I Ranked 9 Digital Nomad Setups (Brutally) | Setup Reacts Ep.1

Hello and welcome to the very first edition of Setup Reacts. The concept is simple. I’m looking for the best setups out there. I find them, react to them, and eventually I’m going to start the Setup Reacts ranking system where the best setups from each episode will receive a Setup Reacts Champ award or something like that, maybe even a cash or valuable product prize. I don’t know.

If this concept proves to be a popular one then meaning lots of people watching, leave a like a cheeky comment or subscribe. You’ll be seeing more episodes and more prizes. And maybe if you have an interesting setup yourself, you might become a Setup Reacts Champ and win some prizes too. If this is your first time watching this channel. My name is Lewis and I’m building a little company called InputZen.

At InputZen, we make devices that let you complete creative work faster, and our first product to do exactly that is called the BuildBox. It’s a completely new MacroPad device. Rules and Clarifications so if we’re going to be pitting different setups against each other in these Setup Reacts videos, we kind of need some baseline rules and distinctions. Firstly, what makes a setup? Well, in my opinion, a setup is a computer device and all of the devices furniture, stands, cables, and whatever else attached to it or surrounding it.

So a home office setup, for our purposes, is a home office containing a computer of some sort, and I reserve the right to drastically expand the meaning of computer if I think it will make for excellent YoYouTube content. That’s my decision. Fight me I’m going to leave all the other rules and definitions open for now, as they’ll likely become obvious in the first few episodes of these Setup Reacts videos. Except for one thing. There has to be at least two angles or shots of the setup available, as one glossy shot often doesn’t provide enough meat for me to say anything about and can often hide some massive flaw, like a massive cable tangle hiding underneath a spotless minimal desk.

Just the thought of that is kind of pissing me off actually. So that’s the rules and definitions out of the way. Let’s get to today’s setups on the Go Setups we’re kicking off this first episode of Setup Reacts and looking at Travel, Coffee Shop, Warrior and On the Go setups. The inspiration for this came from a recent video I made about my coffee shop work setup, showing how I get work done while out and about and still manage to maintain some ergonomics in the process. I have a whole philosophy on making sure my portable setup doesn’t cause any pain and is like 70 to 80% as comfortable and productive as my home setup.

I’ll probably make a video sharing more about that soon. All of these setups claim to be optimized for working while at coffee shops or co working spaces or hotel rooms while you’re traveling. In short, these are all portable setups and some prioritize ergonomics, while others prioritize screen space, weight savings, portability and other things. So bring on the first setup.

All right, this one’s interesting. This is actually the. The setup that I. I basically modeled mine off of. I saw this. Yeah, I randomly came across this video.

I think I subscribed to this guy because he had some interesting content on. It was like servers and like home servers. I’m kind of into that. You might see that sort of down the line, I’m gonna look into some home server setups. So I came across this guy’s videos and it’s kind of interesting.

He’s kind of went on this like minimal. Minimalist journey about a year ago. He kind of went on the road, I think, with his family, I want to say maybe with his kid and his wife. And yeah, he sort of created this sort of ergonomic sort of like a very, I don’t know, like speaking my language, essentially. It’s very optimized setup.

So, yeah, we’re going to watch a little bit this and yeah, see what we can take from it. I’m going to react to it. All right, let’s go. This is my portable go anywhere office setup. In previous videos, you probably would have seen that I had this custom standing desk that I actually made from a countertop from Home Depot, believe it or not, that raised and lowered.

And I had screens and I had my speakers and everything. But I’m in the midst of a bit of a downsizing in my life. I want to be more portable. I want to be able to go places. And this seemed like a perfect middle ground between that huge.

I think what kind of caught my eye about this setup in the first place was actually the audio interface. I was looking for like a decent audio interface to sort of, you know, run these videos through and try and get decent audio on these videos. And I saw. I was looking for reviews of the Audient ID4, which is the audio interface he has there. He also has a Shure SM7B mic.

It’s very good setup. And yeah, I was kind of shocked at how like, oh, it’s quite portable. I saw that. I was like, oh, I like this and I just kind of stole. I took, I took, borrowed, I borrowed liberally from his other ideas like Magec stand.

And you also see the split keyboard. He was one of the first people I saw sort of using a split ergonomic keyboard as a. As a way to. It’s kind of like a portable option. I like that.

I stole that. Well, movable. The beauty of it all is it actually fits into a briefcase of this size and you can take it on planes, you can do whatever you want with it. The only thing is obviously this, this stool we’ll talk about too is it’s obtainable anywhere in the world. We’ll put it that way.

