I would have thought TSA would "x-ray" (or whatever it is they do) through your bag and pull you off to the side for further investigation super quickly.
I came back from a tech event once with a build a robot kit, except I'm a very light packer and the box was huge so I had to take everything out and fit it into a backpack along with everything else I had.
I had a compartment that had an assortment of circuit boards, screws, wires, plastic pieces, etc..
No one even batted an eye and the bag went straight through the carry on x-ray machine. This was in San Jose, California while preparing for a cross country flight. I was surprised too.
They aren't looking for electronics - they are looking for large masses that could be fuel for the explosives. Big blocks of clay, liquids, etc. A jumble of electronics alone with nothing that can actually explode is common and doesn't ring any alarm bells. I discovered this after talking to a TSA agent after flying a few times with my modular synthesizer, where I was surprised that it was never pulled for extra screening.
My mother makes soap and tends to give me a few bars when I visit. I have learned to mail it back to myself; taking a few 2"x3"x5"-ish blocks of a uniform-density material through the airport is a guaranteed close look.
A friend once forgot a bare PCB TV-b-gone in a coat pocket while traveling EU to US. He noticed it right at the first checkpoint.
They asked what it is, laughed at the response, and went "eh, as long as there are no wires dangling off it, we don't care." He stuffed it in a bag and had no further issues.
Why the wires would've made a difference is beyond me...
When in university, I took part in a CUBEsat effort.
I brought the mechanical assembly -no electronics, just the aluminium structure- of our satellite to CalPoly for a CUBEsat workshop; on the way back to Europe I found out the hard way that anything which goes into space is considered munitions as far as the US DoD is concerned.
Took a while longer than expected to get on my flight...
A year or so back my son and his friends built a muon detector as a high school project, and then flew it from London to Germany and back to measure muon rates at altitude. Basically two metal boxes glued together, with some hand cut holes for display and power. Inside, a large block of solid plastic scintillator, wrapped in foil, with a bunch of hand-made electronics connected to it. Suspicious? Only a bit. I wrote a letter on headed university paper, explaining what it was, and with contact details in case they needed to phone.
At Stansted, the kid carrying it got the third degree, eveything put though the explosives sniffer, and so forth. The security person afterwards told him it ticked all the boxes except one for a bomb. Would love to know what that one was! They did eventually allow it on the plane though, and got really good data from the flight.
On the return flight, security at Cologne didn't look twice - just went straight through the x-ray machine, didn't even get pulled aside. Must have been asleep on the job.
In carry-on bags - bags go through an x-ray machine with an operator looking at so many negatives that it's next to impossible for them to spot a positive case.
I agree, although remember that it changes the problem for the attacker too: they're switching between trying to fool a (bleary-eyed) general intelligence to simply fooling a ML algorithm... think about how obvious and jarring anti-facial-detection face camoflage is for a human, whereas the machine simply sees nothing.
I'm guessing it's the power cable. The author is not a native English speaker, and Google says alimentation is "the provision of nourishment or other necessities."
I guess they mean power cable. The literal translation for power cable is "alimentation cable" in my native language. It's probably something like that for the article's author too.
Pelican case for author & foldable laptop displays as the next innovation for the rest. Nothing like just unfolding additional 7" on both sides of your laptop
>Took a few seconds to find a large pool of monitors designed for travelling.
Those are relatively small and ergonomically horrible (as are laptop screens in general). So wouldn't meet the authors needs to retaining current efficiency and comfort.
>I also don't get the need for an external GPU
I doubt his built in GPU can drive 3 large monitors and the laptop display at the same time.
edit: Also, for future reference, it's better/nicer to assume people are intelligent and try to understand their reasons for something rather than assuming they're idiots.
>Also, for future reference, it's better/nicer to assume people are intelligent and try to understand their reasons for something rather than assuming they're idiots.
Yes, but these aren't 24" and that's what the writer of the piece wanted. The biggest is 17", which isn't all that bad though. It's a shame that the resolution is abysmal: 1600x900
I used to code with that type of setup, with multiple large monitors. But a few months back, I switched to a single 43" UHD TV instead. I get more screen real estate that I did before, have fewer cables to deal with, and have less of a mental paradigm shift when I do travel and shrink down to just one laptop screen.
As soon as someone invents a way to fold or roll up a 40+ inch screen, I'll buy it.
I don't have a paradigm shift when I am forced to work on a small monitor, I just miss the real estate. I don't care if it is spread across multiple monitors or not (although I admit it is awkward in my current setup where my 3 monitors are different sizes and resolutions, so dragging windows from one to another requires resizing them).
If I have to work on my small screen, I'm far less efficient although it depends on the task. When developing, I like to have my app as well as multiple editors all in front of me at once. Can't do that on 13" really.
Have you considered a 4k short throw projector? The screen would be an issue, but you could get a foldable one, buy one on the spot or just use a white wall
The newer projectors are quite impressive. You won't get good color accuracy during the day, but it can still be good enough for almost anything else. The image projected is surprisingly sharp. I reckon if you work in the evenings and travel a lot it could be a nice setup.
Back in January of 2019 I bought a 55" UHD TV that I used as my main monitor for a few months.
Ultimately, I found that 55" was too big for me relative to the distance that I was sitting from the screen.
Currently I am back to using a 27" PC monitor with 2560x1440 resolution. I use this same monitor both when I use my desktop computer and when I use my laptop. In the latter case I have the additional monitor of the laptop itself, a 13.3" Retina (2560x1600) MacBook Air 2018 model, but it is sitting at an angle.
There were multiple issues with using a 55" UHD TV for me. A couple of the main issues that I had with using that TV as my main computer monitor were:
1. The pixels were a bit too visible at the distance I was sitting.
2. The upper 1/3 portion of the monitor or so was basically outside of my field of view, and as were the left and right 1/4 portions of the monitor. Turning my head, the fact that the display itself was flat still made it uncomfortable to use these areas of the screen.
3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.
But even with the better experience of going back to my 27" monitor and sometimes additionally using laptop display on the side, I often feel restricted in terms of screen real estate.
Lately I have been feeling a lot like it is an impossible battle.
On top of that I am beginning to feel more and more tired from looking at my monitors, and I also find sitting down in front of my computers both restricting in how I am postured and in the poor quality of the chair that I am sitting on. I am turning 30 years old later this year.
I feel that more and more that for me the joy of computing is becoming overshadowed by tiresomeness and feelings of being restricted, both physically in how I am sitting and moving and in terms of screen real-estate and in interacting with code and data in general.
I feel like I used to be able to marvel at things on the screen when I was much younger and to not be so bothered about the restrictions of posture and of what could be displayed at once and how I could interact with them.
