A Geek Goes Flying

I have a desk in my bedroom that started out life as a slab of GLASHOLM glass held up by a pair of ARTUR trestles , though each trestle was eventually replaced by a sturdy two drawer vertical filing cabinet (like this ). It’s not my preferred place to work but sometimes the dogs are there and it just fits, y’know? It doesn’t get higher end stuff the living room workstation gets, but it’s more than usable. It’s kind of a Ship of Theseus situation, pieces get constantly changed out - is it the same workspace? How it started (circa 2020)   Intermediate setup, with pole mount and 15.4" MacBook Pro The chair I settled on is the generally very comfortable and supportive Branch Ergonomic Chair ($370 brand new), to which I added a pair of Aloudy Ergonomic Memory Foam Office Chair Armrest Pads (which don’t work nearly as well on the Branch as they do on the Aeron, but, they’re still more comfortable than the stock arm rests, by far). There’s no dedicated computer for this setup, though a...

I had an old (circa 2012?) Hackintosh, which started life as a Core i5 3570K Processor (3.4 GHz 4 Core), installed on a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3P  main board (LGA 1155 socket, B75 chipset). Basically, a lightly tweaked version of this moarfish build . The Corsair Carbide 300R case (or, rather, the plastic drive rails) were showing their age, the power supply had a tendency to run extremely - worryingly - loudly, and so it was just sort of collecting dust. A lot of dust (see below). I had picked up a new Cooler Master case and EVGA power supply to rebuild it, but never got around to it. Instead, I eventually moved to a maxed out (1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, Core i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz) 2012 Mac mini server, running the latest macOS through OCLP. Now that I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and start getting my hands dirty with “AI,” after flopping around for a minute looking at various options (eGPU chassis hooked up to a 2020 MacBook Air running Linux? $249 NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super De...

My perpetual quest for the perfect sofa / sitting desk continues (I guess, being perpetual, that makes sense). This attempt was just clunky and the legs kept wanting to collapse. This worked a bit better but even more clunky, didn’t stash well, and required me to be perched at the edge of the sofa to use. My latest attempt is a kids’ desk but doesn’t have an age limit and fits an adult easily, the  ECR4Kids The Surf Folding Portable Lap Desk ($42): The folding portable lap desk itself You sit on the bottom part (which anchors it nicely), and then the rectangle part holds a laptop. And just a laptop. It’s basically exactly the dimensions of my MacBook Pro 15.4" (and wobbles a bit under its 4.5 lbs.; it works a bit better with a more svelte (2.7 lbs.) MacBook Air). I can sit anywhere on the sofa / bed and the computer gets elevated above my lap, providing a more stable platform and better positioning. So far I’m liking it. I’m using it now. With the limited space there’s no temp...

In the Car Using a laptop on a steering wheel desk while charging the car The Solterra provides the occasional opportunity to wait for a DCFC charger to recharge its batteries, which, with a few pieces of kit, gives the operator a chance to get some work knocked out. What I’ve found to work well, so far: USTTOP Car Steering Wheel Desk . $10-13. I wrap the “Vegan leather” steering wheel with a bandana or something similar to protect it from the somewhat rough surface of this piece of plastic. It’s not the most stable a surface, but it works fine for laptop use and the price is certainly right. Have to remember to rotate the steering wheel 180° before shutting the car off. Anker 323 52.5W charger . $12-16. This 12V adapter can reliably pump 30W into a MacBook Air over a USB C cable (or probably the MagSafe charging cable). Baseus USB-C charging cable with an LED display that shows the charging wattage, useful to make sure everything’s working properly. This MagSafe mounting kit for my...

The Chair Back in May, in the middle of an organization kick, I had a KIA Nero EV rental for a few days, and used it to pick up some closet organization stuff at IKEA ( KALLAX shelving units ; DRÖNA inserts ). I’d been thinking about getting a reading chair that would be more conducive to reading and some work, vs. the IKEA FRIHETEN that provides all my living room seating. Somewhere in my reading, I stumbled across someone raving about the POÄNG chair, which has a bit of a cult following and a strong pedigree: No Shame in the Poäng Chair Architectural Digest Poäng: The Little-Known History Of Ikea’s Most Famous Chair Fast Company The Goddamn POÄNG Chair (“[T]he famously frugal IKEA founder and billionaire Ingvar Kamprad, who died in 2018, owned the same POÄNG chair since 1978.”) I wasn’t sure if it would fit my weird, lengthy proportions, so I decided to try one out during my IKEA visit. And, yep, it fits more or less perfectly. So I picked it up with the matching ottoma...

New gig. Working from home. My old “workstation” wasn’t cutting it. Have a Dell U2311H that was sitting on its OEM stand, a Unicomp SpaceSaver M keyboard. My desk is a little (36.5" wide, 17" deep workspace) unfinished wood desk I sanded and stained (looks awesome, cost next to nothing). I didn’t have a lot of real estate left between the monitor base and that huge keyboard. So. Time to do something about it. Monitor I kit-bashed two pieces together (literally with a bit of duck tape - I happened to have some black Duck brand tape, 1 7/8" wide, that I wrapped around the upper (inner) tube of the floor stand; the desk mount tube for the monitor arm was just a touch thicker), because the desk (which has a 1 1/2" drawer hanging down, that makes it way too thick for any of the “clamps on the edge of the desk” mounts I could find, and I didn’t want to drill a hole through the desk - which, with the drawer, probably would’d have worked in any case). Mount-It! Portable Flo...