So in this video we’ll talk about the setup. Setup. What I’ve got going on and why I’m sitting on the floor. Something that I never thought I would do. But I’m digging it.

Let’s get into it. So the brains behind the operation is this T14 Gen 3 ThinkPad. It’s running a Ryzen 7 and it has 32 gigs of RAM and it’s mighty powerful. The thing is, is that this is really what makes the difference. This thing called a.

Just a quick note before he gets into talking about the actual stand, which is great product by the way. Recommend I have one myself. He’s actually using a ThinkPad T14 which is basically top of the line ThinkPad. I think they have like. Or they used to.

I haven’t looked at the latest ThinkPad models, but when I was looking it’s like top of line, like multi core CPUs. It’s basically like a desktop replacement. So when I say thinkpad I’m talking about his laptop by the way. So yeah, his laptop is a ThinkPad T14 which. Or P14 or T14.

I think it’s. Either way, it’s like the top of the line ThinkPad laptop. Very nice, very powerful and I think he’s running Linux. I’ve seen some of his other videos on his channel. I think he’s running a Linux, a Linux setup.

And I think for. For Linux, Generally speaking, the ThinkPad laptops are basically the best laptops you can get for Linux purposes. I used to have a X1 X1 carbon. I still have it actually. It’s kind of.

I’m planning to use it as like a backup laptop. Very good laptops, very well built, very durable. I want no laptops. Waterproof that I’ve seen. But it’s, you know, like you can kind of sometimes with the Apple products, it can be a little Bit fragile.

I have a MacBook Air myself and it’s a little bit fragile. I actually destroyed an old MacBook Air laptop that I had because yeah, I was living in humid countries and yeah, it burnt out the main board. The. I think it’s the main board on it or the motherboard but yeah like this very important unit. And so I was in Germany at the time.

I took it to the Apple store and they were like well we can replace the whole thing but it’ll cost the same price as a new laptop essentially. So yeah, after that happened, actually moved to Linux. My first Linux laptop I bought an old ThinkPad X250 I want to say. Oh, X220. Very old laptop but beautiful.

Put Linux on it and kind of started off my Linux journey. But yeah, his laptop there, ThinkPad. If you’re looking to sort of get into Linux, there’s lots of stuff about on YoYouTube should definitely check out. I recommend looking into Omachi which is a Linux distribution by David Hanmahansen. Dhh, the guy who created Ruby on Rails.

They also run Basecamp. Yeah, he created his own distribution which is based on Arch Linux. It looks very cool. It’s running Hyperland Window Manager so it’s really smooth. You know you can tile Windows and everything set up to be very like interactive and it just, it just looks beautiful and it seems to work really well.

I might try and install it on my old X1 carbon test out or I recommend looking into catchy OS which seems to be the hot new thing, especially if you’re into gaming. Catchy OS seems to be optimized towards gaming setups. I’m actually, I have a gaming PC down, down here in the corner and that’s running Bazzite. Bazzite is very cool. It’s a, it’s a immutable distribution.

So it’s like you install it and you can’t. But it’s like you can’t break it. It’s designed so you can’t just break it. With Linux there’s a big problem with like you just have to do so much configuration and faffing around. So having a distribution where it’s like you can’t break it unless you really, really try really hard is very good especially for like a gaming PC.

I just want it to work for my games. I’m gonna turn on my PC, load up Spider man or Red Dead Redemption or whatever game I want to play and just play. I don’t want to faff around with, you know, running, installing the proper proton Drivers. The problem is figuring out which proton install to put on the machine before you can start gaming. Once you figure out it’s fine, it’s like very quick and easy to set up.

It’s just actually having to do the research behind it can become a pain. So if you want to get into Linux and you’re looking at just, you know, setting up a gaming machine, or you just want a machine which is like very like switch on and just start using it, I recommend Bazaar. It’s very good. I used to use Fedora myself. Fedora is awesome, but you basically have to become like a system administrator in order to just keep it running.

And it gets complex and even I was just confused all the time. And I spent years on Linux systems and it confused me up until the last day. And now I’m back on Apple machines. So I guess that tells you something.

Magix stand, it’s the most amazing little portable stand that can bring a computer up to eye level, as you see. And it makes it so you can sit straight up, focus on your posture. And I absolutely love it. As you’ll notice, I’m still using. Yeah, so I have one of those Magec stands.

They’re awesome. I used to use a product from this company called Moft as a laptop stand. It was, it was basically, it’s like a stand which sticks on the bottom of your laptop. You can just kind of flick it out. It’s great because it’s very flat.

