Last time we did input devices, we traced the whole thing back to a jam-prevention hack from the 1870s. Daniel liked that episode but he wants the shopping trip. He's asking: of the genuinely strange peripherals you can still buy and plug into a laptop today, does any of them actually earn its port? And he's got a test — a device earns its port if it removes a motion you make hundreds of times a day. Not a speed gain, not a comfort claim, not a nice box. A motion, gone.
That's a brutal test.
It is, and he knows it. He wants us to run the weird end of the catalogue through it and be willing to conclude most things fail. The people who benefit, he says, are the eccentrics — the transcriptionist, the colourist, the person who can't use a keyboard. For everyone else, we might just be buying a story about the kind of worker we'd like to be. And there's a second edge: hardware welded to vendor software. The question isn't just does it work today, but will it still work in three years when the company stops updating the driver.
The Loupedeck problem.
So let's start with the test itself — why removing a motion you make hundreds of times a day is the right bar, and what it immediately disqualifies.
The test is elegant because it cuts through marketing. Every peripheral claims to make you faster or more comfortable. But speed gains are usually tiny — saving point-three seconds on a shortcut you use six times a day nets you nothing. Comfort is real but subjective. A motion you make hundreds of times a day is a concrete thing you can measure. If a device eliminates one of those motions from your motor loop entirely, it earns its place. If it just changes the motion or adds a new one, it doesn't.
So the first thing this test kills is the generic macro pad with twelve unlabeled keys. You have to look down, remember what key three does, press it — you've added cognitive load and a visual search. You haven't removed a motion. You've replaced a keyboard shortcut you might have learned with a button you have to find.
The Stream Deck partly solves that with the LCD labels. You can see what each button does because it's a tiny screen. But now you've traded the memory problem for a visual search problem. You're scanning fifteen little screens to find the one that says "mute." On a keyboard, your fingers know where the mute key is — or you learn the shortcut once and it's in muscle memory. The Stream Deck is a shortcut discovery tool, not a motion eliminator.
And that distinction — between discovering a shortcut and eliminating a motion — is going to come back. So here's how I want to run this. Three categories. First, devices for the eccentric professional — steno keyboards, colour grading panels, the stuff that actually passes Daniel's test. Second, devices for the ergonomic refugee — vertical mice, trackballs, things that change how you move rather than removing movement. Third, devices for the aspirational worker — the Stream Deck, the TourBox for hobbyists, the things where you might be buying a story. Then we ask the software rot question that changes the answer for everything.
Let's start with the ones that pass.
Category one. The transcriptionist. Daniel mentioned Plover and steno keyboards. Walk me through why a steno setup passes the test.
Steno is chording. On a normal keyboard you press one key at a time to type one letter at a time. On a steno keyboard you press multiple keys simultaneously — a chord — and that chord represents a word or a syllable. A court reporter doing eight hours of testimony is making hundreds of thousands of individual keystrokes per day. Steno compresses those into chords. You're removing the motion of pressing keys sequentially — a motion you make thousands of times daily.
So it's not just removing a motion. It's removing the single most frequent motion in the entire profession.
Right. And the numbers are wild. A good QWERTY typist hits maybe a hundred words per minute. A trained stenographer does two hundred plus — some hit two-fifty. The hardware is surprisingly cheap now. Plover is open-source steno software, completely free. You can get a Georgi keyboard for about forty-five dollars, or a Starboard for around two hundred. Plug it in, run Plover, and you're writing at court-reporting speeds.
Forty-five dollars to enter a profession that used to require a five-thousand-dollar Stenograph machine.
And that's the tension. Those Stenograph machines are still sold — five thousand dollars and up, vendor-locked software, and the software stops working when you stop paying the maintenance fee. Plover plus a Georgi is forty-five dollars and open-source. The software won't disappear because the community maintains it. But the hardware — the Georgi is made by a small shop. Those shops vanish. The person who made your steno keyboard might not be in business in three years.
So it passes the motion test with flying colours, but the longevity test is... mixed. The software is safe, the hardware is fragile.
