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Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

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21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

#21
I have a small two-room apartment and have a little office space set up at the foot of my bed, near the window. Usually I work from here, but sometimes if I feel like variety I work from my "kitchen" table in the living room, on the couch.

I work from a laptop (MBP and ThinkPad P14s). I just use the built-in webcams.

Work desk: Matting StandUp desk. I like it because it is manual and doesn't require cables.

Chair: Varier Variable Balans. Nice to sit in weird positions and fidget on as much as I like.

Re: Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

#22
WFH since 2006 in 5 different houses (one with wheels), so I've had a bunch of different setups. Started on a desktop with triple monitors, but my sweet spot seems to be a 15" laptop with a 15" ASUS M168B USB monitor next to it. I don't actually need more than two monitors, and this setup travels super well in a backpack for use in hotel rooms and jobsites.

I've had dedicated office space in and out of the house, and I've had corners of the bedroom. Any of the above were fine with me, but some people prefer having dedicated space for specific things. Nothing special about my desk or chair, but I did splurge on my Realforce Topre keyboard and Shure Aonic 50 headphones.

Kensington Orbit trackball has been the easiest on my RSI, and fits great on my current desk's keyboard tray, where I wouldn't have room for a mouse. Logitech Brio 4K webcam. Teams and Zoom can both blur the background pretty well even without a green screen, but I have thought about adding some lighting. I have a USB mic for recording audio, but my headphones work fine for conferencing.

My current experiment is adding a NUC with a third monitor for status dashboards so I can keep them visible at all times. Still tweaking the setup, but I think I like it.

Re: Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

#24
A few years ago I redid my attic space with 2 large windows and all-white walls to form a home office with a double desk, a sofa and a few of my guitars.

Pre-covid I had a 28" 4K monitor on each of the 2 desks and I connected my laptop to it. In the first lockdown I ordered a beefy desktop machine and combined both monitors on the same desk. I also bought a mechanical keyboard, a conference room mic, external webcam and new noice cancelling headphones soon after.

Every 2-3 months I switch the whole setup to the other desk, just to have a change of scenery. After this switch I "feel" more productive for a few days for some reason.

The office is 2 floors up and I did not put a coffee machine or fridge in there so I can at least get some of my daily steps on the stairs for coffee/food/toilet runs.

Re: Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

#25
I am fortunate to have a basement. I have an L-shaped uplift standing desk. I recently upgraded to an M1 Max Macboox pro, and I driver 4 external monitors with this. The main monitor is a 34" wide screen, the others are all 27". I "require" that the vertical resolution of all monitors be the same, at 1440, so that dragging windows between monitors is easier.

I use an Apple keyboard with touch Id, and a Logitech Mx Master3 mouse. I have a Blue microphone for video conferences. This is mounted to the desk behind the monitors on a boom, and hangs over the monitors but out of the scree area. I also have a Logitech webcam, since the laptop is off to the side.

I use OWC thunderbolt dock for 2 monitors, and a second thunderbolt to dual HDMI for the other 2. Works like a charm.

I don't move around the house much, since my setup is so custom.

If I travel for a few days, I'll bring the laptop and a small Asus USB-C portable monitor.

If I travel for longer periods of time, I have a pelican Air case that I am able to fit 3 monitors into. These are 24" QHD monitors, so all running 2560x1440 resolution.

I'd like to upgrade those 2560x1440 monitors to 27", but might need to get a new pelican air case, or get more careful with monitors in the existing case.

"Most" of my work is fine on the Mac, but some requires windows. I have a "company" PC laptop for this purpose, but also have my own "PC" Desktop with an 8 core i9, very fast nVME disk, and lots of memory.

I use both of the PC's via Microsoft Remote Desktop, so I can pretty seamlessly use Mac, Windows, and Linux as needed.

I've found that the M1 Mac actually runs Arm Windows pretty well, and I've even run a CAD program, Altium Designer, using it.. again, with impressive performance, given that it is emulating x86.

