My tricks and accessories for working ergonomically on a laptop while on the go

In my last post, I discussed how I upgraded to a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 11 laptop (rtings.com review) as my primary Linux workstation. For years, I’ve worked from my Linux laptop (usually a Lenovo X1 carbon) on the go.

I’ve been spending more time recently working on the go, outside of my office, for various reasons. That made me realize: I never did a post about how I make sure I keep some good ergonomics even when working from cafes, hotels, libraries, outdoor parks, and so on. Well, this post will remedy that!

Making a laptop feel nice on the lap

It’s in the name! Laptops are meant to be used from your lap. At least, in theory. But, laps create all sorts of issues for laptops:

  • Heat. Even if your laptop stays cool, small amounts of heat from the machine will be lost to your upper thighs. It’s just uncomfortable.
  • Stability. A laptop is meant to be totally stable while you type, but your lap isn’t a totally even surface.
  • Ergonomics. The ideal height and distance of your arms/hands/wrists to the keyboard should be a little further away from you than your immediate lap. But the farther away your laptop is, the less stable it feels.

Luckily, all of these issues can be solved relatively easily, but in a counter-intuitive way. Here is the solution:

What is that? It’s a Moleskin Art Sketchbook, Hard Cover, Style: Book, Size: A4 (8.25″ x 11.75″), 96 Pages. (Amazon link) This is a lovely notepad — really, a sketchbook meant to be used by artists. But it has a hard cover which is the size of an A4 sheet of paper (slightly larger than letter size paper). It’s also pretty much exactly the size of a 14-15″ laptop. You rest your laptop on this, and it allows you to place your laptop on your lap and instantly fixes heat, stability, and ergonomics issues.

What you’ll also notice is that by raising the laptop a little and having a stable surface underneath it, you feel more comfortable balancing your laptop farther from your body (e.g. approaching your knees), which makes typing on your laptop even more ergonomic.

What’s more, it’s easy to slip this sketchbook in your backpack right next to your laptop to provide extra protection when traveling with it. And, you can still use it as a pen-and-paper notepad! I also love that its large-format sheets which are unlined, and thus are perfect for diagrams or interface sketches that you can then take a photo to scan digitally.

I’ve used this trick for so many years, but never see anyone else doing it, so I figured I’d share.

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Linux is free and your mind is valuable

One of my favorite old Linux jokes is, “Linux is free… if your time is worthless.” This quote is possibly adapted from a jwz interview dating back to 1998. In it, he said:

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to [major operating systems], and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. […] As we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.

That said, I’ve run Linux dating back to my earliest days studying formal operating systems, when I did it mainly so that I’d have access to vim, shells, a solid gcc toolchain, and good x86 hardware emulation and virtualization tools. Somewhere along the way, though, I made it a point to make my day-to-day computing, if not completely imbued by the open source movement, at least “keyhole accessible” to its thriving core, which continues to be Linux. So, for me, as a point of pride, it has been Linux on the desktop, Linux on my smartphones (that is, Android Linux), and Linux on my smart TVs (that is, webOS). As well as Linux in the obvious places, like my cloud VMs, my Raspberry Pi, my physical server, etc.

I’m not a purist, though. I still use plenty of proprietary software in my life. And plenty of proprietary hardware, too. To stay connected to the world of Apple, I keep an iPad running iPadOS and a Mac Mini running macOS. To stay connected to the world of Microsoft, I keep a dual-boot’able partition for Windows 11 Pro. But I’d say 90% of my computing happens on some Linux variant, and that makes me feel good about having a more direct relationship with computing, where I can always peel back some layers of the onion as needed.

My latest was to shift from a very-very old laptop (my trusty Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 8) to a not-quite-so-old laptop (a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 11). I’ve been sticking with Lenovo as my Linux laptop for awhile now, covered in past posts like “Speed & lightness” and “Lenovo and the new Linux desktop experience”.

Linux is free to run on your laptop

By doing a little research beforehand, I got a model off the Lenovo outlet store with a screen, webcam, and Intel architecture that is well-supported by Linux (summary: avoid MIPI webcam and avoid mobile WWAN). Specifically, it runs perfect with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS out-of-the-box. The only “tweak” I had to make was a workaround for thermald which was erroneously refusing to start on my CPU architecture — the fix was a rather easy systemd invocation and is described here.

In typical Linux “rabbit hole” style, learning a little bit about thermald (with the help of the source code reading and summarizing features of ChatGPT4 projects, incidentally) made me better understand how my laptop approaches battery and cooling performance.

Another change that is more from the world of security is learning about SecureBoot + TPM, two semi-controversial changes to the laptop hardware landscape that Linux didn’t support well until somewhat recently. More on this available in this Twitter/X thread. So, yet again, in fortuitous Linux rabbit hole style, I learned something about modern “security” hardware I wasn’t paying close attention to beforehand.