However, with the Moft, it just didn’t get. It didn’t get high enough. It didn’t get high enough off the table. Didn’t raise my laptop, raise the screen up as high as I wanted. So I was still kind of hunching forward.

And you know, I’m working most of the day on computers, so I constantly have a problem with hunching forward and, you know, bringing your shoulders up. So I want to bring the screen up to eye level or just slightly higher actually, so I can be looking straight ahead at the screen. And the Moft products don’t get the screen high enough. Whereas the Mage stand, they’re great. They get the screen really high.

It’s really thin. It’s kind of like it’s made from this like thin metal. So it’s quite rigid, you know, it just feels like it’s going to last a long time. I stuck it to the laptop and then it hasn’t come off. It just sort of stays on the back of laptop.

You don’t notice it’s there really, except for when you’re using it, obviously, and you can, you know, you can still use the same laptop cases. You can chuck it in your backpack and you’re just not going to notice it’s there until you need it and you flick it out and boom, you can bring a screen up to a great height. It’s also great when you’re on coffee tables in small, smaller coffee shops where they have smaller tables because the stands actually on the bottom and it raises the screen up without sort of like taking up additional space. There’s another product called a, I think it’s called a neck stand, which is a replica of a product called the Roost stand. And those products are awesome, but they just take up just a little bit too much table space.

So they can kind of push back. Especially when you need to get keyboard on the table as well. I mean, he doesn’t hear, he’s using these clamps. But if you, if you need to get a keyboard on the table plus this large stand and you need a bit of space for your mouse, you know, you kind of table space becomes. What’s the word?

I don’t know, golden. So it’s like, yeah, you have to choose products which basically allow for that when you want to work from smaller, smaller coffee shop tables. Speaking from experience here, as you’ll notice, I’m still using the chocofi keyboard from my Endgame keyboard video. I’ll link that in the description, but you’ll notice that I’ve clamped it so that it is essentially vertical.

And the benefit of that is that you get to open up your chest and tight very nicely. And I’m using these Ulanzi. Let’s see if you can see that. Ulanzi super clamps. And those things are awesome.

I’m not just using these clamps for the keyboard, I’m using it for video production and, and some other stuff around the post. But maybe that’s a topic for another video.

The whole thing is sitting on top of a Ikea. So just a couple of notes. A couple of interesting points here. First of all, the keyboard, he has a, it’s called a chocofi, which I believe is a. It’s like a three column, three column ortholinear layout keyboard.

These keyboards are pretty awesome. I mean, I use an awful linear layout keyboard here at home. It’s called Ergodox. And you know, that has the same amount of, okay, it has the same amount of rows as a regular keyboard does. Right here I have the Dygma keyboard in front of me.

And this one has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 rows. And the Ogre docs, which I use daily on my main computer, that has five rows as well. And. Yeah, so. But it’s an awful linear layout keyboard.

So all of the keys are essentially in lines straight up and down, if that makes sense. With the ErgoDox, it’s a great keyboard, but it does take some getting used to. And what he has here is essentially like the next level up from that. It’s called the chocofi. There’s other keyboards similar to this, like the Khorn.

I think the Korn is the most popular one, where they’re. Yeah, they’re three rows. I think they’re like five or six columns across. So it’s like you have somewhere around like, 36 keys, I think, on the Chocofi, very small. And essentially to use these, though, you have to move keys around onto layers.

So it can get a little bit like. You do have to do some tweaking and some learning, you know, relearning of where you think of keys being. You have to map things in smart ways. Using layers, using home row mods, which is where you take the modifier keys like control, option, command, and you place them on the home row, which is the H jkl ASDFG on the left side, asdfg H A K L row, you set up the ability to do things like. So if you tap on a key, then it acts as the regular key.

So, for example, I could take the G key and I could have it. So if I tap on G, it just types out G, but if I hold down G, it can act as the command key or perhaps the control key. So, you know, you have less keys and you’re essentially trying to get as much as you can out of a few amount of keys. The beauty of this is that you really don’t have to move your hands very much at all. The movement is very minimal.

You’re not constantly stretching your fingers out and around and doing finger gymnastics. Essentially, you’re just keeping your hands generally around the home row and just moving one row up, one row down in straight lines as well, because it’s all for linear layout. That’s what makes these ortholinear split. I think they’re called ergo. There’s a subreddit for them called ergomet keyboards.

Yeah, that’s what makes these so popular, though, is just the fact that you just really don’t have to move your hands around, which for programmers, I believe is supposed to be very Handy even, you know, for writers. But you do have to relearn everything you kind of know about typing. If you just used to regular keyboards, you know, like your Logitech keyboard, which is just one, you know, one box. You have to relearn all of that. And it will take you a couple of weeks to get probably back to somewhere around like 70 to 80% of your typical word per minute measure on your keyboard.

