More Mobile: Minimizing and Overthinking (Premium)

Last month, I began writing about my experiments with more mobile PC setups for productivity and gaming. Since then, those experiments have evolved, at least on the productivity front. (Gaming remains an open question.) By which I mean, I’ve weathered the transition from a desktop PC-based setup to a laptop-based setup, successfully and for the first time. And I have a few observations.

First up, I’ve switched desks. I’ve had some nice home office furniture in years past, but after moving to Pennsylvania four years ago, I switched to an inexpensive IKEA standing desk. It used a hand crank instead of a motorized mechanism, which means that I stopped using it quickly because it was so cumbersome to move up and down. Worse, the desk was wobbly because, well, it was made by IKEA and didn’t have very secure connections between the top and the legs. I never really liked it.

So I decided to replace it with a smaller IKEA desk that I’d been using as a sort of staging area this summer for the PCs and other devices I was getting rid of as part of our ongoing decluttering campaign. Once I had cleared out enough of the junk, that desk was free---I don’t even recall why we got it in the first place years ago, perhaps for one of the kids’ rooms---and since it was both sturdier and smaller than my standing desk, I made the swap.

The “new” (to me) desk, which I wasn’t able to find on IKEA’s website, sorry, but it’s one of the basic cheap units, is considerably smaller than the standing desk. The latter measured 63 x 31.5 inches, whereas the new desk is just 47.5 x 23.5 inches (based on a measuring tape measurement). So I lost a lot of room in both directions.

This is fine for the laptop setup: on the old desk, I had to pull the laptop on its Nexstand Laptop Stand forward when compared to the old desktop PC setup, but that works fine since the laptop’s display is smaller anyway. But there’s not a lot of room now behind the stand, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to use my 27-inch HP Z27n G2 display on this desk because it’s too short front-to-back. This has its own clarifying effect, however, since that removes that possibility. I’m basically stuck using a laptop and its internal display only. Which is fine. Like I wrote, I’ve gotten used to this setup over the past three weeks or so.

Not that there haven’t been hiccups, plus some necessary adjustments.

If you watch any of my podcasts, you may be aware that I’ve been struggling with the El Gato Facecam that TWiT was nice enough to send me this past summer. It won’t persist the settings changes I make, so I have to keep adjusting them for each show, which is maddening. And because it’s a rather large and heavy webcam, keeping it centered, and from wobbling, atop a 15-inch laptop’s open display lid is difficult. At some point, I hope to have a large enough laptop with a great webcam so I no longer need the external camera.

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