And the learning curve is brutal. Six to twelve months to reach usable speed. Most people who buy a steno keyboard never get past the frustration plateau. That's not a failure of the device — it's just that removing a motion you make thousands of times a day requires rebuilding your entire typing brain. Worth it for a transcriptionist. Probably not worth it for someone who writes emails.
Which is the theme. These devices pass the test only if you're the specific professional they were designed for. Let's talk about the colourist.
The TourBox. It's a puck — about the size of your palm — with a knob, a dial, a scroll wheel, and a cluster of buttons. Costs around a hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the base model, the Elite is more. It's designed for Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve. The pitch is that you can adjust sliders, scroll through timelines, and apply colour grades without moving your hand to the keyboard or hunting through menus.
A colourist making five hundred micro-adjustments per session — that's the claim. Does it remove a motion?
The motion is hand travel from mouse to slider bar, click, drag, release, back to the next slider. If you do that five hundred times in a session, the TourBox eliminates that travel. Your hand stays on the puck, your fingers find the dial and the knob, and you work through the adjustments faster. The haptic feedback on the Elite models — you feel each frame tick past — means you don't even have to look. For a working colourist, the TourBox passes the motion test.
But.
But the software is the problem. Full functionality is Windows-only. macOS compatibility has had gaps lasting months. The company's update history shows long silences between fixes. And this is a device that is nothing without its software — the TourBox is a paperweight if the plugin for DaVinci Resolve stops working.
So it passes the motion test for a specific professional but fails the longevity test.
And if you're not that professional — if you're a photographer editing fifty photos a month — the motion it removes isn't one you make hundreds of times a day. You're not saving meaningful time. You're adding a new motor habit — reaching for the TourBox — that replaces a habit — reaching for the mouse — that was already efficient. The net motion count doesn't change.
That's the "buying a story" part. We'll get there. First, the ergonomic refugee.
The Logitech MX Vertical. Ninety-nine dollars. Rotates your hand into a handshake position, which reduces forearm pronation — the twisting that puts strain on your wrist and forearm. Does it remove a motion? No. You still move the mouse. You still click. It changes the angle of a motion you already make. That's ergonomics, not motion elimination.
So by Daniel's test, it fails.
It fails the test, but that doesn't mean it's useless. If you have RSI, the MX Vertical might be the difference between working and not working. It earns its port on medical grounds, not on motion-elimination grounds. The honest verdict is: it passes the "should I buy this" test for the person with wrist pain, but it doesn't pass Daniel's test. It doesn't remove a motion. It redistributes strain.
And the longevity?
Logitech is a giant. The hardware will be supported. But — and this is where the software rot story gets interesting — Logitech replaced their Gaming Software with something called G Hub a few years ago, and the transition broke profiles for thousands of users. Macros stopped working. Custom button mappings vanished. The hardware was fine, the software migration killed it. Even the big companies do this.
The SpaceMouse.
This one's interesting. 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse — three hundred to five hundred dollars, depending on the model. It's a six-degrees-of-freedom controller. You push, pull, twist, and tilt the knob to rotate, pan, and zoom a 3D model simultaneously. For a mechanical engineer orbiting a CAD model two hundred times a day, it removes the motion of using three mouse buttons plus modifier keys to achieve the same navigation.
So it passes the motion test.
Decisively. And it passes the longevity test. 3Dconnexion has been supporting these things for over twenty years across every major CAD package — SolidWorks, Fusion, CATIA, you name it. The driver stack is mature. The institutional buyers — engineering firms, automotive design shops — demand long-term support, and they get it.
The institutional buyer point is important. We'll come back to that. But the SpaceMouse has a limitation.
It's a unitasker. Outside of CAD, it's useless. You can't browse the web with it. You can't edit photos. It removes one specific motion for one specific professional, and for anyone else it's a very expensive paperweight. That's not a criticism — it's just what passing the test honestly looks like. The device that earns its port is almost always a unitasker for a professional who does that one task all day.
So that's the first category. Steno passes the motion test, mixed on longevity. TourBox passes the motion test for colourists, fails longevity. SpaceMouse passes both. Vertical mice fail the motion test but have a separate medical justification. Now let's talk about the rest of us.
Category three. The aspirational worker. And this is where Daniel's "buying a story" question really bites.
The Stream Deck.