So great keyboards. Very good for your fingers, very good at reducing rsi. Also, you know, a lot of them are kind of like handmade. Some of them you have to, you know, you go to like a GitHub projects and you download the PCB files and you send it off to somewhere like PCBway or JLCPCB and they custom make the PCBs for you. Then, you know, maybe a 3D printer case, you buy some keycaps.

Sometimes you can even 3D print keycaps. So the whole thing ends up being this like really, you know, kind of like not hobby project. But yeah, it kind of becomes like a. What’s the word? It’s like a craft.

You know, your keyboard, you build the thing yourself. So it feels like it’s like a labor of love. So that’s why I think people love these keyboards so much. They’re kind of niche, but they also, the people who are into the niche, like myself, really get into the niche. And yeah, it’s a deep rabbit hole.

So if you’re, if you’ve got enough hobbies, you know, tread lightly with this one. You might get sucked into it and end up spending hundreds of dollars and months of your life just building keyboards and testing out different keycaps and switches and, I don’t know, different. Ordering different PCBs from China. It’s gonna be fun. But it’s also.

Yeah, just. Just be prepared. That’s all I’m trying to warn you about. Also, he’s using these, these clamps, which. These are used for photography.

You know, generally you’re. You’ll use these to kind of like attach, I don’t know, like a light or, you know, sometimes like a microphone to objects that you have around the studio. Or if you’re filming out and about, you know, you might attach one of these to a camera or you just clamp it somewhere so that you can, you can kind of like mount different items. And that’s why they have these 14 inch connectors on the end of them. That’s.

These are the clamp things I’m talking about the, the Crab looking items he has attached to the chair legs. And in order to use that with a keyboard, you do have to essentially figure out a way to attach a 1,4 screw mount to your keyboard. Some keyboards actually, you know, people are doing this more regularly. So some people, some keyboards actually have this built in. There are a few options for that.

If you’re interested in, you know, diving deeper into these kind of like weird mounting options, let me know in the comments and yeah, maybe I’ll make a video on it. But yeah, it’s an interesting way to mount your keyboard. Just have it there on legs. He has his keyboards both like sort of like almost like a 90 degree angle. So it’s like you’re typing, you’re kind of typing like this, which you know, if you have the right sort of setup like he has, he has here, it’s very simple setup.

It’s pretty smart where essentially you have the keys kind of resting at this very like natural angle. So it almost feels like your hands are just, you know, like kind of just resting by your side. Not up here obviously, but you know, down here by your waist and you’re kind of typing. So you know your hands are in a natural handshake position and you’re just typing right there. It’s very, it’s very.

I’ve tried tenting like this. You do. Again, you have to get used to it because it’s such an extreme angle and you, you can’t see what you’re typing. So essentially, you know, you have to be, be a touch typist and a pretty good one in order for it to work. But it’s super comfortable if you can find a setup that works for you.

And getting it to work for you does can take a lot of tweaking and a lot of experimentation. But yeah, that’s my notes on the keyboard. So let’s get back to the video. The whole thing is sitting on top of a IKEA stool. This thing is like 35 bucks.

You can literally buy it anywhere there is an Ikea. And it’s perfect for my needs. It sets everything in an amazing position for me to, to work. And I love it. You’ll notice I have the MX Ergo mouse.

I love this thing. It just honestly, if you’ve never used a trackball before ever in your life, highly recommend it. Give it a go. And you’ll never probably go back to regular mouse unless you’re a gamer. And that’s okay.

This, right, Just a note on this mouse, I actually have a version of this Mouse. I have the Logitech Ergo. I think it’s called M575. I mentioned it in my previous video on my digital Nomad Setup, Work setup. And it’s a great mouse.

I’ve never used a thumb trackball before, but this is. Yeah, these are both thumbtrackballs. I added a 3D print to mine because it doesn’t come with the stand that you see the. The Ergo has. I think it’s called MX Ergo.

This has like a small stand which can kind of flick out and it raises the mouse up. So again, your, your hand is kind of like in a handshake position when you’re using it and your thumb just kind of rests on the top. Super comfortable. Great mice. Very.

I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t like thumb track balls because it can kind of hurt, you know, because you’re using your thumb constantly to sort of move the ball around at the top. For a lot of people, that can actually cause a lot of pain in their thumbs. And that’s, that’s why they don’t like them. But I don’t know, I feel like I use mine just in my travel setup at home. I have different track balls which I use, which are just normal index finger track balls.

