Show me your desk/gaming space

[Erwin_Br]

Still happy with my IKEA less.

Edited May 11, 2012 by Erwin_Br

[elmuerte]

My messy desk:

Most of my games are kept in here:

[Erkki]

My "office"

[subbes]

Some of you people seem to have gaming setups that are terrible, ergonomically.

[elmuerte]

says the person that uses a bed (because laptop)

[JonCole]

elmuerte, what Dell monitors are those? I'm thinking about grabbing a U2412M soon after buying a new desk.

[Patters]

Some of you people seem to have gaming setups that are terrible, ergonomically.

Says bed lady.

Should have refreshed.

[elmuerte]

the main one is a U2412M (highly recommended); the left one is a E207WFP

[subbes]

Ah, yes - let thee who is ergonomically correct cast the first stone, and all that.

(I don't actually game on my laptop, because my laptop is also a Mac.)

[Armchair General]

El Muerte, there are both orange AND teal colours on your desk. Shame on you.

[James]

Seriously, is the whole world suddenly multi-monitor? I'm even in the minority at work in my single-monitoredness, and only one of those people is an art or programming guy (he is both).

I guess I'd better show my desk:

IN THIS IMAGE:

• One monitor
  
• No direct sunlight, despite it being a glorious day outside
  
• A horrible wobbly desk that I can't get rid of because it belongs to the flat
  
• A MacBook Air (I had to blow my bonus on something, and I was fed up with how slow netbooks are)
  
• Three sets of headphones (one for voice chat, one for the laptop, and one because I used to just plug the laptop set into the front audio port on the desktop PC, but that had outrageous interference, and there's no way I'm going to keep crawling around the back of that thing every time I want to swap from one to the other)
  
• Some speakers that I don't use because they're shit
  
• A giant tub of some cream stuff my mum lent me when I had painfully dry hands around Christmas 2010 (I should probably return that)
  
• Some Pepto-Bismol from when I was sick twice in the night but decided to go to work the next day anyway, because I am an idiot
  
• An extended battery for my phone which I can't use because the case the company I work for makes for my phone doesn't bloody fit it
  
• A notepad with a bunch of Fez transliterations on it
  
• "Swedish in Three Months", which probably hasn't even been looked at in three months (I would like to make it clear that I never expected to learn a language in three months, but had read that it was good anyway)
  
• A bunch of other assorted paper-based junk
  
• A photo of my nephew when he was smaller, because somebody had given me a photo frame and I didn't know what else to put in it
  
• Two external hard drives that are theoretically for backups, but which are both entirely full and which I can't be bothered to manage (the one that's actually plugged in apparently has 932 kB free of its 1.81 TB capacity)
  
• A wireless mouse (in its pouch) that I got for my laptop (when my laptop was still a netbook) because somebody showed me one and I thought it looked pretty neat, but which I never use because trackpads are fine, and I don't generally use laptops at desks for anything other than watching video while I do something at my main PC, anyway
  
• A very cheap keyboard
  
• A comparatively expensive mouse
  
• A big Portal mouse mat that replaced an identical big Portal mouse mat when my nephew slightly damaged one of the corners, and my stupid obsessiveness couldn't stand it any more
  
• Other things about which I have nothing to say
  

As an aside which I think is hilarious, but which probably isn't if you don't know the guy, and which might not even be if you do, I'm keeping the MacBook Air a secret from someone at work, because he has a vitriolic distaste for Apple, and I couldn't face the passive-aggressive indirect hectoring I'd get about it. What amuses me is both how ridiculous he is, and how petty I am for maintaining this absurd charade.

What's that? You only wanted a photo, not my whole bloody life story? TOUGH.

Edited May 12, 2012 by JamesM

[subbes]

I only have one monitor at work (and one at home on the laptop).

I work with DBs and would really appreciate a second monitor when I'm trying to map our clever and intuitive table schema into some third-party's obfuscated and illogical CSV data-upload form and can't fit both on my screen side-by-side.

