Do you have trouble with your wrists like I do? You know what I mean. You spend a day at the keyboard, and your arms feel like you’ve been carrying your bowling ball in front of you all day. (I love my bowling ball as much as the next gal, but it’s not meant for accessorizing.)

Now, keeping in mind that I am no medical professional (in fact, I blanch at the sight of slivers), I’ve got two solutions that have worked for me, neither of which involves surgical procedures, physical therapists or insurance reimbursement.

I wear a Smart Glove, a fingerless glove that has little beads to pad the wrist. This little device has made a remarkable difference to my typing endurance. Plus, on cold days in my office, it keeps me that much warmer!

Next, I’ve begun exercising my wrists in moments of boredom with a DynaFlex Pro, which, according to the packaging can strengthen and condition “arms, biceps, elbows, fingers, forearms, hands, triceps, wrists and shoulders.” This sucker is tough to work with. Face it, wrists are puny little parts of the body — and the DynaFlex has some real heft to it. After a few minutes of spinning it around in my palm, I feel like taking a nap.

Have you figured out a way to keep your wrists in top-working order? Love to hear about it.

Travel clocks have come a long way, haven’t they? First, there was the foldability. What a boon, to be able to buy something that would slip into your bath bag. Next up: the ability to read the numbers in the dark. Then came the doze button, just like the pricey model you rely on at home.

Now comes the ability to stash photos, which works like digital photo frames. With a  digital photo frame alarm clock, you feed the images in from your computer or other device and they scroll through, a slideshow in miniature for your eyes only.

No longer will you feel so far away from home on those dreary business trips. You can come back from the hotel bar and sulk over dozens of images of the family dog, wishing you were there.

Of course, the next step is to put those images into an even smaller format. I saw a few samples of this at the Consumer Electronics show.

Forget Timex. Forget Fossil. Forget Diesel. The next digital watch you buy is going to let you show 140 digital images of the kids to that ex-boyfriend you just happen to run into at the mall.(Trust me, he’ll never bother you again!)

This decade will become known — I believe — as the era of the display. If it isn’t the hi-def plasma TV we bought to watch the Super Bowl on, it’s the widescreen LCD display we do all our surfing on. Or the little screen on our iPhone or the viewer on our latest digital camera.

Whatever it is we’re looking at, it’s going to get smudged up. You’re either going to be pointing out with taquito-grease-laden fingers how the play should have gone to your buddies or you’re going to find yourself struggling to watch Chad Vader Episode 8 — the final episode — through a nose print.

That means grimy looking displays that will gross out anybody but us or our small children. You need an appropriate cleaner to keep those surfaces shiny.

Yet, I have a sweetheart with a sensitive nose. Use the kind of cleaner on equipment that my mother would have found perfectly acceptable, and it’ll cause nasal distress in my household. Not a pretty sight.

That’s why I was delighted to find out about Purosol, a company that makes display cleaners that are alcohol, detergent and solvent free. In other words, it’s non-toxic. You can buy it in tiny purse-sized kits or honkin’-big super-soaker-sized bottles.

Yes, using this product is slightly more expensive than spitting on a tissue and wiping with a gentle hand. But you have to think about it as an investment in preserving your stuff. Your buddies for one and spouse for another will appreciate the gesture.

This may surprise you, but I’m not the most stylish person you’d know. Yes, although I’ve visited the fashion capitols of the world — Paris, London, Milan, New York — I’ve yet to succumb to their trendy allures. I mostly go for the food.

But this year may be a first. This year, maybe I’ll turn in my frequent buyer card from the Gap, start paying more attention to Ashley Heaton’s glamorous blog, “Chic Shopper,” right here on PriceGrabber.com and consider using moisturizer on my skin more often.

But I realize that these kinds of changes can be a shock to the system if you take them too fast. That’s why I’ll start slowly — by upgrading the skin my notebook wears. I stopped by the Case Logic booth at CES and checked out its latest line of “shuttles,” reversible sleeves that fit over a computer to give it padding when it’s rattling around inside your attaché or knapsack.

