 As someone who uses a computer for several hours every day, I have to work at a computer, at a keyboard, at a mouse. I do worry about RSI, repetitive stress injury. I worry about things like carpal tunnel and tendonitis and things like that. So a couple of years ago, I really started trying out different ergonomic keyboards, you know, things like the Ergodox Easy and the Moonlander. I've made videos about both those keyboards and I'm really happy with those purchases. I have noticed that my hands have less fatigue, less strain, but here in recent months, I've been wondering about the mouse, the standard mouse, because I've noticed I do have a lot of wrist pain on my right hand, my right wrist, you know, that uses the optical mouse. You're always doing this windshield wiper kind of motion with the mouse and it's very hard on your wrist. And, you know, it's painful sometimes for me to have to use that mouse. So about a month ago, I purchased a Kensington Expert trackball and I've never been a trackball mouse user. They've been around for decades. I know what they are. I understand the concept, but I always thought they were kind of a novelty idea, but I went ahead and purchased one to see if it would improve my wrist pain. So there are two main flavors of trackball mice. There are things like the Kensington Expert. These are called finger operated trackballs. So what you have is a really large mouse that fills up your entire hand practically. And then you have a large trackball in the center of it and then four buttons around it. Now the great thing about this is this is probably the most ergonomic mouse design, right? Because your entire hand basically just sits on top of the ball and you can operate the buttons with your fingers and there's no wrist movements at all. You know, there's really, your hand never changes position on the mouse. So these finger operated trackballs of which the Kensington Expert is probably one of the most popular, tends to be the most recommended one when I was looking for ergonomic trackball mouse. You know, the Kensington Expert kept coming up over and over again. So I went with this one. There are other types of trackball mice called thumb operated trackballs and these more resemble your standard mouse as far as the hand position and the buttons that are on it. The only difference of course is you do have the thumb trackball. Now I ended up purchasing the Kensington Expert. You can see right now the price on Amazon runs you about, oh, about 75, 80 bucks. Now they come in two different flavors. They come in a wired version and a wireless version. They're the exact same mouse other than one you plug in and one is wireless. Now I bought the wired version because I like all of my devices to be wired. I've noticed, I don't know, wireless can be flaky sometimes. But other than that, the wireless and the wired version are exactly the same. Now let me switch over to this overhead camera view so you guys can see the Kensington Expert. It comes with this detachable wrist pad. It's a really lightweight wrist pad that kind of snaps into place. It's not a very snug snap as far as the fit, but it doesn't need to be because this kind of mouse of course never moves, right? You're not moving it around the desk. Once you find the location that it's going to be in, it's, you know, you put your hand on it and you know, everything is just right here. And what I do, how I operate this is these two fingers here, my pointer finger and my middle finger, they kind of operate the trackball itself, right? They're moving the cursor around with the trackball. And then what I do, the two main mouse buttons, of course, are your bottom left click and your bottom right click. I do those with the thumb and the pinky. So those four fingers are kind of in place. If I really wanted to use the fifth finger and my ring finger, I could actually use that to operate the top right button. But honestly, typically I've got these two fingers on the trackball and then the thumb on your standard bottom left click and the pinky on the bottom right click. If you really wanted to use the top buttons, they're readily available to you. I can access them with my pointer finger here or my ring finger here. If I really need these, now these top two buttons, we should talk about what they are. So this is what is typically the middle click on a standard mouse, at least for me here. And then this one here is, I'm not sure what button that is, mouse four, mouse five. But it's the one where if I click on it, it will actually go back in the browser history. I don't typically use that button even on a standard mouse. So I really don't use it on the trackball here, but it is available for you. Now Kensington does have software available for Windows and Mac to allow you to customize the buttons. I doubt it works on Linux. I haven't tried it, but to be honest, I wouldn't change the layout of the buttons. It kind of makes sense where the buttons are located. If there was a downside to this particular mouse, the one thing I will say is the outside of it, the scroll wheel here is really noisy, right? It makes a lot of noise and it's not like a