I am left thinking that perhaps my mental capacity is starting to shrink as part of the ageing process of my body, but then I also think that perhaps it is not so much this as it is simply that the things I am working on now requires keeping track of a lot more things at once than the number of things I had to keep track of when I was young and still learning and working on simpler things.
In the beginning of my twenties I was concerned with optimizing my desktop environment for productivity. This was largely a time sink, and not something that I have desired to do anymore for several years now. But at the same time, I feel that I am wearing myself out sitting in front of the computer. And I feel that it shouldn't be this way.
For a while, when VR was new, I was intrigued by the idea of using VR as a working environment. Never went as far as to buy a VR headset but I've since lost a lot of the faith in VR as a magical silver bullet. Perhaps in the future sometime VR will be a solution to some of the problems I am experiencing, but I don't think the tools exist today to really take advantage of VR for coding and for working with data. Furthermore, having those displays on your head for hours on end is sure to be even more physically exhausting than looking at the monitors on my desk which themselves are already wearing me down.
I guess at this point I am basically rambling. But the point that I want to get to is that I believe that the way we work with code and data today is really really far from what would be the best for us. And I don't feel like I have the time nor the energy to tackle that problem either.
I also tried a 55" UHD and found it too big. I scaled down to a 49" on a rolling tv stand and it's perfect for me. I have some distance between myself and the screen though. ~6"
I really wish there was a way for me to travel with this setup :/
> 3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.
You wear glasses, don’t you? Changing the settings won’t help that much. An LCD can’t block all the light coming through, and wide gamut backlights are typically much wider on red vs sRGB. Glasses will cause chromatic aberration and exaggerate the difference.
Me too. I love my Dell U2415, which is not only a really well-made product but also that same 1920x1200 16:10 24" shape that seems perfect. When I have it vertical, I can fit one huge window of code or two browser windows. Horizontally, a browser window and a few smaller terminals fit nicely.
Agreed, 55" does sound huge. I'd never be able to work with the edges at that size.
At 43", I keep the monitor a few inches farther back than my old setup. But I also got a great idea from my eye doctor - he helped me refine a prescription specifically for the distance between my chair and monitor. With these glasses, the screen is impeccably sharp. And I have a different set of glasses for when I walk away from the desk.
Nreal "light" AR glasses (dev kit) provide a usb3 50-degree (5 fists) 1080p stereo screen at 2 m (so like 36"). Head tracking permits making that a viewport into a larger desktop. Display is very crisp. Ubuntu desktop looked quite usable.
Before CoV, the $1.2k dev kit was available outside US (long FCC delay) with claimed 1 mo lead. Issues with 6DOF tracking, nose fit, and maybe warmth. But I'd buy it if I could. Several competitors were aiming for similar designs this year. Now? But I think people are underestimating how rapid this transition might be, at least for some of our use cases.
Note there are right now fairly cheap 8k 55" TVs (Samsung Q900 series), and LG is releasing 48" 4k OLED TV soon. But I agree that these are way too large for working with text.
Regarding ergonomics, here are some obvious improvements:
1. A motorized sit/stand desk. Stand up every hour, or whenever you feel like stretching.
2. A decent chair: Leap and Embody are the best (I tried many).
3. High refresh rate monitors. If you're looking at moving text often (e.g. while scrolling) it's much easier on the eyes. Personally I'm getting two Asus XG27UQ as soon as they appear on Amazon. Also anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap. 5k looks even better, but there are currently no high refresh rate offerings. Hard to say which one more important for eye comfort - resolution or refresh rate, both are, so spend a bit more and get both.
4. Good headphones, or speakers if you work alone (speakers aren't as tiring for my ears as headphones with prolonged use). When there are other people around I use HD600 or QC35II depending on noise level, otherwise I enjoy my Edifier S360DB. Working in silence is great too sometimes.
Finally, try to get out to a park or a beach and let your eyes and mind rest a little. Leave your phone in the car. Or better yet bike/run there.
p.s. I'm 42, got my PhD in machine learning last year, currently keep track of my new R&D job projects, and an exciting personal side project, and two kids at home. Never felt sharper.
I definitely respect and align myself with your workstation hygiene arrangements but maybe not on every detail.
> anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap
I run closer to 1.5K of native definition on a 30" monitor. I find this is very good and doesn't require any fancy tuning in applications or the OS's. I have the panel mounted as low as possible so that I don't have to tip my head back too much to look at the top.
I don't listen to music or podcasts while I work, I found I concentrate better in silence. I also have a door I can close when people are talking BS in the hallway, so my stomach doesn't scrunch up at the falsehoods. The speakers that play the mail alert were bought as cheap as possible at BestBuy.
I have the privilege of being able to carry out all this largely at employer's expense and I don't waste it.
> In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.
On certain types of LCD TVs, the sub-pixels are not equal amounts of Red, Green, and Blue. As you've found out, some TVs have more Red sub-pixels than the other colours. This is because TVs are optimised for video viewing, and the manufacturers worked out that more Red in a scene results in a richer picture.
There's some videos out there that show the differences in close up (I don't have the URLs to hand), but in the worse cases, text can end up being unreadable due to the missing sub-pixel colours.
The bottom line is, a cheap 43" TV panel is not the same panel as you get in a 43" monitor.
I currently sit in front of a 55" 4K LG OLED and I feel your pain on the wall-like nature of it up close. It took some getting used to and sometimes I miss having side monitors. I sit at varying distances to it depending on what I'm doing but my head is usually no closer than 3 feet from it and I'll be honest.. I recline a lot--sometimes 45 degrees or more... I've been nearly horizontal. (I use a split keyboard so I can move my hands as far apart as I need to to get comfortable.) I don't know what the current research says about that but reclining or standing definitely makes it easier to look at the top of the screen.
A 43" UHD TV would have the same dpi as a 21.5" FHD monitor, so I guess the viewing distance should be about the same for both, if that helps put things into perspective. I'm assuming you don't intend to use scaling.
An important thing to keep in mind is there are actual computer monitors out there that match those specs and cost about the same as a comparable TV. If you don't intend to ever use it as an actual TV, that would probably be a slightly better choice as a TV might have unwanted picture optimizations or force you to use a remote to turn it on/switch inputs etc.
DisplayPort is uncommon enough on 4k TVs that none of the 4k TVs reviewed on rtings have DisplayPort inputs[0]. In contrast, the several years old 43 inch monitor I'm using has two DisplayPort ports.
The dot pitch is about the same as a 22" 1080p or 27" 1440p monitor, so really it's like having 4 1080p displays but with no bezels and a much smaller desk footprint.
