As you probably know in April 2017 I moved back after an year and half in Dublin and I started to work from home as SRE at InfluxData.
I am ready to write a small post about my current setup.
Ikea Markus
First things I bought an Ikea Markus. It is comfortable and it has a competitive price. It’s flexible and well designed.
I don’t have a lot to say about it. If you are not passionate about expensive and weird chairs you can go for this one. It will work!
Stand Mount
My setup counts two boring Asus monitor, one horizontal and one vertical, Lorenzo suggested to me this standmount support for two monitor.
Day by day I discover how bad I am using more than one monitor. Change focus so often is not for me but I like the vertical monitor when I am debugging some weird application.
Asus Zenbook 3
I have an Asus Zenbook 3 the only usb-c is kind of a pain. I am a traveler and a speaker. I don’t enjoy its low weight (900gr) that often because I always need some adapter.
For traveling the adapter Asus Universal Dock is good. It is embedded with a charger it means that you need to have power supply to use it. I wrote an article about it and I was very disappointed about the product. But now that I am using it only for traveling purpose it’s not too bad.
If you are a multi desktop user you need to remember that it doesn’t have an external video card, it has VGA and HDMI but you can use only one of them at the time.
I used Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10. Now I am using ArchLinux and both laptop and Universal Dock need to install some drivers, to work a bit on audio configuration and so on. But it’s a good challenge and almost everything works out of the box.
Logitech C922
The embedded Asus WebCam is not great. If you are looking for high definition or an acceptable quality you need to have an external webcam.
I work from and when I have a meeting with colleagues and friends I would like to offer to them good experience.
The Logitech C922 is not powerful enough to make me beautiful but it makes an amazing work and it’s very good.
If you record tutorials or workshop you should think about having one of this. It comes with a small tripod to setup it where ever you like.
USB-C adapter
As I told you the world is not ready for the USB-C but I am! Plugable makes my life very simple.
WebCam, two monitors, Ethernet cable are always attached to it and I just need to plug my laptop in via the USB-C and everything will happen.
It’s an expensive toy but I am using it on Linux and it’s working. The company doesn’t officially support it but there is a DisplayLink driver open source on GitHub that you can use.
Desk
Last but not least I have a standing desk.
I think a good chair, gym, swim are better solution to keep you healthy but I change my point of view and my position help me to stay focused.
Every time I have a boring or complex task at some point just toggle my current position from down to up or vice versa gives me some fresh power to end it well.
I monitored the Ikea Bekant for a lot of months but I was not sure about investing money a standind desk.
I looked at them for so long that Ikea started a very good discount campaign and I just bought it. I took only the mechanical legs because I like the feeling of real wood and I bought the table separately.
That’s it! Bye!