Okay so as a fairly flagrant abuser of the keyboard I must have written around a hundred thousand words this year with books and essays and various other offensive uses of the english language, so as you can imagine, my fingers are pretty tired. Having suffered from random bouts of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) here and there I am one of those people that really needs to have a forgiving keyboard and have found none better than the latest slimline keyboard from Apple. Not wanting to sound like an Apple arse kisser, theres already plenty of them out there, but this is something that Apple really have got right and its a shame that more manufacturers aren’t making (perhaps due to copyright on the design?) this style of keyboard.

Crucially, I wanted to post about this as it took me a lot of googling to discover how to properly make use of this keyboard on my PC. I run XP, and probably will for a fair while until they iron the kinks out of Windows 7 or I magically get enough money to afford the pisstake of cost they call the apple pricing scheme, and so I wanted to be able to not only use the function keys but also crucially the VOLUME CONTROLS! yes, so if you have found this blog post looking for the same thing then congratulations, you’ve hit paydirt. Having gone through various little apps in two year old posts I hit upon a review by an ebuyer customer who posted this fantastic little app called SharpKeys, which can be downloaded here.

Hallelujah! Now I can remap any part of this keyboard to whatever I want. All works except for mapping Eject, but who is too lazy to press an eject button on their CD drive? *cough*maccers*cough*. In all seriousness though I recommend anyone who works a lot on computers to get one of these, its a really RSI saver, and along with a graphics tablet, may well stop your career destroying your body – dramatic it may sound but its true nonetheless.