It's great, cheaper than those ultrawide displays but with more resolution at the top of the screen for music players, email, etc. The built in TV speakers are more or less the same as desktop speakers but with no extra space.
Having a large 16:9 format display is also a million times better for games and fullscreen video.
My only complaints are that the refresh rate is limited to 60fps and the display lag is 20ms. I'll probably upgrade when HDMI adaptive sync becomes more commonplace.
> But a few months back, I switched to a single 43" UHD TV instead. I get more screen real estate that I did before
No you didn’t. If you switched from 2x 24” 4Ks to a single 43” 4K, you have half the real estate you used to, you’re just zoomed in on it.
To avoid confusing inches as a useful metric for how much information can be shown on screens at once, monitors should be measured in megapixels.
Problem’s even worse with “ultrawides” that are generally significantly lower dpi than their 4K siblings, so 1/2 to 1/4 the megapixels compared to dual 4Ks.
I think you’re off too. A 43” 4k can be run at its native 4k and the text is fine for reading and programming. If you’re running a 24” 4k, you’re running it scaled. At a minimum you’re running it at 1.5x, which means you’re getting about the same screen usage as the 43” tv.
It’s mathematically impossible to be off when using megapixels, that’s the point. It’s objective, not subjective. Bring back the subjective by considering “dpi” or “ppi”.
And no, I use dual 24” plus the Macbook Pro 16” native screen, and I run the 24s at native pixels (dual 4K @ 60Hz). I do, however, scale fonts up to 120% - 150% text size (depends on app).
This reduces the % of screen used for UI elements, while retaining “retina” text legible at arms length (same distance you’d read an iPad or magazine).
Exactly, although I tend to find the third screen starts to push the limits of the convenience of having the real estate vs the inconvenience of having to turn my head too much.
Sometimes I just set up my terminal windows to take up have the screen of my main (code) screen and alt+tab to it, and then just clicking on the IDE to bring it back on top.
I go back and forth between using the 3rd and not depending on my mood.
I have 2 x 27" 1440x2560, and my laptop's hi-dpi screen as well. I found a landscape multi-monitor setup a bit much, but a portrait arrangement is fine. Doesn't feel like the amount of head turning required to use the side monitors is a problem. It's definitely most comfortable to look straight ahead while using the central monitor, but using the side ones isn't a big problem. They're good for more than just displaying documentation.
(Total width of my setup is about the same as 3 x portrait 27" displays, so it feels like I have a reasonable idea how much head turning would be required for a better setup. Unfortunately, my laptop can only drive 2 external displays.)
I've been using this setup for about 2 years now, and have no intention of going back. It's really great.
(Portrait 1200p or 1080p isn't as good! The screen isn't quite wide enough. A lot of stuff assumes you have 1280+ pixels horizontally.)
It's really not a "must". Most of time it's a "nice to have", but trust me, lots of people do web dev with single screens and are as/more efficient than you with multiple screens. In fact, your efficiency has nothing to do with how many monitors you have.
OS X has some behavior that honestly gets into my way when I’m swapping back and forth between editing and doing command line work, but has a benefit when doing front-end work.
Put the browser on screen two. Put your IDE and Dev tools on the main monitor. You aren’t really going to operate your IDE and the dev tools at exactly the same time. So you can write your code, flip to the browser, test and inspect your changes, and flip back when it doesn’t work.
I have two monitors and my laptop screen, which is really 2.5 monitors. Since I upgraded one of the screens to a 27 inch, the real estate difference between that monitor and my laptop is so stark that I resist using the laptop screen at all. I really only use all three in a handful of situations.
Screen juggling gets non-trivial when the work I’m doing involves command line tools with behavior showing up in a UI - either our UI, or our infrastructure (eg, modifying a build script that is breaking only in CI).
Occasionally I have to keep a semi-active eye on our production stats while also progressing on other work. But only about 10% of the people in our program have to do that work, and we tend to tag team. I could almost do that work by bringing a tablet into the mix.
But even still, the third screen would barely be necessary if I wasn’t taking little breaks all the time to do other work, like research, or to blow off steam on HN. My windows begin to get mixed up and hunting the right one down gets more complicated.
No way dude. I don't know how anyone can get shit done with less than 3 monitors without wasting so much time. Maybe if you live and breath and were born on laptops you don't understand what you are missing, but to me and many others, it feels like running a race with one leg chopped off. It's just frustrating.
Your comment just makes me angry. Really assholish.
I was happy with 2 when I developed on Windows -- I'd do all my work on one and presentations on the other.
At my current job I have 2 but am feeling the need for 3 because I develop on a Linux VM, so I need one for the app or log I'm watching, one for the IDE, and one for Windows.
Two horizontal and one vertical for reading documents is my ideal setup. If I only need one I only turn on one. Once you go big you are ruined and can't go back without feeling like you have tunnel vision.
I have three monitors, plus a honking great screen on the laptop I connect them to. I can live without them, and most of the time I don't need them, but cross-checking something with a flick of my eyes is very natural when I need to keep track of lots of far flung dependencies.
The author had a preference for larger monitors over ease of transport, but if you're willing to sacrifice screen size, you can cram desktop components into a standard briefcase pretty easily.
Instead of multiple normal monitors I've started mounting tablets around my main monitor. Not quite the same flexibility but for e.g. email, slack etc. that I like having up, it works well.
My setup isn't meant to be mobile, but suspect it would be easier to make it so than normal monitors.
Based on current carry-on bag size limits, the bins on most planes are at least 22" deep, so a 19" server won't be a problem. It'll just take up the space of 2+ bags, depending on how long it is.
Depending on the server build and your physical strength you'll have a lot of trouble lifting it there. My 3U/12x3.5" lives on a cupboard (few inches lower than overhead bins), and I would never dare to (re-)move it (from) there with the disks inserted. Without them it's still heavy enough and a pain to move around, but then I'm more on the nerdy end of the STR scale ;-)
It's his carry-on. Stash it in the overhead when you're boarding. Presumably, if a company needs a server moved in a hurry, it's worth buying a first-class ticket for the "lucky" human who has to go along with it. I've never seen first-class pax not get overhead space, and almost never even see them need to use space outside the first-class section.
Derailing the thread, I took my first flight, age 18, in 2001. I was into carrying lots of tools on my belt / in my pockets back then, so carried on a pair of pliers, crescent wrench, flat head and phillips screwdrivers, a Swiss Army knife, a penknife, about six feet of baling wire, and lord knows what else. Dumped it all into the little round change tray, sent it through the X-ray machine, and re-pocketed it on the other side.
You can still do that minus the knife as long as the tools are under 7 inches. They even allow power tools. For check in can bring whatever tools you want.
