Battle Station 2025

It has been a minute since my last update about my home office, and there have been quite a few additions and questions, not least since I started doing videos on LinkedIn in which I make coffee and ramble for a few minutes while it brews. I was quite jet-lagged for the first one, but it went down pretty well (the Algorithm is pleased with video right now), so I have kept at it. With all the questions, it’s high time for an update!

What Has Not Changed

The LG 5k2k Ultrawide continues to be fantastic. There isn’t much more to say: it’s big, it’s bright, and the picture is sharp. What more do you need, really?

I’m still using the CalDigit TS3-Plus dock. There are updated versions of this device out there now; the brand-new TS5-Plus looks like an absolute monster, but I don’t have an urgent need to upgrade, at least until I get around to redoing the house LAN for 10GbE. It’s the first-worldiest of first-world problems, but it bugs me at some level that the FttH connection at 2.5 Gb/s is now faster than the snails-pace Gigabit Ethernet in the house. I am using all but a single USB-A port on the dock — well, except the audio input and output on the front; I drive the speakers with the S/PDIF optical output on the back.

The MuteMe hardware mute button is also still providing sterling service. The software does seem to be in some sort of fight with Zoom where sometimes it only works while Zoom is the foreground app, while at other times it works regardless of focus, but those foibles aside, it’s still a great addition to my setup.

I still have the Apple Magic Trackpad on the left of the keyboard, too. If you haven’t tried, it’s a real game-changer. A trackpad as a sole mousing device doesn’t quite do it for me, not least because it’s not particularly ergonomic, but I do miss the swipe gestures when I don’t have it, and the MacBook Pro’s built-in trackpad is not easily accessible up on its stand.

The Røde microphone on its swing arm and the audiotechnica headphones are also still going strong. They do what they need to do, and stay out of the way when I don’t need them, which is the ultimate compliment I can pay them.

Okay, So What’s New?

Um, everything else?

The portrait-oriented landscape display on the right is no longer the Lenovo panel from the last pic. That one belonged to MongoDB IT and went back to them together with their MacBook Pro. I had an Air as my daily driver for a while, and that can’t handle two external displays, but when I moved back to the Pro world, I eventually missed the extra screen real estate. I had had good experiences with the LG 5k2k, so I got its little brother, the LG Ergo 27” 4k. What’s unique about LG’s Ergo displays is that they clamp onto a desk instead of taking up precious desktop real estate with a stand. The stand also doubles as a channel for cable routing, keeping things tidy back there.

Helping with the ongoing project of keeping things tidy is a cable box. This was a surprisingly big quality-of-life upgrade, hiding all the mess of cables away — well, most of it, at least. There is also a little 4-port Ethernet switch back there, feeding the dock and my printer.

I swapped the Apple Magic Mouse that was on the right of my keyboard for a Kensington SlimBlade Pro Trackball to help with some RSI issues I was having. Adapting to that was more or less instant, perhaps helped by the fact that I did use laptops with trackballs way back at the turn of the century. One unexpectedly nice feature is that spinning the trackball horizontally is a very nice way to scroll a long document, perhaps on a 27” 4k portrait display, for instance.

The other big RSI adaptation is one of the newest additions to my setup: the ZSA Moonlander keyboard. This goes a step beyond the Microsoft Natural keyboard which I was rocking before. It always bothered me a little that some keys on that Microsoft keyboard remained stubbornly dead, not even reporting keycodes to Karabiner, and the key feel was never that great either. I eventually took the plunge and got the Moonlander that I had been lusting after for years. I did have a “what have I done” moment when I first started trying to use it, but a few weeks in, alphabetical typing at least has become fairly natural, although I still have to pause for any punctuation beyond the half-dozen signs I use regularly. My wrists feel great though, so it’s all worth it! I got blue keyswitches, so fairly clicky, and, as it turns out, quite loud enough to be picked up by the microphone and broadcast to a Zoom call! Yet another reason to have a hardware mute button right there…

I am now at the point of adaptation to my ZSA Moonlander where I am getting fairly competent with it, not that much slower than I was before — but I am now slowed down on a normal keyboard! Hoping this will pass with further practice…

– Me on Bluesky

The very newest addition rests between the two halves of the Moonlander: it’s a Flexbar, a Kickstarter project which aims to replicate the much-missed (by me) Touch Bar from old MacBook Pros. I only received it today, so I haven’t had a chance to mess with it too much, but I had been waiting for months for it to arrive and wanted to get it in the shot of my new setup. More updates to come on that front, no doubt.

That’s it for what’s on the desk. Above the desk, the big change is that I replaced my previous webcam with an Opal C1 (another Kickstarter gamble that paid off). This thing claims to offer “DSLR quality on a webcam”, and it certainly looks amazing. I have it set up on a Smallrig rail system, together with a couple of LED panels for lighting. Those are manually controlled; at some point I will probably get something more sophisticated, but this setup works for now. I also have a spare clamp on the rail for mounting my iPhone if I want to get ambitious with some multi-camera action.

Finally, I got a set of bookshelf speakers from Edifier a while back — long enough that this particular model seems to have gone out of production. Together with the subwoofer under the desk, they make a nice big sound, but also importantly, I can turn them off, and no software in the world can make noise in that situation. I get incredibly annoyed with things emitting sounds that I have not specifically requested them to, so I like speakers that I can turn off in hardware.

Is there anything else on my desk that you’d like me to explain? I spend quite a lot of time in here on my own, basically any time that I’m not traveling, so things evolve and move around constantly, and I always have ideas for changes and updates I would like to make. I’d love to hear from you on on Mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn.