Uses

The chair is a dream, luxurious and extremely comfortable (and you would expect it to be so for the price). If you’re looking for a good chair, for gaming or working, look to Herman Miller, Steelcase or Humanscale as companies built to make office work comfortable, rather than gaming chair companies who just want to make a cool looking seat for streamers.

The regular Herman Miller Embody is several hundred pounds cheaper new, and often available for even less second hand, and frankly all it misses is a bit of cooling butt foam. I’d recommend trying one out at a showroom before going through with a purchase. Buying new is not completely a suckers game though, as Herman Miller have a 12 year warranty on all their chairs (which includes an engineer coming to visit you to fix problems at your desk). Amortise that £1300 over that period, and you’re spending pennies a day to keep your back intact.

Working at 4k is a dream. Or it is if you have good eyesight. It’s the equivalent of four of those 1080p displays stacked in a 2x2 grid in front of you, which you can create a grid of applications in.

And gaming isn’t bad either. I was worried that my graphics card would not be able to keep up, but Nvidia’s DLSS, and an adaptive refresh rate on the monitor makes it work pretty damn well. If you don’t want to game, or you don’t care about going over 60Hz, then you can find some much cheaper 4k monitors that will do the job just as well.

I used to strongly prefer flat screens, and now I’m not really sure. I think flat screens on a desk are superior to about 27”, and then actually a 1500R or 1000R curve helps keep everything in view. This does tend to ruin your viewing angles though, so it does mean if you’re planning on using the screen with others you might want to go for the flatter option.

An old 144Hz 1440p monitor I keep around for LANs, so the big screen can stay on the desk.

One of a very small list of lightbars to work with a 32” curved screen. It feels high quality, and has a sturdy, hefty, spinny remote you can use to adjust the brightness, colour temperature and offset lighting. Worth it for longer sessions.

Mechanical keyboards are so so so much better than their typical low profile membrane style keyboards, even those that come from design centric companies like Apple. I love the tactile nature of mechanical switches, and the satisfying click makes them a joy to listen to in the background. Much more on switches here.

I use this for games and regular typing, most days to be honest. It has K Pro Banana switches which have this super cute bumpy and thunky noise as you tap away. It’s a beast in terms of weight with a full metal body, and feels exceptionally well made.

A split, ortholinear keyboard I use when I’m feeling particularly pained by my wrists. It used to be my everyday work keyboard.

This took a while to arrive (they are handmade to order in Taiwan), but is totally worth it. The training and configuration options they give you means that for several weeks you’ll be swapping keyboards back between tasks where you need to type quickly, and ones where typing 15wpm is fine, but eventually you will get there. I’m up to over 70wpm now, and my wrists are feeling much better.

For on the go working, with even more limited space. An ultra slim Bluetooth keyboard which is great for just getting a bit of distance between yourself and your laptop’s external screen.

It’s smooth, comfortable, lightweight, rechargeable, and pretty durable.

When the pandemic started I decided to try and build my ultimate work from home setup. Having spent a lot of my life online playing games with friends, I knew the value of a good microphone setup. If you’re going to invest in anything to work from home better, a headset with a decent microphone, or headphones and a standalone microphone will be a treat for your co-workers. They’ll also allow you to have more natural conversations, as your voice and others are not cut out repeatedly by laptop noise cancellation.

The SM7B sounds great and is ideal for a variety of rooms, given it has a low sensitivity. Being a common choice of podcasters and twitch streamers, I frequently get asked if I do podcasting. I do not, but it’s a nice ice breaker.

The boom arm the SM7B is mounted on, clamped to the back of my desk.

The audio interface the SM7B is plugged into. Reliable on Windows, which is more than I can say for what it replaced.

The SM7B needs a lot of gain, so this inline preamp gives me a little extra headroom.

Open back headphones from Drop.com. They are the equivalent of Sennheiser’s HD 650 series, but by shipping them to the US and back (Sennheiser make them in Ireland, just a hop over the channel from me) I saved about £40.

Open back headphones of this level are great: they’re lightweight, extremely comfortable for long listening sessions, and airy so your ears don’t get hot and sweaty. These have both a replaceable audio cable and replaceable earpads should things go wrong.

In an emergency where I need to use my headphones in a different location without my SM7B (like a LAN party), this attaches to one side via a magnet. A pretty good alternative to buying a full microphone setup if you’ve already got a good set of headphones.

Cheap studio monitors on the desk for leaning back. A newer version of the pair I fell for as a student.

On the go with a laptop, and in the plane. They came free with my phone. If I was buying again myself I’d pick up the Bose QuietComfort 45s after using their predecessors and loving them.

