Travelling with 24” Monitors

Have you considered a 4k short throw projector? The screen would be an issue, but you could get a foldable one, buy one on the spot or just use a white wall

When in university, I took part in a CUBEsat effort.

I brought the mechanical assembly -no electronics, just the aluminium structure- of our satellite to CalPoly for a CUBEsat workshop; on the way back to Europe I found out the hard way that anything which goes into space is considered munitions as far as the US DoD is concerned.

Took a while longer than expected to get on my flight...

Exactly, although I tend to find the third screen starts to push the limits of the convenience of having the real estate vs the inconvenience of having to turn my head too much.

Sometimes I just set up my terminal windows to take up have the screen of my main (code) screen and alt+tab to it, and then just clicking on the IDE to bring it back on top.

I go back and forth between using the 3rd and not depending on my mood.

Back in January of 2019 I bought a 55" UHD TV that I used as my main monitor for a few months.

Ultimately, I found that 55" was too big for me relative to the distance that I was sitting from the screen.

Currently I am back to using a 27" PC monitor with 2560x1440 resolution. I use this same monitor both when I use my desktop computer and when I use my laptop. In the latter case I have the additional monitor of the laptop itself, a 13.3" Retina (2560x1600) MacBook Air 2018 model, but it is sitting at an angle.

There were multiple issues with using a 55" UHD TV for me. A couple of the main issues that I had with using that TV as my main computer monitor were:

1. The pixels were a bit too visible at the distance I was sitting.

2. The upper 1/3 portion of the monitor or so was basically outside of my field of view, and as were the left and right 1/4 portions of the monitor. Turning my head, the fact that the display itself was flat still made it uncomfortable to use these areas of the screen.

3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.

But even with the better experience of going back to my 27" monitor and sometimes additionally using laptop display on the side, I often feel restricted in terms of screen real estate.

Lately I have been feeling a lot like it is an impossible battle.

On top of that I am beginning to feel more and more tired from looking at my monitors, and I also find sitting down in front of my computers both restricting in how I am postured and in the poor quality of the chair that I am sitting on. I am turning 30 years old later this year.

I feel that more and more that for me the joy of computing is becoming overshadowed by tiresomeness and feelings of being restricted, both physically in how I am sitting and moving and in terms of screen real-estate and in interacting with code and data in general.

I feel like I used to be able to marvel at things on the screen when I was much younger and to not be so bothered about the restrictions of posture and of what could be displayed at once and how I could interact with them.

I am left thinking that perhaps my mental capacity is starting to shrink as part of the ageing process of my body, but then I also think that perhaps it is not so much this as it is simply that the things I am working on now requires keeping track of a lot more things at once than the number of things I had to keep track of when I was young and still learning and working on simpler things.

In the beginning of my twenties I was concerned with optimizing my desktop environment for productivity. This was largely a time sink, and not something that I have desired to do anymore for several years now. But at the same time, I feel that I am wearing myself out sitting in front of the computer. And I feel that it shouldn't be this way.

For a while, when VR was new, I was intrigued by the idea of using VR as a working environment. Never went as far as to buy a VR headset but I've since lost a lot of the faith in VR as a magical silver bullet. Perhaps in the future sometime VR will be a solution to some of the problems I am experiencing, but I don't think the tools exist today to really take advantage of VR for coding and for working with data. Furthermore, having those displays on your head for hours on end is sure to be even more physically exhausting than looking at the monitors on my desk which themselves are already wearing me down.

I guess at this point I am basically rambling. But the point that I want to get to is that I believe that the way we work with code and data today is really really far from what would be the best for us. And I don't feel like I have the time nor the energy to tackle that problem either.

Back in the early '90's I was travelling all over the American Continent and Europe with loads of equipment. I remember a notable last-minute trip to Amsterdam where I had no choice but to take about 600 lbs (272 kg). I had to design a custom 8020-based dolly to be able to move this pile-of-technology around on my own at the airports. The idea was to take it apart, store it in one of the cases and re-assemble on arrival.

For the most part this worked out OK, except for one memorable trip to Munich. All of my equipment cases came out of the plane coated in what I can only describe as some kind of yellow grease. I was literally coated with this stuff after pulling all my equipment off the carousel. I won't bore you with the entire story of what happened at the airport after that. In retrospect it was very funny, not at the time, of course, it was very far from that.