Tehcnically true but any sort of toolbag seems to trigger being selected for a "random" groping by the TSA and with tools being so cheap nowadays it often makes sense to carry on your luggage (and maybe your favorite multimeter or something) and hit up Harbor Freight where you land.
The kind of people that are flying around to fix expensive equipment aren't going to tolerate using tools from Harbor Freight. And the people that own expensive equipment where you have to pay someone to fly in to fix it aren't going to want it being touched by Harbor Freight tools.
I don't know. My friend managed to do this by accident - he had a pocket knife in his backpack that he forgot about. Just threw the backpack in the X-ray scanner and picked it up on the other side. Only noticed it when we were changing flights.
This was just a few years ago, a day or two after France had had one of its annual terrorist attacks.
I too have brought a knife through security... not sure how much of it was me versus the fact that there were a whole bunch of Boy Scouts right in front of me, so they might've though I was with them or something.
7 inches would be luxurious. In Canada we're limited to 6cm (2.4 inches) for the head/shaft of the tool, but in practice, I've had small screwdrivers confiscated for being slightly over 6cm including the handle.
Back when I worked for BT that was part of the disaster recovery for the BT Worldwide Intranet.
We would quickly reconfig our test server to match the live on whilst our support person booked taxis and two tickets from Heathrow to Edinburgh - then one of us would fly up with the server on the seat next to them.
Yes I know we should have had a hot spare in the rack in CAPITAL (the main Exchange in Edinburgh)
At Aph where I worked in the 1970's, the airport people freaked out over my colleagues carrying a briefcase filled with electronic circuitry on the plane.
Aph made the prototypes for Mattel's handheld LED games. The prototype was a custom wirewrapped single board computer about 8*11 inches, with power supply and a rigged up game keyboard. It was all conveniently mounted in a hard shell briefcase. He'd have to power up the device and play the game to convince them it was harmless.
Playing them in the airport would always draw a crowd. Nobody had seen anything like that before.
I wonder what has happened to those machines. They were pretty cool.
Taking 1 off prototype devices across borders, or worse parts of ones (so you can't demonstrate even partial function) is sometimes fun. It can generate some interesting conversations, especially RF gear.
Note that there was no essential distinction between the single board computers we were designing and building, and an Apple II. We coulda been billionaires! :-/ I even made one that generated a 24*80 display on any CRT monitor.
I know someone who recently did that with a satellite that they were transporting to the facility that was going to pack it into a rocket to launch it into orbit. They apparently didn't have any problems.
Back in 1993 or so, I was doing my PhD and also ended up doing a lot of videoconferencing demos at various conferences. This really required a Sun Sparcstation 20, maxed out with dual CPUs, as much RAM as it would take, and a video capture card and camera. In such a spec, an SS20 was pretty rare, so I carried the one from our lab everywhere in an unpadded canvas shoulder bag - on planes, buses, trains, whereever. It was pretty large, weighed about 25lbs, and back in 1993 was worth about £20,000 in that spec, which was more than I earned in a year. I was pretty worried I'd drop it or leave it in the pub or something, but I guess being so heavy, it was hard to forget. Despite the bumps, bashes and vibration, it never failed - Sun made good hardware back then. Other than having a difficult time with customs officials in Italy one time (they wanted to "fine" me for a form I apparently should have filled out; I didn't have any money, so couldn't pay no matter what they wanted - missed my flight by 12 hours as a result), nothing bad ever happened.
I had a colleague who was asked by a client to bring a 2U FPGA-based router on the plane to Brazil .. and not declare it to customs, as that would save the 50% import tax. Apparently this ludicrous scheme worked.
I've flown with sketchy looking computers in pelican cases a few times. The only time it was a problem was when I mentioned that the batteries in the box were scooter batteries. Apparently you can fly with any size lead-acid batteries you want, but "scooter batteries" are on a list of specifically banned items.
The security folks aren't applying any judgement, they're just looking for things on a list of stuff that's not allowed. As long as big-ass servers aren't on the list and they fit in the carry-on size limit, it's all good.
I had a similar experience with lithium-ion batteries: I flew from Canada to the US with a backpack full of equipment that was 99% battery, 1% rfid reader by volume. On the x-ray, it looked like battery packs and that wouldn't have been allowed. But I told them it was rfid readers, and that made it okay.
Not just security people. Easy way of avoiding it if the gate staff want to tag your carry on bag and put it on the hold: be very willing,take their receipt that points out there shouldn't be batteries in there,then very apologetically point out you have devices with batteries in there.
So far it's worked every time - not once have they asked if I could take them out; probably not so much that they're clueless as that they're just looking for the easiest way of getting their assigned task done.
Nice article. Logical next step is to drive all 3 screens from a single power supply (as these use LED backlighting, they do not require much power each). I would build the AC transformer into the middle screen and have it output DC to the ones on either side.
Yes, exactly what I wanted to do initially, but the issue is that the power block also contains the video card of the screen and needs power too, so that wouldn't be so easy to do, but feasible
Well, congratulations on the whole setup. It seems you planned everything down to the last detail and it worked out well.
However, if I were you, I would have asked myself: (1) do I really need 3 monitors, (2) if yes, can I just rent them wherever I'm headed, (3) if no, can I just substitute them with a larger UHD TV, which seem to be quite cheap these days (buy one and resell later).
In fact, if you are staying at a hotel or a serviced apartment, there would usually be a TV you could repurpose for this.
I also wanted to point out you can travel with more luggage as long as a single piece is under 32 kg, and stuff can be shipped internationally without including an invoice.
As long as a single item is below 20 kg, you could also use EMS, which works nearly as well, is cheaper, and, unlike parcel services, does not require you to appoint a customs agent on your behalf.
I'm not writing all this to critize what you did but just wanted to let you know alternate solutions should in fact be possible. As someone doing a lot of travelling, I've come to the conclusion that travelling light is the best thing one can do.
> (2) if yes, can I just rent them wherever I'm headed,
Sounds like there's a very boring but likely profitable business waiting to be spawned here. The fact that there isn't an obvious choice for renting electronic goods for digital nomads on the go is a pretty big flag.
They exist and they are horribly expensive. Last time I was setting up a recruiting booth and it was cheaper to buy a display from Walmart than it was to rent one. And I was able to return it to Walmart at the end, too.
I don't have names. This was at CVPR 2017 in Honolulu.
The convention center had some recommended A/V rental company that quoted $350 for a simple 28" display or something of the sort. They clearly didn't understand basic economics because it cost me 4*$10=$40 Uber rides to get a display from Walmart and return it for a full refund, so the rental company would have needed to be cheaper than $40 to make sense to a customer. Also they violated the most basic axiom of rentals which is that a single day rental needs to be significantly cheaper than buying.