And so I don’t use my thumb that often. I don’t feel like, you know, maybe if you game a lot, you know, you might notice a lot of thumb pain. So therefore, maybe these sort of thumb trackball mice might not be for you in that case. But if you’re, if, you know, if you’re just a regular computer user, I think switching to a thumb trackball, I was surprised at how comfortable they are. And also great, like as a portable option, just because they’re quite small, the ball doesn’t fall out.

As weird as that sounds with other trackballs. Some of them the ball is just kind of like resting in there. So when you move it around or chuck it in your backpack, you know, you might pull the mouse out of your backpack and it’s just missing the ball. So these mice are great because the ball kind of stays in there. You can push it out of a little bit of force just to clean it.

You’re going to need to clean it once a month or so. But, yeah, great mice highly recommend it. This right here is my audio interface. I’m going to get it to focus here. The Audient ID4 Mark II, I believe it’s called.

And this is what my mic, which is a shirt SM7B plugs into as well as my headphones which are the Moondrop Katos. I did a unboxing of those a few years back and they are the most amazing pretty budget level headphones. But they’re, they’re awesome. Everything is plugged into my computer via USBC up here and is sitting on a Ulanzi MT28 carbon tripod. And this thing is used so much in my life.

Like I, I use this for steadying my phone, I use this as a tripod for cameras. And obviously right here I use it to, to hold up my, my microphone. If you can see over here I have a anchor 120 watt. That’s actually 100 watt charger. But that’s what I plug this into and it just runs everything without any issue whatsoever.

Let’s talk about why I’m sitting on the floor before he gets into the stuff about the, the floor sitting. Which you know, I think is, I don’t know for me personally I was like a next level step. I just want a couple of notes actually, which I’m just noticing now. I didn’t notice this the first time. I did notice it, but I didn’t really pay attention the first time I watched this video is.

So this setup seems to be more sort of like optimized for someone who’s. It’s like a travel setup, but it’s someone. If you’re doing like overland travel, you know, if you’re just doing a long road trip or you know, maybe doing a work trip and you’re going to be staying in hotels mostly, you know, somewhere where you can kind of like take your stuff with you. Maybe, you know, maybe you just go to local Ikea if you can find one. You know, you buy the stool while you’re there and you just buy the stool just for the length of your trip.

But yeah, this seems like a, you know, it’s like the items themselves which I took, the Magec stand and the keyboard and the clamps, those all seem quite portable. You’re gonna throw them in your backpack. But you know, the, the audience audio interface and the microphone on the tripod stand, which is a very smart idea by the way. I might steal that and do need another microphone stand. Yeah, those things, those seem to be more like, you know, you’re trying to take your, your home setup on the road with you.

So I could see it being very useful for that. But yeah, just something to keep in mind. You know, maybe just take components of this setup and you know, utilize it in your Own setup. If you’re looking for something more portable or, you know, if you are going to be sort of staying in places for, you know, longer, longer times and you need a more permanent setup. You could steal, you know, the, the stall idea and use the clamps and even have, like whole audio interface.

You could even bring second screens into a setup like this. It’s got quite a lot of space, but it’s, it’s large. You know, you’re not taking this on the plane. Not all the, all the parts of it. So, yeah, just something that I noted.

Sitting on the floor.

Let’s talk about why I’m sitting on the floor.

So inevitably, people are going to ask, why are you sitting on the floor? Don’t you have like a Herman Miller $300,000 share? And I did at one point. And the only thing is, is that from. For me, it just didn’t work.

I still felt like garbage every single day after getting back from work. And I found better results by sitting on the floor, by really focusing on my posture opening up. And as somebody commented in one of my videos, I needed more splay in my life with my keyboard. Well, you got it. The thing about sitting on the floor is you can’t sit in one position for very long.

You have to continually move. So I’ll just open up my legs or sit with them open like this while I’m typing, or I’ll grab my foam roller and sit upright on it while I’m working like this or with my legs crossed or whatever, and I’m continually moving. The benefit that I’ve seen thus far in movement is completely outweighing the standing desk as well as the ergonomic chair. And that’s saying something. So if you have back problems, if you have issues with your shoulders feeling tight and everything like that, try sitting on the floor.

It’s something that I’ve been experimenting with since we got here, and I think I’m going to continue with it well into the future. But, yeah, that is all right. I think that’s, that’s most of the video that’s pretty interesting. I don’t know about the floor setting, man. I’m getting flashbacks to, you know, being in, in primary school.

I know we call it the rest of the world elementary school. Yeah. Where you had to sit on the floor while, you know, read books or, you know, teachers talking to you. And yeah, I was always just constantly, you know, you’re supposed to sit cross legged. And even as a little kid, I was constantly, like, moving from one side to the other.