Since the newest line is reversible, you can have two different colors or patterns to coordinate with your shoes. Best, they’re made of neoprene. The way I figure it, if this synthetic rubber can keep divers mostly safe from great white sharks, it’s sure to protect your precious electronics. If that’s not enough, surely, the external “PowerPocket,” which can hold your extra gear, will convince you.

Now, if I could just learn not to trip on the runway…

IRIS has released a new pen.

Oh, big deal, you might be thinking to yourself. Just what the world needs — another pen! But I’m telling you, if you were Maxwell Smart, you’d be mightily interested, because this is no ordinary pen. This is a scanning pen — the kind that you can easily hide in your sleeve. Then when you go to visit the headquarters of some conniving organization that plans to take over the world and the chief meanie excuses himself or herself to get you a cup of tea or maybe a glass of water, you can pull out your IRISPen and do some quick scanning of whatever ultra-secret plans you find on his or her desk. And once again, the world will be saved only through your unsung efforts.

Of course, in the demo I saw at CES, the pen was attached to a computer via a USB cable. So you’ll have to hide one of those up your sleeve too.

But here’s how it works. The pen digitizes information contained in paper documents. You simply run its tip along the line of text you want scanned. The text — letters, number, symbols — shows up on the screen at the cursor position in whatever application you’re using.

The newest version of the pen, IRISPen 6, has enhancements, including a wizard for creating different user profiles, a redesigned interface and a greatly expanded list of languages that it recognizes.

It comes in three models, the Express, the Executive and the Translator, each priced differently and intended for a different user. And if time is tight, relax! This device will recognize up to 3.15 inches per second, plenty fast when it comes to saving the world.

Are you picky about your keyboard? I’m the type of user who needs a keyboard that *clicks*. If it doesn’t *click*, the tiny brains in my finger tips don’t believe they’ve done their job, and the brains in my eyeballs have to go to the page to see what I’ve actually typed. Also, don’t be moving the Del key on me. You do that and your keyboard becomes a dust-catcher in my closet.

But aside from that, I’m happy.

Or at least I was until I saw the Mother-of-All-Keyboards at CES.

It won’t be available from resellers until March, but you’re getting the word now because I like you. It’s called the Optimus Maximus keyboard and you can only buy it if you speak Latin. No, that’s not true. You can only buy it if you are willing to spend $1,500.

That’s right. That new car,. The Nano, from Tata Motors in India is priced at only $1,000 more than this keyboard, which comes from Art Lebedev Studio in Moscow, Russia.

Now, I know that everybody in Russia is rolling in the dough. You just have to look at the luxurious hats Russians wear to realize that. But this keyboard is truly for the Paris Hiltons of the world. Or it would be if only Paris Hilton were more of a geek.

So why is this keyboard so pricey? Because every single key on it is a stand-alone display. Imagine a tiny monitor that shows exactly what function the key is dedicated to. Looking for a way to integrate a little Cyrillic or Ancient Greek into your everyday blogging? Dedicate some of those keys to the more obscure layouts you need to use. That also includes HTML code, math functions, images — anything you can configure in a 48×48 pixel space through the keyboard’s software.

It runs on Windows XP and Vista. If you’re a Mac user, don’t feel left out. It’ll run with Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher. Just needs a USB port to plug in.

I was going to take my family on a special vacation this year. But maybe those funds will have to be diverted to office supplies instead… Sorry, son.

Don’t you marvel at engineers who come up with better designs for the stuff we use every day? I mean, whoever created Glide floss should be knighted as far as I’m concerned. That goes for office supplies too. In particular, I’m talking about the Staples One-Touch 3-hole punch.

This is my story…

While I hesitate to admit this to you (because we hardly know each other), I am an incompetent at punching holes. Inevitably, what happens is this: I become overly ambitious with my dreams of workplace organization. That means I sit down with a stack of papers that all need to go into a newly labeled 3-ring binder. Thus begins the chore of punching holes in all of those documents. But I usually grab too many sheets and the puncher has dull blades, so some of the sheets go sideways in the puncher in my struggle to punch them, and the holes sometimes end up halfway off the sheet, which means they’re not really holes so much as crescent moons. So I grab my single-hole puncher to remedy the situation, but I can never line up the missing hole with the other holes on the sheet and, therefore, many sheets end up not really suitable to fit uniformly in my 3-ring binder. So goes another effort at personal improvement.

