Enthousiastic about my home officeΒΆ

Tags: personal, plone

I work from home two days a week (two small children and quite a long commute). So "home" also has to be "a great place to work". In the last week I made three improvements: a good reason to show a picture and describe it a bit.

Reinout's home office

  • I renovated my office chair. The seat cushion was badly tattered so I bought some strong fabric at ikea and screwed and hammered the chair apart. With a sowing machine I got the fabric fitted quite nicely. The chair looks as new again.
  • I bought a 22 inch widescreen monitor. The secondary computer moved downstairs to the living room, so I lost my second monitor. Some googling later and I found a 200 Euro monitor with a 1920x1080 pixel resolution. Pixel count matters when programming: more text on the screen at the same time. For the size, the price is definitively on the low end so I didn't expect great performance. The first day, I was actually disappointed. The second day I left my mac monitor connector (mini dvi to vga) at the office. The third day, I bought a replacement mini dvi to dvi adapter. That made all the difference! The screen doesn't tire my eyes anymore like it did on the first day. So good screen real estate with reasonable performance for a very good price. (Acer H223HQ)

    Note that I also raised the monitor more than my previous one. The top is now slightly above eye level, as recommended. I've got to learn to keep my neck more straight, so the new monitor was a good reason.

  • After some 10 years of solid service, my trusty logitech trackball was replaced. By a similar one, but now with two small extra buttons for scrolling up/down. That was a feature I really started to miss. A "normal" mouse wheel is impossible on this trackball design. I only very very reluctantly use an ordinary mouse. A trackball feels much better. Note that there's also a model M keyboard on my desk. Of course!

So: I'm quite happy with my home office!

(Old imported comments)
"agreed, nice NPR story on the model M" by reinout on 2009-02-05 09:51:07
Agreed, that was nice to listen to. And instructive to see the inner working of such a keyboard. I had not noticed yet that there's some travel space between the point where the contact is made and un-made :-)
"Model M lives on" by http://travelschlepp.blogspot.com/ on 2009-02-03 14:10:00
You'll enjoy reading this recent bit about the Model M keyboard at NPR: http://www.npr.org/[...]/story.php?storyId=99950176 or listening to the original broadcast story: http://www.npr.org/[...]/story.php?storyId=100076874.
 
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About me

My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.

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