Just trying to, like, you know, keep my legs. Keep my legs awake. I guess. I just. I don’t know.

I think the genetic bad knees or bad legs or something like that, I can never be comfortable. It’s made me very fidgety, and I know it always affected my concentration. I think for some people, though, that might be a good thing. You know, if you’re. If you’re generally someone who, you know, you don’t.

You don’t get distracted by having to move, move around, you know, like, you just kind of like pain. Got a little bit of pain on my left thigh. Let me. Let me shift my weight over here and move. Move a leg out over here.

If you’re someone who’s. Who’s okay with that and it doesn’t kind of disrupt your workflow, could be great. It could just be a way to kind of force you to stay active, sort of stay mobile. You know, you’re working in positions where how many times you sit on the floor. We just don’t do it anymore as adults.

So I think it would be kind of interesting to, you know, work different parts of your body in that way. I’m sure you’d have to work on, you know, a lot of core strength just in order to stop you from slouching over consistently. And also just from the movement. I think that would actually, you know, it probably would actually just work. You know, your obliques, your sides, you work different parts of your thighs basically make your legs more active, which we don’t really do when we’re sitting in chairs.

Your legs just kind of stay in one position. It’s supposed to stay in, you know, feet flat and proper ergonomic position. So kind of interesting sitting on the floor. I’m not going to try it, but if you do, if this is something, if you’re all about the sitting on the floor life, let me know. It’s kind of interesting.

I’d love to hear more about how, why and. Yeah, maybe I should experiment. Maybe I should do set up a little floor setup. Maybe I’ll film it. Be interesting video.

All right, let’s get to the next setup. This one seems interesting. It seems more. This seems to be someone who’s more about, you know, sort of having a set which I can keep with them at all times, rather than, you know, someone who sets like a previous setup where it’s like, you know, maybe they’re operating on, you know, from hotel rooms or, you know, from rented Airbnb. This one seems to be about.

Seems to be about. I haven’t watched the full thing. This one seems to be more about like having a setup which you can take with you on planes, maybe to coffee shops, you know, maybe while you’re traveling. Maybe if you’re digital Nomad, maybe this would be the perfect setup for you. Let’s watch it and see.

Basically have to work all the time. And that’s why I need a way to be able to work productively on the go as well. Unfortunately, I’m also a and now have a five monitor setup at home. So working on the go with just one monitor from my MacBook is definitely out of the question. That’s why over the years I’ve built a portable desk setup from different parts that allows me to work on the go almost as comfortably as at home.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this video. And to keep things clear, I’ve divided everything into three categories. Category number one, stuff I always have with me, even if I’m only going away for a single night. First on this list we have my MacBook Pro. Because of course, working without a laptop on the go is a bit difficult.

In my case, it’s the MacBook Pro with the M3 Max, 36 gigabytes of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, which is a bit small, but disk drive space is just very, very expensive at Apple. So I solved that in a different way, which I’m going to talk about later in this. He’s talking about disk drive space, man. Like RAM prices at the moment are insane. Apple seems to be, you know, the last holdout of the, of, I’d say, I’m gonna say reasonable RAM prices.

It’s not reasonable. They’ve just always been expensive. I guess now compared to RAM prices, you know, for PCs or compared to like RAM prices that the other sellers are offering, Apple just seems reasonable in comparison. But yeah, RAM prices are insane. So I’m seeing his 36 gigabytes of RAM and I’m like, oh yeah, that’s, that’s a sweet spot right there.

I’ve got eight gigabytes of RAM on this. I’m recording this on a Mac Mini and it has 8 gigabits, 8 gigabytes of RAM, which is shockingly small. And my MacBook Air also has 8 gigabytes of RAM. I’m severely RAM limited. So I see it’s 36 gigs and I’m like, oh man, that’s a sweet spot.

I will be buying a new Apple product at some point within the next couple of years, which I’m gonna. I’m gonna go just go hard on the ram, man. That’s. That. That’s my goal.

That’s my dream. This hard drive space. Who cares? Hard drive space. Just give me the RAM, okay?

I bought my MacBook in spring this year, and so far I’m super happy with it and even use it as my daily driver at home as well. So it’s not like I have a tower at home. And then on the go, I just use my MacBook. I actually use this MacBook for everything because the M3 Max is actually really, really powerful and has handled everything I’ve thrown at it so far without any issues. Actually, my old gaming PC that I used before that, which I now only use for gaming, struggled a bit with complex 3D animations and stuff like that.