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Linux backup workflow for hackers with restic, rclone, Backblaze B2

In 2017, CrashPlan was one of the most popular full-computer offsite/cloud backup tools for consumers. It had millions of paid users, usually paying around $10/month for a few terabytes of offsite storage.

But then… “On August 22, 2017, Code42 announced they were shutting down CrashPlan for Home, effective in October 2018. They were not accepting new subscriptions but would maintain existing subscriptions until the end of their existing subscription period, at which point the backups would be purged.”

Picking a backup tool is hard. If you outsource your backups to a commercial entity, you have to be convinced that entity will stand the test of time — and won’t undergo dramatic business model shifts — since, after all, your backup scheme is supposed to follow you around for life.

This is an ideal software category in which to choose open source software — plus a highly durable, interoperable, and financially-well-supported cloud storage option.

Thankfully, as of 2018 or so, I have this open source software + interoperable cloud storage solution working on my main Linux development machine. I’ve been using it for 5+ years and since I’m very happy with it, I’d like to share it with you all here.

The restic logo sets the tone for how you should think about backups!

As a hacker (that is, as a playful programmer), you inevitably have important files on your desktop that don’t get automatically backed up some other way. Yes, you probably have your source repos backed up in GitHub or Gitlab, and you probably have your phone backed up in Apple iCloud or Google One. Maybe you are even organized enough to have digital copies of your personal records, usually in DOCX or PDF format, in Dropbox or Google Drive, assuming you trust the data privacy policies of these providers.

But you still have millions of other files on your desktop computers that include: artifacts not checked into source control (or not yet pushed to remote); operating system and application configuration; photographs and videos from your non-phone camera gear; screencasts and Zoom/GMeet video recordings; paranoia-driven backups of data exfiltrated from cloud providers like Gmail and Google Drive; and so on. Perhaps you even have sensitive/important medical or tax/financial records that you’ve been nervous to stick in a cloud data store.

This post will cover a setup that works well in practice, while also having some interesting technical properties worth discussing.

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Good Python Software

I’m glad to say that the last few months have been a return to the world of day-to-day coding and software craftsmanship for me.

To give a taste of what I’ve been working on, I’m going to take you on a tour through some damn good Python software I’ve been using day-to-day lately.

Python 3 and subprocess.run()

I have a long relationship with Python, and a lot of trust in the Python community. Python 3 continues to impress me with useful ergonomic improvements that come up in real-world day-to-day programming.

One such improvement is in the subprocess module in Python’s standard library. Sure, this module can can show its age — it was originally written over 20 years ago. But as someone who has been doing a lot of work at the level of UNIX processes lately, I’ve been enjoying how much it can abstract away, especially on Linux systems.

Here’s some code that calls the UNIX command exiftool to strip away EXIF metadata from an image, while suppressing stdout and stderr via redirection to /dev/null.

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My relationship with digital media in the last few years

I have a long relationship with digital media. I’ve been blogging for decades. I’ve been a news junkie forever. And I started a startup in the real-time and historical content analytics space (Parse.ly) that ended up shipping a widely-used product in the industry.

What’s more, Parse.ly’s network-wide data (billions of online news reading sessions every month) was used to understand the media industry, via various (aggregated and anonymized) data compilations and reports in partnership with organizations like Axios and Pew Research. This was one of my favorite studies we did a few years back, on the shape of different page visit lengths, using engaged time (PDF).

Summary of the “engaged time” spent on single news articles across 1.6 billion news reading sessions from the Jan. 2017 – Jun. 2017 period in the Parse.ly network.

Aspirationally, I’d like for my media habits to move toward that top 1% of engaged sessions on the regular — that is, 7 minutes or more of reading time per article, as shown on the right-hand side of the graph. Intentional, slow, deep reading. And I’d also like to avoid having a big portion of my day whittled away by the kinds of quick-hit information conveyances that put one on the left-hand side of that graph.

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The Partially Examined Life: a podcast, a new book, an antidote to doomscrolling

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

This famous quote comes from the history of philosophy, supposedly said by Socrates, as recounted by Plato, in his “Apology.”

Over the years, however, this quote has also become a kind of aphorism, suggesting that philosophy — that is, discussions around the ideas of historical and modern philosophers — is not just for university academics and their students, but even for we mere mortals, living down here in the common plane of everyday existence.

This quote also serves as the title of episode 1 of The Partially Examined Life Podcast, where the three founding hosts — Mark, Seth, and Wes — discuss Plato’s Apology and the trial of Socrates at length, in their wonderfully informal and inaugural podcast discussion. And a well-edited partial transcript of this first episode also serves as the first chapter of their forthcoming book, “The Partially Examined Life: 15 Years with Your Favorite Philosophy Podcasters.”

The book is planned for publication by the end of April 2024, and I was able to get my hands on an advance copy. Read on for my thoughts.
Continue reading The Partially Examined Life: a podcast, a new book, an antidote to doomscrolling

The smartphone app audit

I recently upgraded from a Google Pixel 7 to a Pixel 8 phone. Nothing earth shattering about this upgrade. Incremental. “Performance smartphones,” as the DOJ recently called iPhones and high end Androids, have leveled off in core functionality.