Fifteen to thirty-two LCD keys. Costs between a hundred and forty-nine and two-forty-nine. You can trigger macros, open apps, control OBS scenes, adjust audio levels. It's a beautiful piece of hardware. The build quality is excellent. Elgato is owned by Corsair, a large company, and the software support has been consistent for years.
Does it remove a motion?
Only if the motion it replaces is hitting a keyboard shortcut you already know. And that's the catch. Most Stream Deck users don't know the keyboard shortcut. They buy the Stream Deck, set up buttons for the things they want to do, and then — here's the thing — they look down at the Stream Deck to find the button. They've added a motion. They've added visual search. They haven't eliminated anything.
It's a shortcut discovery tool.
And for a live streamer running OBS, switching scenes on the fly while talking to an audience — that's a genuine use case. You can't fumble for a keyboard shortcut on camera. The Stream Deck earns its port for the streamer. But Elgato markets it to everyone. Programmers. Designers. People who answer emails. And for those people, it's an aspirational object. You buy the Stream Deck for the streamer you'd like to be, not the worker you actually are.
I have absolutely done this.
We all have. The device sits on the desk as a promise. A little box of screens that says "I am the kind of person who has a clean OBS setup and efficient workflows." And six months later it's a very expensive mute button.
The TourBox for non-professionals is the same story.
Same story, smaller market. A hobbyist photographer editing fifty photos a month doesn't make enough slider adjustments for the TourBox to matter. The device creates a new motor habit that replaces an already-efficient habit. But it looks professional. It has the shape of a colour grading panel. It feels like something a real colourist would use. You're buying the identity, not the tool.
And that brings us to the software rot problem, which makes all of this worse.
Here's the thing about hardware welded to vendor software. When you buy a keyboard, it works. The USB HID standard is decades old. Your keyboard will work on Windows 95 and Windows 25. But a TourBox isn't a keyboard — it's a proprietary controller that talks to a proprietary plugin that talks to DaVinci Resolve. If any link in that chain breaks, the hardware is a paperweight.
And links break.
Loupedeck shut down its legacy software and plugin marketplace on March thirtieth this year. Monogram, formerly Palette Gear, wound down. These were well-reviewed, well-built devices. The hardware is still good. It doesn't work anymore because the company stopped caring. People who spent hundreds of dollars on a Loupedeck now own a very nice-looking brick.
Logitech's G Hub transition broke profiles for how many users?
Thousands, at least. The forums were full of people whose macros just stopped working. The hardware was the same. The software migration killed the functionality. And Logitech is a big company with resources. The small shops — the steno keyboard makers, the niche peripheral vendors — they can disappear overnight. Your forty-five-dollar Georgi stops working with the new OS and the person who made it is gone.
So the question isn't just "does it pass the motion test." It's "does it pass the motion test and will the company still exist in three years."
And that second question has a pattern. Devices that pass the motion test for professionals — the SpaceMouse, the professional steno machines — have institutional buyers. Engineering firms. Court reporting agencies. These buyers demand long-term support, and they have leverage. If 3Dconnexion dropped driver support, Ford and Boeing would have a problem. The vendor can't afford to abandon them.
But the consumer devices — the Stream Deck for non-streamers, the TourBox for hobbyists — those buyers have no leverage. You bought one unit on Amazon. If the vendor stops updating the plugin, you have no recourse. The consumer peripheral market is built on planned obsolescence disguised as innovation cycles.
The TourBox you buy today might not work with DaVinci Resolve in 2029 because the vendor didn't update the plugin. And you'll have no one to call. The device will sit on your desk as a reminder that you bought a story.
There's a grim thing you have to reason about when buying a knob. Daniel mentioned it in his notes — the fact that TourBox, Logitech, Blackmagic, and Elgato are all shipping new product this year is the strongest available signal that their software keeps moving. You're not evaluating the hardware. You're evaluating the company's likelihood of continued existence.
And that's an absurd thing to have to do for a hundred-dollar peripheral. But it's where we are. The hardware-software bundle means you're not buying a tool. You're buying a relationship with a vendor, and the vendor can end the relationship whenever they want.
