Weeknotes #24

In one of our daily conversations about COVID-19, Eri and I were discussing how long it would take for the situation to go back to ‘normal’. We’ve discussed this before but for some reason it finally hit me how far away that might be. It made me realise that one of the things I’d taken for granted was that I’d only be working from home for a short period of time. Recognising that things might be like this into next year (if not beyond) was the motivation I needed to head to Amazon and order the pieces for a proper working from home setup.

So far I’ve been making do around the living room with a Dell Latitude 7200 2-in-1 laptop. It’s been great to have a computer specifically ‘for work’ but it’s only 12” and you really feel the limited screen real estate when reviewing long documents. So if I was going to buy anything, I figured it was a monitor. But of course for that I’d need a desk and you of course want the monitor to be at the right height but monitor stands never extend as high as that and while we’re talking about ergonomics is it really good to be sitting all day aaaaaaaand before I knew it I’d ordered a standing desk, a monitor mount and an LG 24” 4K display.

The 4K monitor wasn’t necessary but my thinking was that if I was going to set up a computer work station, I wanted it to be something I could use with my Mac and for that I wanted a high-density display. Unfortunately, the pickings are decidedly slim in that department. Most 4K monitors start at 27” and while LG makes a 24” 4K designed for Macs, they’re marked up accordingly (it does also come with Thunderbolt 3 support). I chose the ‘not designed for Macs’ 24UD58-B model. It connects over DisplayPort rather than USB-C but cost almost a third the price.

It all arrived on Saturday and by the afternoon I had things set up. This is the first time I’ve ever used a mount for my display and it is fantastic. I’m also really happy that I went with the 4K option: macOS looks great.

Oh, that happened too: Apple announced the next version of the Mac operating system at the Worldwide Developers Conference and, like a dummy, I stayed up all night to watch it. The big announcement was the confirmation that ARM-based Macs are coming. I’m not in the market for anything at the moment but I’m excited to see what Apple does. It feels like PCs haven’t changed much in the past decade or so.

I’m not sure why exactly but I found myself watching quite a bit of stuff with the kids this week. I was distressed to see in a recent episode of Thomas & Friends that Hiro, the Japanese D51 engine, went back to Japan. I woke Eri up from a sleep-in to tell her this (this was not appreciated).

Emma, John and I also watched two episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. That was prompted by the Heart of Batman documentary that Warner Bros put up for free (YouTube).

Finally, we watched a few episodes of DC Super Hero Girls (Netflix). As much as I love BTAS, part of what made it great was how different it looked compared to cartoons at the time. Which Warner Bros promptly followed up with by using the same visual style for the next 20 or so years. Super Hero Girls has a completely different visual aesthetic and while its absurdist humour is not as groundbreaking as Dark Deco, it was still a refreshing change.

I was going to listen to the more recent Björk albums I let slip by but that will have to wait for another time. This week it was a lot of ‘Mi Gente’ (Apple Music).