across the screen. I even tried out Apple's external "Magic Trackpad" accessory, which did somewhat mitigate the problem with its larger surface area, but not eliminate it completely.

I bought this because I wanted an index finger trackball instead of a thumb
trackball, which are much more prevalent in the trackball market. It ships with far more buttons and features than I actually needed, but this seems to be one of the only wired index finger trackballs with a larger navigation sphere.

My only gripe with trackballs is that inevitably, with use, the dead skin cells that would normally build-up on a traditional mouse's buttons is now deposited onto the bearings that keep the artificial ruby orb turning smoothly, making regular cleaning a necessity for continuous operation as opposed to just not looking like a slob.