tactile clicky kind of noise. It makes a, I'm dragging a piece of concrete across a concrete driveway, right? It's really gritty and you know, I've gotten used to it as far as I don't mind using the scroll wheel. I just, it makes a very loud kind of gritty noise and that does get picked up on the microphone. I've noticed using this particular mouse for the last month that sometimes if I'm doing a lot of mouse wheel scrolling with this wheel, you guys do hear that sometimes on the mic. Overall though, I'm really happy I purchased the Kensington. As a matter of fact, I recently purchased a second one that way I could have the Kensington expert at the office and I could have another one at home because I have noticed that my wrist really appreciates using this kind of mouse rather than a standard mouse. So I'm going to keep using the trackball probably forever. I can't imagine ever going back to using a standard mouse. The only time I would go back to a standard mouse is for gaming because you can't really game on a trackball. You can't make those, you know, really quick precise movements, you know, this is mainly for slow precise movements. You can be really precise with it. I've edited all my videos on the expert. I've also made all my thumbnails with the expert and some of that stuff, you know, I have to do cropping and selections and things and it's actually not bad with this. You know, the first couple of days it was a little weird because it's a new thing, right? You know, change is always hard, but it wasn't that hard. Switching from a standard mouse to a trackball mouse was a lot easier than me switching from a standard keyboard, for example, to the ErgoDocsEasy or what we're looking at here is my Moonlander keyboard. You know, this is a much bigger kind of change and I was able to do this just fine. You know, switching from a standard mouse to a trackball mouse is actually not hard at all. Now, one thing that kind of puzzled me when I bought my Kensington expert was looking at the Amazon descriptions, the wired version ships with a smoky gray ball, trackball, and then the wireless version had a red ball. And I kind of wanted the red ball, especially since I knew I'd probably make a video about this particular trackball. And I thought it would be better as far as the contrast on camera. So I ordered the Kensington expert and then I also ordered a red ball. There's a company. I think the company's name is Perix that makes the ball. And what I ended up doing was I swapped out this ball here. It's really nice. It's a smoky gray kind of shimmery ball. Looks really good in real life. I don't know how it looks on camera. And then I switched that out with the red ball, the extra ball that I purchased. One interesting thing to note about these particular trackballs that are in the expert is that they are almost the exact same size as a billiard ball. You would think that you could actually just take that out and drop in a billiard ball. Maybe you want the eight ball or the nine ball or whatever it is, but you actually cannot do that. There's a million people that have tried to do it because that's like one of the first things. All this. I was like, man, that's almost a cue ball, right? It's almost what I could just drop in there. But the problem is it is slightly smaller than a standard billiard ball, like a couple of millimeters smaller. So you can't actually get a billiard ball into the Kensington expert. Now, even though it looks like a billiard ball, it's almost the same size. The weight is not nearly as heavy as a billiard ball. It's got some weight to it. If I throw it around, you can hear it slapping my hand, but it's probably like a quarter of the weight of a billiard ball, which is good because otherwise you could actually damage a desk, you know, especially a glass desk. Because remember, these track balls are not actually locked into place. If I just turn the mouse over, the track ball is just going to fall right out of it. So that's probably a good thing that it's got some weight, but it doesn't have a ton of weight to it. Overall, I'm really happy with my purchase of the Kensington expert. I can't recommend this highly enough to you guys. I mean, I love this mouse. I actually ordered a second one so I could have one here at the office and one at home. And if you guys want to try it out, especially if you're already having wrist pain, corporal tunnel issues and things like that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to both the wired version and the wireless version of the Kensington expert in the show description. They're going to be Amazon affiliate links. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Apsi Gabe Mitchell, Lakami Allen, Chuck David Dillon, Gregory Erion, Paul Polytech Scott, Steven Smith, Wes and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, I couldn't do what I do sincere. Thank you to each and every one of those ladies and gentlemen. And I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. This ever growing list of names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and you want to help support me, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.