I’m in the conference and events business. I had the exact same mentality as you when I started, but after a couple broken monitors and stuff that doesn’t work and so on I started to understand the logic of paying an AV vendor to just make sure there’s a working monitor on the table.
My company needed a half dozen 32" monitors for a conference (to play videos, so 1080p was fine). We had some in storage, but it was cheaper to buy some new ones from Amazon (with free shipping) and dispose of them after the conference than to pay to ship the existing ones back and forth to the conference. They bought a spare one just in case one failed (they didn't)
One of the employees manning the booth went to high school nearby and had arranged for someone from their AV department show up after the conference to pick up the monitors as a donation.
Renting equipment at conferences is indeed heinously expensive, IME.
However, this is a very different case to the one of the previous commenter, who is talking about renting out equipment to the public, for the sake of ‘digital nomads’.
I thought about that, one issue that you will have is that you still need to have blank screens to project on, and the setup would be more complex as you need to project from the back ...
Back in the early '90's I was travelling all over the American Continent and Europe with loads of equipment. I remember a notable last-minute trip to Amsterdam where I had no choice but to take about 600 lbs (272 kg). I had to design a custom 8020-based dolly to be able to move this pile-of-technology around on my own at the airports. The idea was to take it apart, store it in one of the cases and re-assemble on arrival.
For the most part this worked out OK, except for one memorable trip to Munich. All of my equipment cases came out of the plane coated in what I can only describe as some kind of yellow grease. I was literally coated with this stuff after pulling all my equipment off the carousel. I won't bore you with the entire story of what happened at the airport after that. In retrospect it was very funny, not at the time, of course, it was very far from that.
When I was in high school I worked for our district’s IT department. There were a couple of Power Mac G5s that were shared, but the students working in that department were using eMacs. One year I bought the first generation Intel iMac (my first Mac), which was significantly faster than the eMacs we were allotted. I got a carrying bag for it and biked into work with it each day.
That said, I wouldn’t dream of doing that in a public cafe.
No, I'm not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I'm getting a hotel room in a state where I don't know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.
I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I'm sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.
This will be an interesting experiment for me. I have always wondered how much of my time that isn't at peak productivity is a necessary rest break, and how much of it is just wasted.
Back in the 90s a friend of mines dad donated a room full of new PCs for the pc lab (486 dx66) and some big monitors to our high school. My friend at the time thought that since he was the main one (voluntarily) tech supporting most of the PCs in the lab, and it being his dad who donated everything, that he could exchange a few things with his personal setup at home. Initially it was trading his 1MB RAM sticks for 4MB sticks. Near the end it was carrying home one of the those incredibly heavy Sony Trinitron 21" CRTs (the one with composite outputs) on his bike handlebars a few miles home down. I rode with him and kept thinking no way he'd make it... but he did, although there a few close calls stopping at traffic lights.
In the spirit of his (sadly passed away) adventurous self, a few years ago I carried home 2x 24" LCDs that i had lent my friend the week prior... on my unicycle, figuring my hands were free, why not carry something? The worst part was going up hills... thankfully there were no spills ;)
Because of my weird comfort and focus habits I've forced myself to get used to small screens. I hate having more than one task visible at any one moment so all my apps are running full-screen anyway. I've got very used to the various short-cuts for switching apps. I use Windows and MacOS and avoid all the full-screen functionality in MacOS (never managed to really get my head round it). I've got a 13" Macbook Air (2015 - before they ruined them) and a 15" Windows Laptop (Gaming GPU so I couldn't dual boot the Mac)
My IDEs are all Jetbrains (PyCharm, Rider). A console is no issue. The biggest challenge is probably Unity but having good workspace presets for various tasks helps.
Another factor - I'm pushing 50 and my eyesight is getting worse so I want less going on at once so I can make stuff bigger...
From one old git with failing eyesight to another, think about talking to your optician and investigating a pair of glasses optimised for the shorter distance. Life changing move if you spend any decent amount of time in front of a monitor. Good luck!
Does the difference in alt-tab behavior between Windows and MacOS (with alt-` too) slow you down at all? I might venture to guess no, since your workflow sounds like largely single-window-per-program.
Not OP but in a similar position. I find that since I don't use the desktop switching features on MacOS I dont have a problem with the alt tab situation. I only use one desktop and just alt tab for everything. Its just a minor annoyance on Windows when alt+` doesn't respond.
The worst part for me about switching back and forth between MacOS and Windows/Nix is the muscle memory around applekey+c/v vs ctrl+c/v. There isn't a way to remap keys to recreate that muscle memory on Windows/nix and keep the muscle memory for alt tab.
Surely Windows has a comparable window-switching behavior which could be mapped to alt-` with AutoHotKey or similar? I'm not familiar with Windows post-95, but I'd do this in a heartbeat, since the change app and window shortcuts are deep in my muscle memory after all these years.
I used to regularly switch between Windows and MacOS when I was in college and found that if I used the same keyboard I'd frequently go for the wrong keys (I didn't like the college keyboards so would bring one from home). Interestingly, using different keyboards for Windows and MacOS solved that problem.
Too many places to move my neck for my preferences, but this did get me looking at something like the Samsung Space 27” for this use case - seems like it would work well and weighs in at 12 pounds each so two of them would hit the 12 kilo requirement without the hacks, and probably shield the RF a bit more. Also does multi-source PIP if you wanted to create a third “virtual” monitor but I’m not sure why you’d bother when one could arrange windows instead.
I'm working remotely for a month right now and needed a monitor there to work. I had two ideas:
1. bring one in a suitcase on my flight
2. just buy one locally once I got there
I decided to just bring my existing 27" monitor and wait until the day of my flight to try and pack it... Of course it was about 2 inches too long for a standard large suitcase.
I quickly found a (physical) store which sold a cheap 23" Dell monitor and bought it. It easily fit into the suitcase and I've been happily using it for 3 weeks now. Only downside was going back to 1080p :(
You just need one suitcase per monitor. The yoga mat isn't going to keep blunt pressure off the screen though. You need to attach something structural to the front to distribute load to the bezel. The corrigated plastic used for yard signs is light, cheap, and surprisingly strong. Bubble wrap that and wrap it in your clothes.
That said, nothing beats the custom molded styrofoam it came in. Keep these if you can.
I had a similar problem back in 1997 - of course it was much worse since we had much heavier CRTs then.
The answer was to rent the monitor when I needed it. I’d imagine it would be easier to do that today than it was back then. I remember going through the white pages to find a company who would accommodate me.
