desk

DIY desk in standing configuration

I have a pretty unorthodox, DIY sitting/standing desktop combo that I made with a friend a few years ago. It was originally made to work with a different set of monitors, but it still works okay with my current setup. I have plans to rebuild it in the near-ish future.

The idea is that a mouse and keyboard can sit on the original desktop with the monitor pushed all the way down and the desk can work as a sitting desk. The mouse and keyboard can also be placed on top of the pull out shelf and the monitor raised and it functions as a decent standing desk.

The light is an Ikea Terital work lamp with a Philips Hue Color bulb.

hardware

  • I have a 2014 16" Macbook Pro, 2.5GHz i7 processor, 16 GB or ram, and 512 GB of storage. I stupidly spilled a drink on it a few years ago but it still works mostly fine. I regularly run 2-4 simultaneous Docker containers and handful of Node apps for work and rarely run into issues if I'm diligent about rebooting once and a while.
  • I have a have a Samsung 34" Curved Widescreen Monitor. I really like the usb passthrough on this monitor, it lets me run a mouse, keyboard, webcam, and stero through one usb hub in, and one single wire out and into my laptop.
  • I have a Keycool 84 mechancical keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches. They're tacticle enough and not super loud, and I use as set of rubber gaskets to make them even more quiet. It's technically a Windows keyboard, but I swapped the keycaps and used Karabiner to switch the command and option key functionality and can't tell the difference on my Mac.
  • I have a Logitech M500 Corded Mouse, becuase I don't like to mess with batteries at home. I'm big fan of Apple's spaces for window management, so I have the side buttons bound to ctrl + ← and ctrl + → for quick switching. Plus the on/off fast scroll wheel is nice for reading long error logs.
  • I have a Logitech Carl Zeiss Tessar 1080p webcam that I don't really know anything about and hardly use. I'm pretty sure I got it out of a free-to-a-good-home box at work one time.

software

  • I pretty exclusively use VSCode for text editting.

    • I switch up my theme fairly regularly; current theme is Shades of Purple by Ahmad Awais. I get a lot of positive comments on it from the backend devs on my team whenever we screenshare.

  • I've been using iTerm2 for a long time now, and while I wouldn't say I absolutely love it, it is the best terminal I've come across so far. It does everything a terminal needs to do, and has nice extras for running multiple terminal instances at the same time.

    • I am a huge fan of zsh. It's very hard to go back to regular bash once you've been using all the extras this shell adds.

  • I use FireFox as my internet browser because they have killer frontend devtool and I believe in their mission to make a better internet. I also really like the container approach to keep Facebook from follwoing you around the web.

builtwith

This particular site is made with:

doesn't use

A list of things I try to avoid using:

Embedded Tweets

The ability to quote tweets directly on a website is useful, but including Twitter's javascript on the page gives Twitter the ability to add tracking scripts to a site. I like Twitter, I use it, but I don't personally think it needs to follow people around the web all of the time. In fact, Firefox actually now blocks these tracking cookies by default, so users of my site will have to live with a styled <blockquote /> whenever I need to quote a tweet, even my own, directly on my site.