Working from home

Good Friday afternoon all and welcome to this working-from-home-and-obsessively-washing-hands edition of FAIC.

I am posting today from my recently-transformed spare room which is now apparently my office. Scott Hanselman started a great twitter thread of techies showing off their home workspaces; here's my humble contribution.

We have my work Mac hooked up to two medium-sized HP monitors, one of which cost me all of $20 at a tech thrift store. The Windows game machine is under the desk. You'll note that I finally found a use for my VSTO 2007 book. The keyboard is the new edition of the Microsoft Natural; my original edition Natural is still on my desk at work and is not currently retrievable.

I am particularly pleased with how the desk came out. I made it myself out of 110 year old cedar fence boards; when I bought my house in 1997 the original fence was still in the back yard and falling down, so I disassembled it, removed the nails, let the boards dry out, planed them down, and figured I'd eventually do something with it. I've been building stuff out of it ever since, and this project finished off the last of that stock.

Here's a better shot of the desk.

The design is my own but obviously it is just a simple mission-style desk. All the joints are dowel and glue; the only metal is the two screws that hold the two drawer knobs on. The finish is just Danish oil with a little extra linseed oil added.

To the right I have a small writing desk:

Which as you may have guessed doubles as my 1954 Kenmore Zigzag Automatic Sewing Machine:

I have not used it in a while; I used to make kites. I might start again.

The manual for this machine is unintentionally hilarious, but that's a good topic for another day.

Finally, not shown, I've got a futon couch and a few plants to make it cosy.

Stay safe everyone, and hunker down.

UPDATE: Obviously I've been spending so much time in video chat from home, which is very unusual for me. Unfortunately my setup is such that there is a south-facing window right behind me that overpowers the built-in camera on my laptop even with the curtains drawn.

I took Scott's advice and got an inexpensive 8 inch ring light, shown here with the room otherwise dark:

The ring light is dimmable LED and has three colour temperatures, so I can now control the specularity of the light directly on my face, and also do some light shaping with the little non-dimmable desk lamp should I wish to. On a bright day the window no longer washes out the webcam image.

Before:

After:

The window is still an almost total white-out, but at least I no longer look like a purple-faced Walking Dead extra.

And good heavens do I ever need a haircut. That'll have to wait.