Next we have the device that probably most of you are actually watching this video on right at this moment, according to statistics at least. I’m talking about my phone, of course, and in my case, that’s the iPhone 13. I’ve had the iPhone 13 for almost three years now, and it’s actually the first cell phone that I’m completely happy with. Before, I always had the urge to upgrade after one to at max two years because I was unhappy with something. But the iPhone 13 I now have for almost three years, and it just works like on day one, and I really use it for everything you would typically use a cell phone for, be it making calls, writing messages, but nowadays also often as a camera for my social media content because there are many situations where it’s simply quicker and more practical to just pull my cell phone out instead of setting up my big camera.

And to be honest, I don’t think that this bothers anyone on social media. Actually, most people, I think, probably don’t even realize because the image quality of the iPhone is actually insanely good for a smartphone. Now I think he’s just talking about, like, you know, very general things. Headphones, phone, you know, so let’s just. I’m just gonna scoop past this stuff.

Let’s try and find interesting stuff, give me the everyday carry, you know, time throughout the day. Now to solve this problem. I also almost always carry this power bank from Anker with me. And with this, I actually have plenty energy if I’m out and about, and always charge my phone at night with a cable I can easily get throughout a whole week without having to recharge the actual power bank. Now I kind of feel like powers.

This is gonna sound weird. I feel like power is a solved issue. I, you know, everything seems to be like USB C now. So I feel like if you just have like one USB C cable with you as well as like a plug socket, so a plug adapter that connects a USB C which can do somewhere around like say 100 watts maybe if you have an Apple product, I think like the MacBook Airs and stuff, they can, they can charge it for around 60 watts. Yeah, if you’ve got like a 60 watt to 100 watt adapter and the USB C cable, you’re pretty much set.

I mean, you can even get battery banks now for pretty cheap. But like under, under like $40, you can get like a very good USB C power bank which can power your laptop for a couple of hours if it’s a low power one. So yeah, I kind of feel like power is a solved issue now. So I’m just going to skip ahead. Let’s get to.

I already mentioned that if I have to work on the go, then I really want to have a proper setup where I don’t have any problems with having a longer work session. And actually there are two things that used to really piss me off about working on the go. The first one is most chairs are just incredibly uncomfortable if you sit on them for a really long time. Now this problem is actually a bit hard to solve because unfortunately I can’t just take my ergonomic desk chair with me when I’m going on holidays, for example. But the second problem is actually solvable because previously my neck always hurt terribly at some point because if you just put the laptop on the table, you sit completely hunched because you always have to look down.

And this problem I actually solved with a 3D printed laptop stand so that I now have a properly ergonomic posture in front of the computer when I’m out on the go as well. But one monitor in the MacBook obviously isn’t enough, so I need at least, least a second one even when I’m out on the go. And for this I use this one from Ersopa, which I got in a sale on Amazon a while ago. The huge advantage of this monitor is that it is relatively small and I can easily take it anywhere. And it only needs a single USB C cable and it will get power and the image connection via this one single cable.

And then I have the whole thing on another stand, which is actually an iPad stand, but I just put my monitor in there to have it almost the same height as my MacBook Pro monitor. And because two screens are also not enough. I usually also have my iPad with me as a third screen. And the practical thing, I don’t just have another monitor, but I actually also have an iPad which I can use as an iPad. Well, and if the laptop is on a stand all the time, then of course it would be incredibly impractical to use the keyboard and touchpad directly on the MacBook.

Which is why I actually use exactly the same devices as as a keyboard. That’s my beloved Akko Black and Gold, which is a mechanical keyboard, which is small, cute and handy, but still has arrow keys. That was important to me and it still has the great haptic feeling of a mechanical keyboard. And the size is plenty enough at home, and it’s also plenty enough when I’m on the go. And as a mouse I use the MX Master 3s.

I have actually tried out a lot of mice over the past 15 years or something, and this one is by far the, the best. I really find it incredibly practical, especially for use directly with macOS, because macOS is especially well known for its multi touch gestures on the trackpad which are very, very intuitive. Like for example, this window changing mode when you swipe up with four fingers or switching between different spaces and stuff like that. And you can mimic this behavior extremely well with the MX Master 3S. The software from Logi is really extremely good.

A lot of the things can actually be accomplished using this extra action button directly on the mouse. If I press it once, I also get that window changing mode, for example, or if I press the action button and swipe left and right, I can again switch between spaces. And it’s all super intuitive and very, very well solved. Category number three. I also want to produce content when I want to go.

Just a couple of notes on that. Super interesting. A couple of things I liked. I loved his 3D printed laptop stand. That’s very smart.