Fun project! My solution was to just buy a hardshell suitcase and throw a 27" monitor in it. That, a 15" laptop screen, and a hotel TV if I'm so inclined does the trick for me. I'm willing to give up my third monitor in exchange for convenience. Also, I'd NEVER make it through security with something that looks like that.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] threadI came back from a tech event once with a build a robot kit, except I'm a very light packer and the box was huge so I had to take everything out and fit it into a backpack along with everything else I had.
I had a compartment that had an assortment of circuit boards, screws, wires, plastic pieces, etc..
No one even batted an eye and the bag went straight through the carry on x-ray machine. This was in San Jose, California while preparing for a cross country flight. I was surprised too.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-fentanyl-bust...
Also, plants or foods are sometimes forbidden because of potential to carry vermin, plant diseases, etc.
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/us-citizens/know-before-you-go/pr...
They asked what it is, laughed at the response, and went "eh, as long as there are no wires dangling off it, we don't care." He stuffed it in a bag and had no further issues.
Why the wires would've made a difference is beyond me...
I brought the mechanical assembly -no electronics, just the aluminium structure- of our satellite to CalPoly for a CUBEsat workshop; on the way back to Europe I found out the hard way that anything which goes into space is considered munitions as far as the US DoD is concerned.
Took a while longer than expected to get on my flight...
At Stansted, the kid carrying it got the third degree, eveything put though the explosives sniffer, and so forth. The security person afterwards told him it ticked all the boxes except one for a bomb. Would love to know what that one was! They did eventually allow it on the plane though, and got really good data from the flight.
On the return flight, security at Cologne didn't look twice - just went straight through the x-ray machine, didn't even get pulled aside. Must have been asleep on the job.
Schneier has a nice piece about it in an excerpt from one of his books: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/failures_of_a...
I agree, although remember that it changes the problem for the attacker too: they're switching between trying to fool a (bleary-eyed) general intelligence to simply fooling a ML algorithm... think about how obvious and jarring anti-facial-detection face camoflage is for a human, whereas the machine simply sees nothing.
Are there newer stats that show 95%?
I think it's from what it's called in French.
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-portable-monitor
I also don't get the need for an external GPU. Maybe for machine learning it makes sense, but just to drive monitors it sounds excessive.
Those are relatively small and ergonomically horrible (as are laptop screens in general). So wouldn't meet the authors needs to retaining current efficiency and comfort.
>I also don't get the need for an external GPU
I doubt his built in GPU can drive 3 large monitors and the laptop display at the same time.
edit: Also, for future reference, it's better/nicer to assume people are intelligent and try to understand their reasons for something rather than assuming they're idiots.
The older I get, the more I learn this lesson.
Well in that case it works. Last generation integrated GPU can handle 2 4K monitors at 60/s or 3 full hd at 60/s if I remember correctly
There are larger portable monitors too.
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/24-inch-portable-monitor.ht...
The external GPU is needed when you want to use more display that your integrated card can handle, 3 in my case
https://eu.aoc.com/en/monitors/e1759fwu
As soon as someone invents a way to fold or roll up a 40+ inch screen, I'll buy it.
If I have to work on my small screen, I'm far less efficient although it depends on the task. When developing, I like to have my app as well as multiple editors all in front of me at once. Can't do that on 13" really.
Ultimately, I found that 55" was too big for me relative to the distance that I was sitting from the screen.
Currently I am back to using a 27" PC monitor with 2560x1440 resolution. I use this same monitor both when I use my desktop computer and when I use my laptop. In the latter case I have the additional monitor of the laptop itself, a 13.3" Retina (2560x1600) MacBook Air 2018 model, but it is sitting at an angle.
There were multiple issues with using a 55" UHD TV for me. A couple of the main issues that I had with using that TV as my main computer monitor were:
1. The pixels were a bit too visible at the distance I was sitting.
2. The upper 1/3 portion of the monitor or so was basically outside of my field of view, and as were the left and right 1/4 portions of the monitor. Turning my head, the fact that the display itself was flat still made it uncomfortable to use these areas of the screen.
3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.
But even with the better experience of going back to my 27" monitor and sometimes additionally using laptop display on the side, I often feel restricted in terms of screen real estate.
Lately I have been feeling a lot like it is an impossible battle.
On top of that I am beginning to feel more and more tired from looking at my monitors, and I also find sitting down in front of my computers both restricting in how I am postured and in the poor quality of the chair that I am sitting on. I am turning 30 years old later this year.
I feel that more and more that for me the joy of computing is becoming overshadowed by tiresomeness and feelings of being restricted, both physically in how I am sitting and moving and in terms of screen real-estate and in interacting with code and data in general.
I feel like I used to be able to marvel at things on the screen when I was much younger and to not be so bothered about the restrictions of posture and of what could be displayed at once and how I could interact with them.
I am left thinking that perhaps my mental capacity is starting to shrink as part of the ageing process of my body, but then I also think that perhaps it is not so much this as it is simply that the things I am working on now requires keeping track of a lot more things at once than the number of things I had to keep track of when I was young and still learning and working on simpler things.
In the beginning of my twenties I was concerned with optimizing my desktop environment for productivity. This was largely a time sink, and not something that I have desired to do anymore for several years now. But at the same time, I feel that I am wearing myself out sitting in front of the computer. And I feel that it shouldn't be this way.
For a while, when VR was new, I was intrigued by the idea of using VR as a working environment. Never went as far as to buy a VR headset but I've since lost a lot of the faith in VR as a magical silver bullet. Perhaps in the future sometime VR will be a solution to some of the problems I am experiencing, but I don't think the tools exist today to really take advantage of VR for coding and for working with data. Furthermore, having those displays on your head for hours on end is sure to be even more physically exhausting than looking at the monitors on my desk which themselves are already wearing me down.
I guess at this point I am basically rambling. But the point that I want to get to is that I believe that the way we work with code and data today is really really far from what would be the best for us. And I don't feel like I have the time nor the energy to tackle that problem either.
I really wish there was a way for me to travel with this setup :/
You wear glasses, don’t you? Changing the settings won’t help that much. An LCD can’t block all the light coming through, and wide gamut backlights are typically much wider on red vs sRGB. Glasses will cause chromatic aberration and exaggerate the difference.
Also, I long for the day when humanity will retire the imperial measurements system.
Planing to use them forever.
CCFL is infinitely better than LED.
How so?
At 43", I keep the monitor a few inches farther back than my old setup. But I also got a great idea from my eye doctor - he helped me refine a prescription specifically for the distance between my chair and monitor. With these glasses, the screen is impeccably sharp. And I have a different set of glasses for when I walk away from the desk.
Nreal "light" AR glasses (dev kit) provide a usb3 50-degree (5 fists) 1080p stereo screen at 2 m (so like 36"). Head tracking permits making that a viewport into a larger desktop. Display is very crisp. Ubuntu desktop looked quite usable.
