More Mobile: Mexico City Changes (Premium)

My wife and I both use More Mobile setups here in Mexico City that consist of a laptop, a USB-C hub or Thunderbolt Dock docking station, and an external keyboard and mouse. These setups somewhat mirror what we use back home: My wife uses a 27-inch desktop display with her laptop screen as a secondary display, while I’ve moved between several configurations and eventually shifted back to a desktop rig in my home office because I review so many laptops and I need something stable for all the podcasts I review. That setup now has two 27-inch displays, though I typically only use one, with the second enabled during podcasts so I can put the show notes off to the side.

It’s interesting how much has changed. And how little has changed.

I first experimented with a highly portable More Mobile setup during our first lengthy stay in Mexico City, in January 2022. That setup consisted of a lot of equipment I still use regularly here and at home and can highly recommend, including an Anker 555 8-in-1 USB-C hub (I now own two) with a UGREEN USB-C extension cable, an Audio-Technica ATR2500x-USB cardioid condenser microphone, and a Nexstand portable laptop stand.

But since that trip, we bought the apartment, which changed things for us dramatically. Among those changes, we started leaving behind More Mobile setups for us to use each time we came here.

To date, my wife has brought her laptop back and forth because, well, it’s her laptop, and she uses it everywhere. But she keeps an IKEA tablet stand here for her laptop, plus one of our Anker USB-C hubs, a 15-inch USB-C external display, a full-sized standalone keyboard, and a mouse.

My setup here has evolved a bit over time, and because I don’t have a home office here—I just work from a kitchen table we’ve never once eaten at and probably never will—I take it apart and pack it into a storage bin after each trip so that any guests who stay here while we’re away don’t have to deal with it. But the basics haven’t changed since this May 2022 write-up: There’s an HP Thunderbolt 4 Dock, a Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse (no longer available but coming back soon), and that Audio-Technica microphone, as before. But since then, I upgraded the portable laptop stand with a Lifelong ergonomic laptop stand that I hoped would be more stable (and was a PIA to bring here in my carry-on) and a Dell 4K webcam.

It’s worked out OK. But I’ve wanted to fix various issues with the setup for a long time. And now that we’ve finally left enough stuff here in the apartment that we may never need to bring clothes and other items with us when we travel here, I’ve started trying to address them.

Some of the issues are specific to the apartment, which has three rooms, not counting the bathrooms and utility/laundry room. I work in the biggest of those rooms, a sort of all-in-one living room/kitchen space that occupies 50 percent of the total floor plan, and it’s a big space that echoes enough that it’s a problem for podcasts. To address that, we hope to have the place painted during this trip—we’re now waiting to get an estimate back from a guy a neighbor recommended—and then we’ll put up some wall hangings.

But it’s not just the sound: The current plain white walls look terrible too, and the lighting we’re also soon upgrading casts shadows behind me. This will be addressed between the painting and lighting, but I experimented with different table orientations during this trip to see if there wasn’t a short-term workaround. Since we got it, the kitchen table has sat lengthwise against the U-shaped island that separates the kitchen area from the living room area, and I’ve sat at its short side, with what I think of as the back wall of the apartment behind me. So I rotated myself briefly by 90 degrees, sitting at the table’s long side, with the kitchen in front of me and the living room behind me.

You can see this view in Windows Weekly 867. It’s a bit more visually interesting, I guess, but because there was so much space behind me, the echoing sound was worse, so I made a second orientation change: I rotated the table by 90 degrees so that it’s now perpendicular to the kitchen, and I’m back against the back wall of the apartment, but now sitting on one of the table’s long sides. This is the right layout: I get more space from left to right, which I need, and being close to a wall cuts down on the echoes.

I noted above that I replaced the Nexstand laptop stand with a far heavier and sturdier stand. But between the building, the table, the stand, and the Dell webcam mounted on top of the laptop on the stand, I created a shaky house of cards that visually wobbles when I bump the table or, more frequently, type. And that’s not great for podcasts. I first experimented with just taking the webcam out of the equation, and while that did solve some of the visual shakiness in podcasts, the video quality on the laptop’s built-in webcam isn’t as good, nor is it very configurable. It was bad enough that someone asked about it in last week’s Ask Paul.

