My three-display computing setup

[mtbc]

One thing I have appreciated at work is that they provide me with a three-display setup: the provided laptop can drive the two external monitors. It is good value for money because what costs is my labor hours so small increases in productivity soon accumulate. Perhaps one of those very wide curved screens would work even better. With my home setup, with just the one external monitor, it happens to have the same resolution as the work laptop's screen so windows move seamlessly between them. Anyhow, the three displays work well for me as they show:

1. Integrated Development Environment.


2. Reference materials: about the software I am developing, the technologies with which I do that, etc.


3. Communications status: e-mail, messaging, etc.
   

Being able to see all these at once is valuable. It's not as if there isn't scope for more: there is videoconferencing (which may include both participants and slides), terminals running shells, the web browser developer tools, etc. Despite actively closing those I no longer need for a while, with the three monitors I still pile windows atop each other.

Comments

[thewayne]

Very nice! I never needed more than two when I worked IT, generally my SQL Server Enterprise Management mainly filling one screen and a development tool filling another. Now I'd be happy with a computer that's less than six years old! Even putting in 16 gig of ram would be a heck of an improvement! With only 8, I'm using over 75% and hammering the poor thing!

I never needed video conferencing before I semi-retired. I watched some, but it was never interactive. Different world these days. :-)

[mtbc]

Mmm, my work computer has 16GB RAM and my recently replaced personal laptop has 32GB, up from the 8B of its predecessor, makes a big difference so definitely something I prioritize in selection. I would be happy with an old computer if I didn't have to run modern software on it! Especially videoconferencing, which is hungry indeed. In my previous job, which I started in 2012, I had a big-boss who was mostly in transit, frequent collaborators (including line managers) in different cities and countries, and infrequent ones on a different continent, so videoconferencing became normal for me then. Before that, back when my parents were alive, it was just trying to use Ekiga to chat to them via poor video. For most work stuff, I'd still be fairly content if people used e-mail and IRC!

[thewayne]

Normally I'm a Mac man: in my IT career I was exclusively Windows as I was a SQL Server administrator and developer, but I'm pretty much retired from that and now work in a university library.  My wife is an astronomer and they're largely Mac as their IT core is exclusively Linux, so Macs simply interface wonderfully with their core infrastructure.  I had a run of bad luck with laptops a few years between keyboards being mauled by dogs (couldn't be easily replaced as they were riveted in the chassis) and video card failures, and had a friend give me an Asus ROG with an i7 and 32 gig of ram!  Very nice workstation.  It could use a new keyboard, some keys are beginning to strobe or are becoming a bit unresponsive, I should look in to that.

[mtbc]

Definitely worth a new keyboard, yes, should be an affordable repair that you ongoingly appreciate! My laptops are exclusively Linux, I have NetBSD on servers and desktops. I used to work on microscopy software so I'm used to large scientific image management, it even understood astronomers' FITS format, but our users tended to be biologists.

[thewayne]

Nice!  Yeah, my wife lives/eats/breaths FITS. I sometimes fantasize about buying a scanning electron microscope....  Maybe as a retirement project.  Just to play with.  I've been a photographer for over four decades, I think it would be a fun way to explore another form of photography.

[mtbc]

While I've not seen anything like that, it's sometimes a surprise what one can find in a large university's surplus store. (-: I've always liked https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2021-photomicrography-competition

[thewayne]

Nikon Small World is an awesome competition and collection! Take a look at Ebay some time.  It's surprising how much you can buy an SEM for.  I'm not saying they're pocket change, but less than a used car.  I'm not sure what they'd do to your electric bill, though.

[mtbc]

https://www.labonthecheap.com/ has some great self-build microscopes too that can be interesting, I saw they linked to https://openspim.org/ a while ago.