Apparently, the designers at Staples have experienced similar office gaffes, and they have come up with a puncher that takes — according to their calculations — 50% less effort than the standard puncher. (If they had measured it against my puncher, the ratio would have been much higher, but I digress.) This monster can handle up to 20 sheets at a time. And the compartment where the detritus accumulates isn’t a funky piece of plastic that, when you peel it back, sprays your office floor with confetti.

What next? Self-cleaning microwave ovens? Now is truly a majestic time to be alive.

I have another business trip coming up, and I’m fairly certain that I’ll forget one or another of my rechargers. So here’s an interesting device that could come in handy. The Datexx SuperBattery USB AC/Crank Generator provides a manual way to generate power to recharge cell phones, MP3 players, handheld games, PDAs or, no doubt, other USB-powered devices I’ve never even heard of.

Here are the particulars. It’s about a pound in weight and 2.5-inches x 1.5-inches x 4-inches in size. It has a crank on the side that you wind to convert kinetic energy (your wrist action) into electrical energy, which is stored in internal batteries. Or if your wrists are feeling particularly overworked, you can simply plug in the AC adapter and recharge the internal power supply that way.

The generator comes with four cell phone tips that you plug into the unit then into your cell phone. Sellers say the tips fit Motorola, Samsung, LG and Nokia phones. It generates USB output of 5 volts.

It includes a built-in LED flashlight too, in case your phone is so dead, you can’t find it in the dark.

Now, the product isn’t perfect. One reviewer on Amazon reports that it’s “very fickle about taking a charge, particularly from European plugs,” and that it has a “weak USB current; devices take forever to take a charge from it.”

Of course, the biggest obstacle to a device like this is that its form factor is so portable, it could be left behind as well when I travel — right next to the rechargers I meant to pack.

It took me a long time to finally move onto Skype, but now I don’t know how I worked without it. Sure, I still rely on my ol’ land line for in-country calls, especially the ones where I need to record interviews for stories I’m writing. It’s just plain reliable. But this afternoon, I needed to talk with the author of Scrappy Project Management, who happened to be in Hiroshima for a few weeks consulting with some of her clients, and Skype was the way we talked.

But what about those times when I don’t want to turn on my computer? Maybe I’d start using Skype for my personal calls and dump my pricey long-distance service.

That’s why I’m considering offline Internet telephony — and here’s the phone I think I could use to help me achieve it. It’s from Philips, and it goes by the memorable moniker, VOIP0801. (Probably by the time I post this, the company will have upgraded its model.)

The idea is that the phone display shows whether somebody’s online or not, and you can use the same device for regular landline calls along with voice over IP calls. If you set up the right kind of Skype account, you can also get a phone number to hand out so that people without Skype can call you too.

Pretty soon, this cheapskate will have no excuse for not calling — um, Skyping — her mom every week.

Wacky USB powered toys really don’t appeal to me, and yet my desktop computer at home just doesn’t seem to have enough USB 2.0 ports. With only 4 USB ports I find a USB hub a necessity. A shared printer takes up one port (I just don’t print enough to justify a network printer), an APC UPS another port and a cradle for my Palm the third. On top of that I still need to plug in an external hard drive and have a spare port for a a USB Flash drive.

To maximize the number of available ports I use a Belkin TuneSync USB Hub. That way I have a dock for my iPod, and four extra USB 2.0 ports (It uses one port).

Its one weakness – from a user review by agnelors: “Could be a little smaller”.
It is a bit large, so I keep it on top of my Desktop computer tower, instead of on my desk where space is at a premium. Of course a USB Hub without a iPod Dock would be smaller.

For laptops a more portable solution would be a USB Thumb Hub like the Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Thumb Hub.