(Seriously, CSV? Oh, and you're using VBScript? Good luck with that. And you got the million dollar contract instead of us, because your terrifying VBScript has a glossy cover. The nerdy girl at prom, here.)

[Erkki]

Some of you people seem to have gaming setups that are terrible, ergonomically.

If you meant me, that photo was a joke -- I don't play games there, it's just my temporary office at my new apartment where I have to work on some days while I wait for some delieveries or workmen.

[Thompson]

Seriously, is the whole world suddenly multi-monitor? I'm even in the minority at work in my single-monitoredness, and only one of those people is an art or programming guy (he is both).

Once you do you can barely function without two or more monitors.

[Brannigan]

Pimp my Ride forever changed the landscape with it's no holds barred flatscreen hedonism

[toblix]

Once you do you can barely function without two or more monitors.

At work, I agree, but at home I only use the second one for a maximized uTorrent window I could probably do without.

[Gwardinen]

I just got a second monitor for Christmas. Actually, as I write that I realise I'm saying "just" but Christmas was nearly five months ago. Good god, my sense of time is rolling right off the rails these days. I don't want to get older! This is bullshit!

All right, starting again. I got a second monitor for Christmas, and I can already see that trying to go back to just using one would be profoundly difficult for me. I'm constantly spoiled by the ability to just drag windows all over the place. Also, Windows 7 has been a huge help to that - the very simple addition of dragging a window to the top of the screen to maximise it, for example, has made dual-monitor browsing and reading and video watching and so on vastly easier.

[elmuerte]

Tthe main gain in multiple screens (or larger screen estate) is reducing context switching. You lose a lot of productivity when you have to switch windows constantly.

Larger screens don't have the same positive effect as 2 screens. This is mostly due to the fact that the window management of Windows and OSX sucks (and for X11 its tricky to configure). You usually have at least 1 application maximized because it's your main work area. The other screen shows additional information, sometimes on several smaller windows. This setup is crap to pull off on a single window because the window manager doesn't provide a similar region management on a single screen.

[Gwardinen]

Yeah, that is generally how I use it. A maximised window on my main (larger) screen, and then a number of smaller secondary windows on the other screen. I also keep my taskbar on my secondary monitor, primarily so that I can be watching a video or playing a game fullscreen and still have the taskbar available on the other screen to blink and tell me of new things popping up.

[Raff]

I use two monitors at work (one above the other) and I had my older monitor set up here as well at one point just because I could, but in the end I prefer just the one at home. Feels more relaxing and generates less incredulity from visitors.

This is my univeristy room (the last and best but totally without character) where I am for a few more months, I'm going to miss the delightful curtains and hospital-style furniture. The corner of shame on the right conceals the various machines nestling in cable spaghetti and an unweildy HDMI switcher.

I'm strictly forbidden from having any kind of LAN switch or wifi whatsoever, so have to switch out that ethernet cable in the wall constantly and can't work anywhere else in the flat. On the plus side the university internet is probably the fastest, cheapest and most reliable I'm likely to see in my life. Back to crummy dsl soon...

Edited May 13, 2012 by Raff

[miffy495]

Here's mine. Note my bed right next to it and the speakers behind the monitor, signifying that I have a super tiny desk in a super tiny basement apartment bedroom. The photo that's blu tacked to the wall above the monitor is of myself and the girlfriend a year and a bit ago when she still had her bright pink hair, the sticky note on the monitor is my work schedule for the next two weeks, and the desk is actually an antique from my dad's school days that still has an inkwell in it and everything. There's also a remote control just above my mousepad, which is for a space heater on the other side of the room from my bed. It can get to -40 degrees Celsius here in the winter, and living in a basement for that sucks if you can't turn on the heat before getting out of bed.

[Gwardinen]

I think you and I may have the same computer case and keyboard, Raff.

[JonCole]

I think you and I may have the same computer case and keyboard, Raff.

I think I have the same keyboard as well or at least an earlier iteration, if the one you're talking about is the Logitech G15.

[Orv]

I think you and I may have the same computer case and keyboard, Raff.

I can't be sure, but I think I also have that case.

[Erkki]

...

Hey, those are my glasses!