I bought it during the webcam work from home crisis of early 2020 for £140 and they can now be got for half that price. I think it’s a good deal now. Though it comes with a microphone I don’t use, and a vertical mounting option I also don’t use, it’s attractive, and has reasonable image quality. Going up from here requires you to use an actual camera.

Which isn’t actually super useful to me. I have it display some hardware stats and then media keys, Spotify monitoring, Discord shortcuts, and screencapture options. Given the versatility of the Moonlander I could probably do most of this with layers, but the Stream Deck is a little more fun. If you are interested still, get the smaller version, 15 keys is more than enough.

I’ve gone a bit overboard: in the cupboard under the stairs in our two bedroom duplex is enough to run a small office. A Unifi Dream Machine Pro, a PoE switch, and that feeds two Unifi Wifi 6 APs, one upstairs, and one downstairs. This is generally because our flat is a weird shape that means it’s a pain to get a good speed in the master bedroom.

I’m pretty happy with it, and the overall setup isn’t too power hungry (about 65W), though if I were starting again I’d be very interested in the Dream Wall, which is a much nicer form factor for a flat.

Around the house, where it’s affordable. I found these to have a better hue and brightness than Hue, and the lack of hub makes them quite attractive also for a single bulb setup. I wish there was an Anglepoise-style lamp that would take one of these, but nothing I’ve found has even remotely enough tension for the weight of the bulb.

I bought this in Malaysia when it came out, when Samsung usually have incredible deals for the first two weeks. For this I got free buds and doubled storage to 512GB. The S24 Ultra is a beast, and though sometimes the camera shutter can lag a bit, and it doesn’t take as nice a photo as an iPhone 16 or Pixel 8/9, two things stand out for me: the battery life, and the screen.

The battery life on this thing could easily get me through two days if I tried, and I usually end heavy days on 30% battery remaining after a year of use.

The screen however is the real killer. I hate scratches but I also hate cases and screen protectors. The S24 Ultra was the first phone to score “deeper grooves at a level 8” on the JerryRigEverything durability test. After over a year of abuse I still only have two tiny nicks. Compare this to my Pixel 8 Pro, that’s scratched to hell.

After my last road bike was stolen I decided my new bike must have some way of tracking it (and that was a good enough excuse for my brain to buy an ebike). The Cowboy 4 is a single speed, rear-wheel driven bike with a gorgeous phone mount in the front. It also, crucially, has a removable battery so I don’t have to carry the whole thing to a socket to give it a charge. Having the extra power is just great for doing big grocery runs.

I used to have a real problem with notes, then found all I really needed were three things: outlines, daily notes, and backlinks.

Outlines are just the best way to write, hands down. The simple concept of a collapsible, nested, bulleted list just makes everything much easier to structure. Your main thought starts high up, and as you work down you might have lesser observations or throwaways that you can record at an appropriate level.

Having a single note a day encourages you to just have a space for things, no matter how trivial. I find it really useful to put a line in for every meeting I have, tagging this person. This is where backlinks come in handy, as with those tags I can quickly go back to previous days where I’ve had conversations with them and refresh my memory.

I back it up with Dropbox. It’s self hosted, and it’s got just the features I need.

Roam Research was not a good fit for me for a few reasons: the development was pretty slow (so much that a lot of the community run on third party JavaScript hooks), security seemed to be an afterthought, and the founder seems more interested in starting an actual cult than listening to his community.

Simply the best looking and most well supported bookmarking tool in the world by far. Raindrop comes with a first party app, chrome extension, and API. It has categories and tagging, highlights and notes, and for less than £30 a year it will create an offline copy of every page you bookmark. It’s super.

The same kind of function as a Pi-hole, hosted. You get 500k queries a month for free, and then it’s ~£20 a year. The only thing it’s missing is an off switch, and some notes about why you blocked/unblocked a domain.

You can run it as a host on your various devices and it allows you to access them all remotely from anywhere. Their free single user plan is very generous.

Keyboard shortcuts to snap windows into a grid, which matters a lot on a 4K screen. I prefer the keyboard shortcuts that Rectangle offers; I wish there was a decent Windows equivalent.

FancyZones from Microsoft PowerToys manages window arrangements on Windows. It does the job, but I miss Rectangle’s keyboard shortcuts.

This site is hosted on Cloudflare Workers, who have a mad $5 a month plan for a ton of usage of some of their most interesting tech. It’s a joy to play around in their back yard for such a small fee. I use Astro for building the site itself, currently on Astro 7.