chillu.com

Update (04/10/2007): This article has been lifehacked. Thanks for all your comments!

Being a programmer, I crouch in front of computers a lot – obviously you want to avoid being a cripple with 30 and get an ergonomic workplace. Usually this means having a separately adjustable keyboard and screen in addition to my Macbook Pro. Currently i don’t have this luxury, so I came up with a really simple laptop stand to rise the screen-height and have a more relaxed wrist position.

This has been done before (a lot). Some of them are just clumsy, look bad, or can’t be applied to Apple laptops because of the limited bending-angle of their screens. I’m suprised nobody looked at the obvious, and constructed a stand from a ring-binder. Its very cheap, easy to build, portable, and in addition contains most of the clutter i need on my desk (post-its, pen, my two external drives). You can even bundle any cables through the metal hole present in most binders. And most important: It perfectly fits the color of my laptop! *g

What you need

1. A stable ring binder, optimally with the latch not sticking out of the top to prevent scratches
2. 40cm aluminium rail (0.5mm thick, 1.5cm depth/height), normally used for securing edges, its available in every utility store
3. 40×1cm felt or fabric, to prevent scratches
4. Double-sided adhesive tape
5. Two small metal clamps, normally used for securing letters
6. Optional: Some black anti-slide mat to cover the ring binder

Instructions

1. Cut the aluminium rail to the length of the ring binder with a metal saw
2. Round the cutting edges
3. Place adhesive tape on one inner side of the rail
4. Drill two holes towards the sides big enough to hold the metal clamps
5. Fit rail to one edge of the ring binder
6. Drill holes through the binder as well, and secure them with the metal clamps
7. Fit the strip of felt on the other inner side of the rail (which will hold the laptop)
8. Secure the sides of the clamps facing the laptop-bottom with tape to avoid scratches

Warning

If your laptop-bottom tends to heat up with high CPU-usage, a paper-based ring binder might pose a fire hazard. Consider using an aluminium binder, leave some room for ventilation, or cut venting-holes into the binder top.

Pictures

There are innumerous posts about getting things done (GTD), and I spent so much time reading them that I actually didn’t get anything done ;) So, what would a geek-blog be without it’s GTD-post – here’s my take on the topic: Organization of your life’s daily actions basically needs a consistent system. I tried really basic stuff such as moleskines (handwriting sucks) and text-files (too unflexible). Then I switched to Circusponies Notebook (no todo-categories), Backpack (online-only) and Burnoutmenu (clumsy UI). All this systems failed for the stated reasons – I needed cross-platform compatibility in case my Powerbook dies again, offline-access and an intelligent GUI that does not get in my way.

After several weeks of testing, I’m still excited about a simple HTML-tool that now keeps all my todos: NextAction. Somehow in my development-life, I missed the fact that webpages can save data to theirselves via Javascript and JSON – I mean, how cool is that?! By that, you can have a full-blown interactive web-app in a single file, in the case of NextAction executable in every Mozilla-based browser. NextAction is really tailored towards GTD, with action-contexts (a very important principle to learn), actions for the next X days and human-friendly due-dates (“next month” instead of 2006/04/01). Of course, it’s interface is freely customizable via CSS – I’m planning to do a chillu.com-skin for it ;) To make this web-app behave more “desktoppy”, I’m loading it into a seperate browser (Camino) showing only this page without any title-bars. By this, I can instantly switch to my todo-list, and don’t clutter it with tabs of other websites – simple access is everything.

So, having a functional system that I trust, the only thing I have to learn is actually implementing good GTD – I still have those monster-todos floating around in my list that are not “actionable” in the original sense – they can’t be accomplished in a simple sitting. I guess I have to do some more GTD-reading... before I get things done… g