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About a year ago I decided I needed to give standing desks a try, after hearing good things about it from various well known developers, such as Romain Guy. Though the office at my house isn't tiny, it's not exactly Google HQ either, and I have a fairly spacious sitting desk. As such, I don't have the room to add a standing desk. I didn't really feel like shelling out big bucks for a switchable desk either, nor do those seem to come in the size I've grown accustomed to. Today I finally put in the effort to make it work (about time, you slacker).

The setup

When I'm sitting at my desk, behind my chair is a wall. Spanning the entire width of that wall is a large IKEA Ivar System ( http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/living_room/11703/ ), with space for my phones, tables, cameras, lenses, printers, the diskstation, the safe, paperwork, storage boxes, etc. It's a highly configurable, extensible, and relatively cheap system. As a potential drawback, it is made of unfinished wood.

In one of the columns of this system, I've cleared out the top half, and put in two shelves. On the bottom shelf is a keyboard (Microsoft Natural) and a mouse (MX518). I put a piece of laminate on the shelf as the wood isn't a good surface for the mouse.

The top shelf holds an older 24" widescreen monitor. Of course, having a shelf at the height of your shoulders doesn't work that well, so I sawed half a circle out of it. And by "I" of course I mean I had somebody else do it, as nobody in their right mind would trust me with a saw. At my sitting desk I'm used to having (at least) two monitors, so this one monitor is not ideal. The space isn't large enough for two though, but if this all works out well I am considering getting one of those 29" ultra-wide screens, which fits exactly, and gives me some extra screen real-estate.

When I was thinking this up, I wondered how I would connect everything. I didn't want to dedicate a full computer to this (I gave away all my old computers recently anyway). I had considered using the Chromebox I got at I/O last year to remote desktop to my main machine as well. Ultimately though, I opted for a pretty darn long DVI extension cable and an extra USB hub. So my main box powers both my sitting and standing area, and now has an extra monitor, an extra mouse, and an extra keyboard attached. I was a little worried that the latter would not work seamlessly, but it certainly does.

Note that I did have most of this stuff lying around from old computers, old places of employment, etc. So I didn't actually spend any money to set any of this up, aside from that DVI extension cable.

Screen real-estate management

Of course, having all the screens active at the same time is not very handy, as the windows would be all over the place, and having to turn around to find and drag over a window from one of the desk monitors would be a drag. The obvious answer is to use monitor profiles - sounds easy enough, right? 

As I used to be an avid gamer (and still like to play now and then) and Adobe doesn't believe in Linux either, I run Windows 7 on my box as host, and various of my development tools run on either the host or in one of several Linux (Mint) and OS X virtual machines. 

Windows 7 does not include a monitor profiles feature, nor does the nVidia driver. One might expect UltraMon to come to the rescue, but its profile function has stopped operating since I hooked up an Oculus Rift (first world problems...). Luckily, there's a hack for nVidia's nView driver which does have this functionality. With this hack it also runs on "normal" GeForce cards (as it used to out-of-the-box years back) instead of only the Quadros.

Using it

After setting it all up this morning, I've been using it for about 5 hours now. I'm clearly not used to standing around this long - my legs are plotting bloody murder, and my feet shall be willing accomplices.

However, the health benefits are clear ( "I'm feeling lucky" hit from Google: http://ergonomics.about.com/od/office/a/Benefits-of-a-Standing-Desk.htm ), and if I end up using it only one or two hours a day instead of sitting in my (ergonomically sound) office chair, it already should be well worth the effort (and potential cost) in the long-term.

If anyone is interested in this stuff, I'll report back in a few weeks about the experience. This turned out to be a rather longer post than I had intended, so if you read this far, then kudos to you.