New Mouse
Published at 15:36 on 19 January 2025
Notice that it’s an old-fashioned corded one. “I wish mice didn’t have cords” is a thought that has passed through my mind exactly never. Bluetooth mice struck me as a stupid idea a dozen years ago, and they strike me as a stupid idea today.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they still made old-fashioned corded mice, given how long Bluetooth ones have been around. I guess it goes to show that I am not the only corded mouse diehard out there. Maybe I should have purchased a second one just in case the market decides to make wireless mice mandatory before this one dies, but I have enough of an issue with accumulating clutter as it is.
As for keyboards and mice, so for phone headsets, but double or treble.
Again, use Bluetooth and they become battery-dependant. They lose a convenient leash that keeps both earbuds paired with each other, and which makes the whole headset significantly larger and easier to find. I just know I’d be losing headsets, running into dead batteries, and ending up with singleton earbuds if I was stupid enough to buy into the Bluetooth hype.
Furthermore, a huge part of my reason for preferring to use a headset on the phone is to get the phone’s antenna away from my skull. No, there is no definite evidence that low-power microwaves are harmful to the brain, but given that it is so easy to drastically reduce my exposure (thank you, inverse square law), why shouldn’t I?
A long time ago, I worked in the nuclear industry, and they have a policy called ALARA which means as low as reasonably achievable. A canonical example, on posters throughout my workplace, showed a worker tasked with moving a low-level radioactive item from one place to another. A cart was available, and using it meant one could put the item on the far end of the cart and wheel it to its destination, instead of carrying it against one’s body. Moral of the story: use the cart. Always do everything you can to minimize your exposure.
Well, Bluetooth uses radio waves to do its thing, which makes Bluetooth headsets a whole lot less useful for reducing RF exposure, since each earbud has a tiny radio transmitter in it.
And then we have bluetooth pairing, needed to prevent unauthorized devices from connecting to one’s computer. Sometimes this ends up being a tremendous pain. For example, I have never had much luck pairing a smart phone with my desktop computer. I tried it, I thought it would be nifty to download images without using a USB cable. Spent most of an hour getting it to work, it worked for a while, then it stopped working. Blew another hour trying to get things working again, then gave up and used a USB cable (which, of course, worked perfectly). Ever since it’s been USB cable all the way.
Aside for some niche cases (such as keyboards for tablets, which have limited battery power and one or no USB ports), Bluetooth just doesn’t make sense, and comes across as the answer to the question: “How do we take perfectly fine wired connections and make them dramatically worse?”