So let's land the honest conclusion before we go further. For the eccentric professional, the SpaceMouse and a steno setup pass both tests — they remove real motions, and they have institutional support ecosystems or open-source software that outlives any single vendor. For everyone else, the test is brutal. The Stream Deck is a nice box of buttons that doesn't remove a motion you already make. The TourBox is a niche tool for colourists that dies when the vendor stops caring. Vertical mice are ergonomic aids, not motion eliminators. Most of the weird peripheral catalogue fails Daniel's test, and the ones that pass are only worth it if you're the specific professional they were designed for.
What about the foot pedals? Daniel mentioned the Stream Deck Pedal and the cheap Ikkegol triple pedal.
Foot pedals are interesting because they remove a motion — reaching for a key with your hand — and replace it with a foot press. For transcriptionists, a foot pedal for play-pause-rewind eliminates the hand motion entirely. For a programmer binding a foot pedal to "run tests," it's... If you run tests a hundred times a day, the foot pedal saves the hand travel. But most people don't run tests with their feet.
The Twiddler is the one I keep coming back to. It's a one-handed chorded keyboard and mouse — been around since 1992, Tek Gear bought the line in 2007, and they're still selling the Twiddler 4 with USB-C and Bluetooth. Nineteen keys, over a thousand programmable chords, an optical trackpad. It removes the motion of moving your hand between keyboard and mouse entirely because your hand never leaves the device.
And it's never taken off and never died.
That's the spine of the whole weird peripheral story. The Twiddler is a useful device for a very specific person — someone who needs to type one-handed, or someone who wants to type while walking, or someone with a very particular ergonomic need. For that person, it's transformative. For everyone else, it's a curiosity. And it's been a curiosity for thirty-four years.
The CharaChorder is the modern version of the same idea — chorded entry, "type at the speed of thought," the X model is literally a dongle that bolts chorded entry onto a keyboard you already own. Tom's Hardware covered the Lite at two hundred and fifty words per minute claims. It's still shipping. It's still niche.
These devices will keep existing in the margins because the problem they solve is real for the people who have it. The market is small but durable. The Twiddler has outlived dozens of better-funded peripheral companies because it serves an actual need for an actual user base that has no alternative.
Which brings me to the thing I keep thinking about. Daniel's test is honest, but it also reveals something about who these devices are really for. The devices that pass are for professionals who do one thing all day. The devices that fail are for people who want to feel like professionals. The peripheral market runs on aspirational identity, not on motion elimination.
The USB Big Enter Key is the purest version of this. It's a plush pillow that enumerates as a keyboard and sends the Enter key when you punch it. It doesn't remove a motion. It adds a motion — the motion of punching a pillow. But it's funny, and it makes you feel like the kind of person who has strong opinions about email.
The humping dog charging cable is the accidental version. It's a USB cable shaped like a dog that, well, moves while charging. When the battery is full, the dog stops. It's a charge-state indicator arrived at by accident. It's useful and completely absurd.
The NerdMiner is the philosophical version. Twenty-four dollars, runs a bitcoin lottery miner at about a thousand kilohashes per second off a USB port. Economically hopeless even with free electricity. You will never mine a block. But that's arguably the point — it's a conversation piece, a little blinking reminder of what bitcoin mining became. It's a peripheral that comments on its own uselessness.
None of these pass the test. But they're honest about what they are in a way the TourBox for hobbyists isn't.
The TourBox for hobbyists is the dangerous one because it looks like it should pass. It has the shape of a professional tool. It's priced like a professional tool. But for the person editing fifty photos a month, it's a souvenir of a profession they don't have.
Hilbert: It's a ghost.
Go on.
Hilbert: I worked a year at a regional TV station, early two-thousands. They had a dedicated colour grading suite. Fifteen-thousand-dollar DaVinci control surface — a literal desk with knobs and trackballs, each one physically distinct. You could run your fingers across it blind and know exactly where you were. The colourists never looked at their hands. The TourBox reminds me of that desk, but it's a ghost of the real thing. It has the shape but none of the muscle memory. The buttons aren't physically distinct. You have to look.
The TourBox is buying the memory of a fifteen-thousand-dollar desk for two hundred dollars.
Hilbert: It's a souvenir. A postcard from a profession.
And the Stream Deck?
