For the past 13 years my primary office has been in my home. During this time I’ve experimented with a lot of different things from simple small desks in Mexico to large glass topped workspaces. Here is what my current desk looks like.
Image may be NSFW.
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The first thing people usually notice is the weird lights. I work on video conference pretty much 8 hours a day right now. The lights help make sure that the video conferencing is as effective as possible. The studio lights were about $150 and give nice even lighting for the video as well as for the work surface. Each stand has two 80 watt CFL bulbs which are supposed to be equivalent to about 300W in a traditional light.
The monitor on the right is hooked to a small Windows 8 computer that is running the video conference software. You’ll have to click on the image to see it better, but there is a small Cisco video camera on the monitor.
The computer on the left hand side is running linux and the laptop hooked to the center screen is my MacBook Air. If you notice there is only a single keyboard. I use a program called Synergy to share between the screens. My MacBook Air is the server and lets me move the mouse and keyboard to the screens on either side. This may sound like a small thing, but it is a huge improvement to be able to treat multiple computers as one from your input device.
The desk is a Turnstone Bivi. My favorite thing about the desk is that it has lots of places to hide wires. The top half of the work surface is a tray that I use to put my power supplies and cables and it gets many of the wires out of the way. Also the desk has 16 outlets built into it–and I’m using all of them. I have the Bivi double so their are actually two work surfaces facing each other. Last summer when I had an assistant helping me she used the opposite desk, but now I use it for my printer or if I need some additional room to spread things out.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This picture is looking from my desk backwards. The desk to the side is my old glass top desk and there is another one on the other side as well. I’ll sometimes use these for organizing paper work but often they start collecting junk so I may replace them with some shelves or storage units.