Before CoV, the $1.2k dev kit was available outside US (long FCC delay) with claimed 1 mo lead. Issues with 6DOF tracking, nose fit, and maybe warmth. But I'd buy it if I could. Several competitors were aiming for similar designs this year. Now? But I think people are underestimating how rapid this transition might be, at least for some of our use cases.
Regarding ergonomics, here are some obvious improvements:
1. A motorized sit/stand desk. Stand up every hour, or whenever you feel like stretching.
2. A decent chair: Leap and Embody are the best (I tried many).
3. High refresh rate monitors. If you're looking at moving text often (e.g. while scrolling) it's much easier on the eyes. Personally I'm getting two Asus XG27UQ as soon as they appear on Amazon. Also anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap. 5k looks even better, but there are currently no high refresh rate offerings. Hard to say which one more important for eye comfort - resolution or refresh rate, both are, so spend a bit more and get both.
4. Good headphones, or speakers if you work alone (speakers aren't as tiring for my ears as headphones with prolonged use). When there are other people around I use HD600 or QC35II depending on noise level, otherwise I enjoy my Edifier S360DB. Working in silence is great too sometimes.
Finally, try to get out to a park or a beach and let your eyes and mind rest a little. Leave your phone in the car. Or better yet bike/run there.
p.s. I'm 42, got my PhD in machine learning last year, currently keep track of my new R&D job projects, and an exciting personal side project, and two kids at home. Never felt sharper.
> anything less than 4k on 27" monitor looks like crap I run closer to 1.5K of native definition on a 30" monitor. I find this is very good and doesn't require any fancy tuning in applications or the OS's. I have the panel mounted as low as possible so that I don't have to tip my head back too much to look at the top.
I don't listen to music or podcasts while I work, I found I concentrate better in silence. I also have a door I can close when people are talking BS in the hallway, so my stomach doesn't scrunch up at the falsehoods. The speakers that play the mail alert were bought as cheap as possible at BestBuy.
I have the privilege of being able to carry out all this largely at employer's expense and I don't waste it.
This phrasing makes me think you’re much older than I am :)
which would explain you being fine with “1.5k” resolution on a 30” screen.
On certain types of LCD TVs, the sub-pixels are not equal amounts of Red, Green, and Blue. As you've found out, some TVs have more Red sub-pixels than the other colours. This is because TVs are optimised for video viewing, and the manufacturers worked out that more Red in a scene results in a richer picture.
There's some videos out there that show the differences in close up (I don't have the URLs to hand), but in the worse cases, text can end up being unreadable due to the missing sub-pixel colours.
The bottom line is, a cheap 43" TV panel is not the same panel as you get in a 43" monitor.
An important thing to keep in mind is there are actual computer monitors out there that match those specs and cost about the same as a comparable TV. If you don't intend to ever use it as an actual TV, that would probably be a slightly better choice as a TV might have unwanted picture optimizations or force you to use a remote to turn it on/switch inputs etc.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table/23958
The dot pitch is about the same as a 22" 1080p or 27" 1440p monitor, so really it's like having 4 1080p displays but with no bezels and a much smaller desk footprint.
It's great, cheaper than those ultrawide displays but with more resolution at the top of the screen for music players, email, etc. The built in TV speakers are more or less the same as desktop speakers but with no extra space.
Having a large 16:9 format display is also a million times better for games and fullscreen video.
My only complaints are that the refresh rate is limited to 60fps and the display lag is 20ms. I'll probably upgrade when HDMI adaptive sync becomes more commonplace.
No you didn’t. If you switched from 2x 24” 4Ks to a single 43” 4K, you have half the real estate you used to, you’re just zoomed in on it.
To avoid confusing inches as a useful metric for how much information can be shown on screens at once, monitors should be measured in megapixels.
Problem’s even worse with “ultrawides” that are generally significantly lower dpi than their 4K siblings, so 1/2 to 1/4 the megapixels compared to dual 4Ks.
And no, I use dual 24” plus the Macbook Pro 16” native screen, and I run the 24s at native pixels (dual 4K @ 60Hz). I do, however, scale fonts up to 120% - 150% text size (depends on app).
This reduces the % of screen used for UI elements, while retaining “retina” text legible at arms length (same distance you’d read an iPad or magazine).
Sometimes I wish I have a forth screen for the documentation.
Sometimes I just set up my terminal windows to take up have the screen of my main (code) screen and alt+tab to it, and then just clicking on the IDE to bring it back on top.
I go back and forth between using the 3rd and not depending on my mood.
I have 2 x 27" 1440x2560, and my laptop's hi-dpi screen as well. I found a landscape multi-monitor setup a bit much, but a portrait arrangement is fine. Doesn't feel like the amount of head turning required to use the side monitors is a problem. It's definitely most comfortable to look straight ahead while using the central monitor, but using the side ones isn't a big problem. They're good for more than just displaying documentation.
(Total width of my setup is about the same as 3 x portrait 27" displays, so it feels like I have a reasonable idea how much head turning would be required for a better setup. Unfortunately, my laptop can only drive 2 external displays.)
I've been using this setup for about 2 years now, and have no intention of going back. It's really great.
(Portrait 1200p or 1080p isn't as good! The screen isn't quite wide enough. A lot of stuff assumes you have 1280+ pixels horizontally.)
Put the browser on screen two. Put your IDE and Dev tools on the main monitor. You aren’t really going to operate your IDE and the dev tools at exactly the same time. So you can write your code, flip to the browser, test and inspect your changes, and flip back when it doesn’t work.
I have two monitors and my laptop screen, which is really 2.5 monitors. Since I upgraded one of the screens to a 27 inch, the real estate difference between that monitor and my laptop is so stark that I resist using the laptop screen at all. I really only use all three in a handful of situations.
Screen juggling gets non-trivial when the work I’m doing involves command line tools with behavior showing up in a UI - either our UI, or our infrastructure (eg, modifying a build script that is breaking only in CI).
Occasionally I have to keep a semi-active eye on our production stats while also progressing on other work. But only about 10% of the people in our program have to do that work, and we tend to tag team. I could almost do that work by bringing a tablet into the mix.
But even still, the third screen would barely be necessary if I wasn’t taking little breaks all the time to do other work, like research, or to blow off steam on HN. My windows begin to get mixed up and hunting the right one down gets more complicated.
Your comment just makes me angry. Really assholish.
At my current job I have 2 but am feeling the need for 3 because I develop on a Linux VM, so I need one for the app or log I'm watching, one for the IDE, and one for Windows.
The author had a preference for larger monitors over ease of transport, but if you're willing to sacrifice screen size, you can cram desktop components into a standard briefcase pretty easily.