Hilbert: I bought one. Twenty twenty. Controlling OBS. It's been in a drawer since twenty twenty-one. I learned the keyboard shortcuts instead. The Stream Deck is a solution in search of a problem for anyone who isn't live streaming. For a streamer, it's load-bearing. For me, it was a box of buttons I had to look at.
What do you still use?
Hilbert: Kensington Orbit trackball. Thirty dollars. Scroll ring around the ball. Removes the motion of moving my whole arm to scroll — I just spin the ring with my fingers. Same company, same driver since nineteen ninety-five. Works on Windows eleven without anyone at Kensington remembering it exists.
That's the test, isn't it? If the company forgets the device exists but it still works, it earned its port.
Hilbert: The scroll ring is the thing. I scroll through documents hundreds of times a day. Every scroll used to be an arm movement. Now it's a finger movement. That's a motion eliminated. And Kensington didn't design it to be a productivity revolution. They just put a ring around a trackball and shipped it.
The accidental feature that actually works.
Hilbert: Most of the good ones are accidents. The humping dog cable — someone thought it was funny, and it turned out to be useful. The Kensington scroll ring — someone added a ring to a trackball and it eliminated an arm motion. The stuff that's designed to be a productivity revolution usually isn't.
The TourBox is designed to be a productivity revolution.
Hilbert: The TourBox is designed to look like a productivity revolution. The DaVinci desk I used was designed to grade film. Nobody called it a productivity tool. It was just the thing you used to do the job. The marketing came later, when they started selling the ghost to people who don't have the job.
The honest peripheral is the one that doesn't know it's a peripheral. It's just the thing someone uses to do the work.
Hilbert: The SpaceMouse doesn't have a marketing story about productivity. It has a knob you twist to rotate a model. Engineers buy it because it's the thing you use to rotate models. The steno keyboard doesn't have a story. It's the thing you use to write at two hundred words a minute. The story is for the rest of us.
The story is what you buy when you don't have the problem the device solves.
Hilbert: I still have the Stream Deck. It's in a box with the TourBox I bought in twenty twenty-three. I'll probably buy the next one too.
Of course you will.
Hilbert: The box is getting full.
The misconception that jumps out of all of this is that a macro pad or a Stream Deck automatically saves you time. It only saves time if it replaces a motion you already make. If you're learning the device instead of learning the shortcut, you've added time, not saved it.
The related one — that ergonomic means removes a motion. A vertical mouse changes the angle of a motion. It doesn't eliminate it. The word people are looking for is different.
Here's what I'm left with. Daniel's test is honest but brutal, and most devices fail it. The ones that pass are for professionals who do one thing all day. The ones that last are the ones the vendor can't afford to abandon. And there's an open question sitting behind all of this — as AI assistants start handling more of our computer interactions, voice commands, agentic interfaces, does the whole category of weird peripherals become obsolete? Why learn steno when you can dictate at a hundred and eighty words per minute?
Dictation isn't the same as steno. A stenographer is producing a verbatim transcript in real time, with speaker identification, in a courtroom. An AI dictation system is producing a best-effort transcript that needs cleanup. Different problems. But for most people, most of the time, the AI route is going to be good enough — and that shrinks the already tiny market for these devices further.
The niche gets nicher. The professionals who need the SpaceMouse or the steno keyboard will keep buying them. The aspirational market — the hobbyist with a TourBox, the programmer with a Stream Deck — might evaporate when voice commands handle the same tasks with no hardware at all.
Or it might not. People like buttons. They like knobs. The humping dog cable exists because someone wanted a humping dog cable, not because they needed a charge-state indicator. The market for weird peripherals is partly a market for delight, and AI doesn't deliver delight in a box.
That's probably the most honest thing we've said. Daniel's test is the right test for whether a device earns its port as a tool. But some of these things earn their port as objects. The NerdMiner doesn't remove a motion. It sits on your desk and blinks and reminds you that bitcoin mining is absurd. That's not nothing.
It's not nothing. But it's not what Daniel asked. He asked which ones earn their port, and the answer is: almost none of them, and the ones that do are for someone else.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the drawer full of peripherals.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to tell us about the weirdest thing plugged into your computer right now, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
