I used to suffer from a very acute case of RSI, requiring wearing a wrist brace and seeing a physiotherapist twice a week for more than a year. As a programmer, I seriously considered finding a new career but thankfully, I have recovered. Of course, recovery is relative here and as you know, you never come back to your college days when you could abuse your writs with all nighters after all nighters, you are always as risk. In my case, I can type without wrist braces for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and feel no pain. I do that on a full size keyboard at a desk; I can type with a laptop on my lap but only for a few hours before I am reminded that this is wrong.

One thing that really helped me was to get rid of the mouse. My main setup is a Unicomp EnduraPro keyboard with a touch-stick. A touch-stick is not as fast and as accurate as a mouse but the touch-stick is right there on the home row and it's easy to use with either hand to you don't put all the strain on the same hand all the time. I tried the Lenovo UltraNav keyboard but I don't like its cramped layout and I fell that the keys are not tactile enough. My laptop is a Lenovo X-Series with a touch-stick only. The key to be able to work efficiently with the touch-stick is to take the time to fine tune the sensitivity and to make sure that you can scroll with it in all your application. See the ThinkWiki website to learn how to do that under GNU/Linux.

But I have to be honest, finding a new keyboard is not what allowed me to move away from the wrist brace. It was only a minor part in a greater program to get my wrists back into shape. Your first goal should be to strengthen your wrists. Your physiotherapist probably recommended you some exercises and you have to do then. After a long and painful recovery doing wrist curls with barbels, I started doing rock climbing and this is probably the most effective way that I have to stay away from the wrist brace. If you go that route, be careful because the potential for injuries is very real if you try to do all the fun moves. Dynos and crimpers are not for you until you move away from the wrist braces but rock climbing will still be much more entertaining than wrist curls so you're more likely to keep a regular training schedule all year long, even when you don't feel the pain.

If your are not seeing a health professional, get off Slashdot and book an appointment with one immediately. Slashdot will recommend gadgets is this is not what you need. Good luck with your quest. I trust that you too can enjoy computing once again.

With Konqueror, I set my flash viewer to /bin/true. That way I avoid the annoying pop-ups that ask me if I want to save to disk or to install a viewer. I also avoid the annoying flash content but I unfortunately lead some clueless webmasters into believing that I'm "flash enabled".