I'm extremely happy with the M1 mac.. pricey, but so far, well worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Tell about your work from home setup

#27
Use-case wise, I'm a developer by trade and a gamer/PC enthusiast (is that still a thing?) off hours. I.e. I spend a lot of time in front of this thing. I also have something of a fascination with physical workspaces and desktop environments (from a HCI point of view), though I've never managed to move the needle much in that respect.

>> What room do you use in the house?

In a house with a few (unneeded) bedrooms, so one of those makes for a decent-sized office.

>> Do you have a special desk?

Not really - Ikea Alex/Karlby worktop job, same as all the YouTubers use. This whole setup is basically your stereotypical YouTuber/streamer rig (though I do neither of those myself). In fairness to those folks, the Karlby-Alex combo does make for a very simple and effective desk. Good size, very stable (this 180cm worktop weighs a good 30kg by itself). Never had much interest in standing desks.

I do have a second desk set to the right-hand side of the main one; simple Ikea table with a large roll of paper on a reel pulled across it, padded underneath, lamps overhead. The idea is to use that as a scratchpad/brainstorming space to swivel back and forth from, though frankly it hasn't seen much action yet.

>> What monitors do you have?

Triple monitor setup for work, just about. Main monitor is an Acer 27" 1440p 144hz IPS, very nice. Also have the 15" laptop screen to one side, sitting on a simple metal stand to raise it to usable height.

And in the only moderately original aspect of this whole setup, a 10" touchscreen propped up at an angle in front of the keyboard, below the main monitor (that gap the BendDesk folks were targeting with their curve). That's very useful for breaking out extra IDE windows for search results, debug output, etc, and/or keeping IM tools handy. Haven't been using the touchscreen aspect much yet tbh, though there's definitely potential with that positioning.

Ultimately I'm looking towards a 32" main monitor, but my desired specs (4k, IPS, 144Hz) are only barely available at that size yet, plus gaming on one would need serious PC upgrades.

In the short term, a 16" monitor in a vertical orientation is the next experimental addition.

>> Keyboard? Mouse?

Gamer gear again, hooked to a KVM between my work laptop and my LED-laden-fishtank of a desktop. In fairness, better brand gamer peripherals tend to be very good for general use as well, as long as you can live with tasting the LED rainbow.

Specifically my mouse is a Logitech G903 - excellent wireless mouse, easily the best I've ever owned.

My keyboard is a Fnatic Ministreak (more obscure brand tied into esports, but a very nice keyboard). It's a TKL ("tenkeyless"/65%, i.e. no number pad) - I never used the numpad much, and I like the reduced width to keep my mouse hand in closer. Mechanical keyboard with MX Brown keys - great to type on, not very loud as those go, but still too noisy to ever use back in the office, more's the pity.

>> Do you work from a laptop?

Work-supplied laptop, yeah, though I only ever use it docked with proper peripherals - apparently unlike the entire rest of the world, I've never been a fan of laptops.

>> Do you move around the house?

No, never got in the habit of that for work. I do have a "sitting room PC" downstairs; rigged up a monitor arm to hold a 24" monitor out in front of an armchair, running off a nice little Intel NUC that's barely bigger than my fist, wireless mouse and keyboard on a lapboard. Quite proud of that setup, clean and efficient.

>> What other equipment? Microphone? Webcam?

One of those giant Corsair mousepads that extends across the desk, in keeping with the YouTuber stereotype. Actually pretty good - makes for decent mousing, plus it pads the keyboard impacts somewhat.

Chair is a Secretlab Titan Evo, because of course it is (served me well, good mid-priced chairs in fairness).

Corsair wireless headset, serves me well for mobile sound. Microphone is entirely adequate for calls, but as always with wireless gaming headsets, it's definitely not something you'd use to make proper recordings.

Webcam is just the dodgy built-in one on the laptop for now, Logitech C920 would be the weapon of choice if I ever get around to replacing that.

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