But I had an idea. Though I had replaced it with an allegedly sturdier stand, I had kept the Nexstand here, and had recently been using it for a second laptop that I use as an external display during Windows Weekly. (A USB-C external display like the one my wife uses would be better, and I had one ready to bring on this and the previous trip, but never did. I suspect most people don’t know this but you can use another Windows 11-based PC as an external display.) Was it possible that the more portable Nexstand was also less shaky?

Why yes, it was. And so I put the Dell webcam back on the laptop and switched (back) to the Nextstand. It isn’t perfect, but doing so did lessen the shakiness.

But I wasn’t done improving the setup for podcasts. The Audio-Technica microphone I use here sounds great, but I have to be right on it for the best sound quality. And that’s been awkward: The microphone comes with a small plastic tripod that doesn’t put it close to my mouth. And with the keyboard right in front of me, positioning it back a bit is even worse. I’m embarrassed to even admit this, but until this trip, I’ve used three stacked boxes—the box from our Internet router plus two identical Nespresso cup boxes—to elevate the microphone to mouth level. And I’ve had to move the keyboard awkwardly close so I can use it during podcasts and allow the mic, precariously balanced on cardboard, to get close enough. Worse, I have to put up and take down this crazy pile of stuff at the start of each podcast, so typically 6 times each week.

That I’ve done this for nearly two years is further embarrassing. But I did try to fix this. I bought and returned a few microphone arms/mounts at home because they didn’t work right. And then on this trip, I finally bought a microphone arm and shock mount from Amazon Mexico that emulates my professional setup back home, just far more cheaply. And it works great, actually. So now I just need to swivel the mic over on its arm as I do at home. And I can keep the keyboard where it is. So this was a nice—and long overdue—upgrade.

There was just one more problem.

My wife and I have both wanted to use desktop displays in Mexico since we got the apartment, as we do at home, but electronics are incredibly expensive in this country, and traveling here with desktop displays is a non-starter. (Plus, we’d be taxed, which would obviate the savings.) And so we’ve just made do with our laptops. I don’t recall when, but I left behind a 16-inch laptop so I could at least have a bigger screen. And on this trip, we brought a second 16-inch laptop for my wife to use. (Until now, she’s just been using her everyday laptop.)

There’s no need to go into a lot of detail here because I already wrote it up, but I discovered a surprisingly inexpensive 24-inch Dell desktop display during an outing last weekend, and I ordered it from Amazon Mexico to save even more money. That display arrived yesterday, and I immediately set it up to see whether it would make more sense than working directly off a laptop display.

I’ve been using this configuration for less than a day, and I may still play around with the physical positioning of each part, but I think it does. The Dell P2422H display I bought is nothing special—it’s a 24-inch IPS panel with a Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution, a 60 Hz refresh rate, HDMI and DisplayPort connectivity (plus USB pass-through), but no speakers or integrated headphone jack—but it’s considerably bigger than any of our laptop displays, and I’m surprised how much I prefer it. (I use 27-inch displays with a 1440p, or 2560 x 1440, resolution at home.)

Right now, I’m using this setup, which still includes my HP Thunderbolt Dock, Microsoft Sculpt keyboard and mouse, and Dell 4K webcam, with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 that I’m currently reviewing, but that device’s unique form factor precludes me from using it with a laptop stand.

So I will soon experiment more with a standard laptop, on a stand and off, to see which I prefer. I can imagine using just this display, with the laptop closed. But either way, the webcam seems less shaky on the desktop display, and I think this setup will work nicely.

And it will work even better when we make another apartment upgrade: The same person who will likely paint the place is going to do a lot of other work for us related to shelving, lighting, and plumbing. Among those jobs is adding a new two-port power receptacle to the bottom middle of the kitchen island that the table I’m using butts up to. This will solve a problem with cables: There’s only a single two-port receptacle anywhere near this table and the electronics it holds, and that’s in the kitchen, above the counter. So I currently have to drape power cables to it, and because we have two devices in the kitchen that need power, I had to buy a four-port outlet extender to accommodate it all. I can’t wait for the new receptacle.

So there you go. A bunch of small changes, I guess, but a meaningful overall improvement. And it’s still quite mobile, allowing me to use whatever laptops I happen to be reviewing at the time in docked or non-docked configurations.