The Pixel 8 is slightly smaller than the Pixel 7, which makes me happy, as I treat my phone as a utility device, not a content or gaming device. It has small upgrades in battery life, screen, and connectivity. The most interesting upgrade is a USB-C desktop display mode for external monitors, which I’m excited to try out for Google Photos, for reviewing hi-res photos on a bigger screen.

When I am working at a laptop-docked ergonomic desktop computer setup during the day, I like the idea of my phone being like a second desktop (with an actual monitor, keyboard, and mouse!) rather than this buzzing distraction in my pocket. This is all a part of my long desire to resurrect the read-write creative abilities on what were, for many years, read-only passive consumption devices.

The biggest change for me during this smartphone upgrade, though, was that I decided to do a smartphone app audit at the same time.

That is, I wanted to figure out, what apps do I have installed, and why?

And, in particular, can I remove the apps from my life that are time wasters and pure distractions?

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Core Python

When I describe my programming background these days, I say that I code “primarily in Python, JavaScript, Clojure, C… and Zig!” I put Python first in that list for good reason.

This is a post about the core Python language, but also the ways in which Python is evolving its single-core and multi-core CPU performance.

Python has been my go-to programming tool for a long time. When I started to build out my last company and shipped the production core of its product, Python 2.7 had just stabilized, creating an excellent “core language.” This is a language that I truly respected, as evidenced by my style guide. And, as I discussed in my Python technical book review round-up, this core language was best described by David Beazley in the first half of his Python Essential Reference book, which was also turned into an excellent standalone volume (which includes Python 3.x coverage), Python Distilled.

Many, many useful open source projects, companies, and projects were built atop that Python 2.7 core foundation of a language. Its community truly flourished.

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Putting Your Media on a Diet

When you type an address into your web browser and are brought to a web server, a lot of decentralized magic happens within the span of a few seconds. Through the web, we have an infinite media available to us.

It as though you have a beautifully-maintained bookshelf and run your finger along the spines of the books, and then pluck out the one you want. But the sci-fi part, which is more science than fiction today, is that the bookshelf has millions of virtual entries and the information you want is delivered to you instantaneously. Once this virtual book is delivered (once a website is loaded), it can be frequently refreshed with real-time updates, and it exists in a form that can be navigated, searched, read, spoken, heard, shared, saved-for-later, or even automatically analyzed and summarized.

This is a lot of power for each individual to wield.

That is a lot of text to choose from, with which you can train your brain.

And that is even if you put aside the world of paid digital books via Amazon’s empire of Kindle. By the way, this Amazon empire need not cost money to you in the US, as you can often gain (adequate) free access to it via your local library on the Libby app.

So, one thing is for sure: there are a lot of words to choose from when deciding what to read. But this also means that an individual faces a paradox of choice when they click into that blank address bar in their browser.

Will they, like so many others, ignore the address bar and the browser altogether? That is, despite having the “infinite bookshelf” at their fingertips, will they, instead, hit an app shortcut to one of the major passive content delivery platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok?

Recent research from Pew suggests that major passive-consumption mobile apps are used by a majority of Americans, and, what’s more, that usage of the most video-forward of these (YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok) is nearly universal among people 18-29 years old. As for teens, 9 out of 10 of them are online (presumably via smartphones) every single day, and nearly 5 out of 10 are online “almost constantly.” This comes from a 2023 report.

If you read between the lines of these two reports, what comes into a focus is a culture of individuals addicted to video streaming devices in their pocket, filling inevitable moments of boredom with hastily- and cheaply-produced sights and sounds, rather than retreating to the world of written words. And, unsurprisingly, people are reading less.

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The Blog Chill

The film The Big Chill came out a bit before I was born, over 40 years ago, in 1983. The plot focuses on a group of middle-aged friends, perhaps in their late 30s and early 40s, who had attended the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor together. They reunite after 15 years, brought together by the tragedy and the funeral of their friend, Alex, who, we learn in the film’s opening, died by suicide.

The “big chill” of the title can be interpreted a few different ways. The numbing loss of the innocence of youth. The cold realization of the quotidian nature of adulthood. Or, the wintry blast of mortality, which comes as a shock to this group of old college friends, who had become used to a sort of humdrum comfortable existence, pursuing families and careers, and then being suddenly shaken out of it by the sad news of their old friend Alex’s passing.

There is a historical and generational aspect to the film, too. The college years, for this group, were the 1960s. A time of great idealism in the US. The counter-culture was the culture. They weren’t supposed to end up like their parents. But then they found themselves in the 1980s, yuppies of exactly the sort they feared they’d become.

One of the interesting aspects of watching this film today is that, being set in the 1980s, it lacks altogether the technopoly we see in our current lives in the 2020s. There are no smartphones nor social media, to be sure, but, what’s more, there is no computing or internet either.

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