My setup isn't meant to be mobile, but suspect it would be easier to make it so than normal monitors.
I just carried it on.
It was enormous - 4U and full length - and weighed a ton.
No packaging, no box - just carrying a huge server down the aisle of the plane ...
Yes, I put it in the overhead bin and it did, indeed, fit.
After all, a rackmount server is only 19" wide ...
-“I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave”
No seat - I put it in the overhead bin ...
Derailing the thread, I took my first flight, age 18, in 2001. I was into carrying lots of tools on my belt / in my pockets back then, so carried on a pair of pliers, crescent wrench, flat head and phillips screwdrivers, a Swiss Army knife, a penknife, about six feet of baling wire, and lord knows what else. Dumped it all into the little round change tray, sent it through the X-ray machine, and re-pocketed it on the other side.
Those were the days.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
This was just a few years ago, a day or two after France had had one of its annual terrorist attacks.
https://www.catsa-acsta.gc.ca/en/item/tools
We would quickly reconfig our test server to match the live on whilst our support person booked taxis and two tickets from Heathrow to Edinburgh - then one of us would fly up with the server on the seat next to them.
Yes I know we should have had a hot spare in the rack in CAPITAL (the main Exchange in Edinburgh)
At Aph where I worked in the 1970's, the airport people freaked out over my colleagues carrying a briefcase filled with electronic circuitry on the plane.
Aph made the prototypes for Mattel's handheld LED games. The prototype was a custom wirewrapped single board computer about 8*11 inches, with power supply and a rigged up game keyboard. It was all conveniently mounted in a hard shell briefcase. He'd have to power up the device and play the game to convince them it was harmless.
Playing them in the airport would always draw a crowd. Nobody had seen anything like that before.
I wonder what has happened to those machines. They were pretty cool.
The security folks aren't applying any judgement, they're just looking for things on a list of stuff that's not allowed. As long as big-ass servers aren't on the list and they fit in the carry-on size limit, it's all good.
I had a similar experience with lithium-ion batteries: I flew from Canada to the US with a backpack full of equipment that was 99% battery, 1% rfid reader by volume. On the x-ray, it looked like battery packs and that wouldn't have been allowed. But I told them it was rfid readers, and that made it okay.
So far it's worked every time - not once have they asked if I could take them out; probably not so much that they're clueless as that they're just looking for the easiest way of getting their assigned task done.
I settled on 4x 17" laptops, much easier to carry and you get extra storage and bonus processing power.
Wasn't my plan, really, but I can't sell old laptops (too cheap, no one wants them anyway, plus I always think maybe I'll use this one for smth).
So one old laptop became a second display. Then a second. But that's three and looks stupid and asymmetrical, so I added a 4th...
Traveled once with them, barely takes up half a bag. Think I'll stick with it.
However, if I were you, I would have asked myself: (1) do I really need 3 monitors, (2) if yes, can I just rent them wherever I'm headed, (3) if no, can I just substitute them with a larger UHD TV, which seem to be quite cheap these days (buy one and resell later).
In fact, if you are staying at a hotel or a serviced apartment, there would usually be a TV you could repurpose for this.
I also wanted to point out you can travel with more luggage as long as a single piece is under 32 kg, and stuff can be shipped internationally without including an invoice.
As long as a single item is below 20 kg, you could also use EMS, which works nearly as well, is cheaper, and, unlike parcel services, does not require you to appoint a customs agent on your behalf.
I'm not writing all this to critize what you did but just wanted to let you know alternate solutions should in fact be possible. As someone doing a lot of travelling, I've come to the conclusion that travelling light is the best thing one can do.
Sounds like there's a very boring but likely profitable business waiting to be spawned here. The fact that there isn't an obvious choice for renting electronic goods for digital nomads on the go is a pretty big flag.
The convention center had some recommended A/V rental company that quoted $350 for a simple 28" display or something of the sort. They clearly didn't understand basic economics because it cost me 4*$10=$40 Uber rides to get a display from Walmart and return it for a full refund, so the rental company would have needed to be cheaper than $40 to make sense to a customer. Also they violated the most basic axiom of rentals which is that a single day rental needs to be significantly cheaper than buying.
One of the employees manning the booth went to high school nearby and had arranged for someone from their AV department show up after the conference to pick up the monitors as a donation.
However, this is a very different case to the one of the previous commenter, who is talking about renting out equipment to the public, for the sake of ‘digital nomads’.
For the most part this worked out OK, except for one memorable trip to Munich. All of my equipment cases came out of the plane coated in what I can only describe as some kind of yellow grease. I was literally coated with this stuff after pulling all my equipment off the carousel. I won't bore you with the entire story of what happened at the airport after that. In retrospect it was very funny, not at the time, of course, it was very far from that.
There has to be a huge advantage building such a weird thing over just going on holiday without all that crap
He brought in his laptop, and the box containing whatever giagantic Apple monitor he had, and proceeded to hook it up.
When barista came by bussing the tables, she told him to put it away. He was completely incredulous, but relented.
Hmm. I have a terrible idea.
After a bit of digging, the XPS M2010 20" entertainment 'laptop' released in 2006.
https://twitter.com/jcs/status/1232779884751204354
No, I'm not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I'm getting a hotel room in a state where I don't know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.
I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I'm sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.
This will be an interesting experiment for me. I have always wondered how much of my time that isn't at peak productivity is a necessary rest break, and how much of it is just wasted.
https://youtu.be/-5zeJyQ31rM?t=113 (at 1:52, with bonus Bill Gates)
My IDEs are all Jetbrains (PyCharm, Rider). A console is no issue. The biggest challenge is probably Unity but having good workspace presets for various tasks helps.
Another factor - I'm pushing 50 and my eyesight is getting worse so I want less going on at once so I can make stuff bigger...
The worst part for me about switching back and forth between MacOS and Windows/Nix is the muscle memory around applekey+c/v vs ctrl+c/v. There isn't a way to remap keys to recreate that muscle memory on Windows/nix and keep the muscle memory for alt tab.
1. bring one in a suitcase on my flight
2. just buy one locally once I got there
I decided to just bring my existing 27" monitor and wait until the day of my flight to try and pack it... Of course it was about 2 inches too long for a standard large suitcase.
I quickly found a (physical) store which sold a cheap 23" Dell monitor and bought it. It easily fit into the suitcase and I've been happily using it for 3 weeks now. Only downside was going back to 1080p :(
That said, nothing beats the custom molded styrofoam it came in. Keep these if you can.
The answer was to rent the monitor when I needed it. I’d imagine it would be easier to do that today than it was back then. I remember going through the white pages to find a company who would accommodate me.