I actually used to. I was traveling around Morocco years ago, it’s like 10 years ago now, and I found this online. Someone had this, this like this cardboard laptop stand. So it was a laptop stand which you kind of like this, you know, you print it out onto a piece of paper and you trace that, that design onto pieces of cardboard and you kind of just made this stand. It kind of works similar to what he has there, just slotted together in multiple places and it was quite rigid.

Great design. I’ll try and find it. If anyone’s interested, just leave a comment down below. If you’re interested, I’ll try and dig it up. That was a Great little invention.

Yeah, I’d love to use again his 3D printed version. Way more, way cleaner. Yeah, very smart. I like how this sort of, you know, falls down into these two little pieces. I like having the external monitor, however, I personally just find it very like if I’m at coffee shop, I find it very inconvenient to sort of bring out a whole extra monitor, even if it’s just one cable that connects it.

You know, one cable normally powers and connects these, these monitors to your laptop, which is awesome. But just having one cable there plus a whole other, you know, large monitor, probably going to want around at least 15 inch. I think. I have a 16 inch Arzopa monitor as well. Portable monitor and they’re just, just a little bit too big to carry around for sort of day to day use.

However, if I’m going on a longer trip and you know, again, I’m in a hotel room, an Airbnb, I’m kind of trying to, you know, create like a work setup away from home. It is very handy to have the extra monitor there. I know some people can’t, they just can’t do work on a single monitor. So it can be handy especially if you’re doing things like video editing. One tip I would have, if you’re on Apple, you can get 4K portable monitors for not that much more Expensive expensive than 2560 by 1440 2K monitors.

2K monitors on Apple, especially in small sizes, generally it’s just you have to scale them down in order to get them to look good. So you just don’t have that much space. I’d Recommend Getting a 4k one which you can then scale down to 2k in Apple settings. And it will look really good and you, you know, your icons won’t be tiny and the text won’t be tiny. Everything will be crystal clear.

And it’s 4K which Apple’s not perfect with, but 4K looks fine on, on Apple silicon. So yeah, that’s my recommendation if you’re going to do external monitor. Also, he’s using the Logitech MX Ergo mouse, which I used to have one of Those at the MX3. I gave it to my girlfriend because yeah, it just, it just, I, I moved to trackball mice and so I just didn’t need it. So I gave it to her and she loves it.

She, she uses it every day for work. They are great mice. They’re still super comfortable. Like if, if you’ve never used a trackball, you just, you know, you want basically the Most comfortable regular mouse, I would say it’s the Logitech MX4 I think is the latest one. They’re basically the best mice.

They’re. They just, they fit your hand perfectly. And those extra buttons, you have to set them up just right. But it can be super handy. I never used to use mine because it got stuck.

It would constantly get stuck on the old MX3. I think that was actually like a manufacturing defect. Hopefully they’ve solved it with the new MX4. Or was it MX5? I think it’s MX4.

Hopefully they’ve Logitech have solved that issue. If so, yeah, great mice, highly recommended. Yeah, they also have the MX Anywhere which is basically like a, it’s a slightly different shape. I’ve never used one, but I’ve seen them and they’re about half the price or something like 60, 70% of the price of the MX4. MX3.

They look very good too. They have. Another great thing about the Logitech MX mice is the scroll wheels. And the Logitech MX Anywhere has the same scroll wheel as its larger brothers. And yeah, you can, they just, they’re very smooth and you can, you can sort of switch modes.

So it has like a smooth scroll mode and it has like a ratcheted mode. You can switch between, switch between them. So, you know, if you have long documents having a smooth scroll, it’s beautiful. You just kind of scroll on it. But if you like the scroll wheel, try trackball, especially the Kensington Slim Blade, man.

And it has this twist to scroll function, man. Best scroll I’ve ever experienced. Like, I would recommend it’s a hundred dollar mouse. I would recommend buying it just based on that scroll. Nothing I’ve used as compared to it.

It’s fantastic. So if you like smooth scrolling, try the Kensington Slim Blade. You won’t regret it. I can again switch between spaces and it’s all super intuitive and very, very well solved. All right, so I think he’s moving into.

Yeah, you know, like you mentioned the content creation side, which isn’t really the focus of this video. So yeah, we’ll, we’ll move on to the next setup. But yeah, that was quite interesting seeing his on the go setup. I kind of like the 3D stands. So let’s move on to the next one.

So I think this one’s a little bit more of like a digital Nomad setup. I’ve had a quick scan for it before. It seems to have some interesting points on like, you know, maintaining proper ergonomics when working from co working spaces. Or from coffee shops. So, yeah, let’s have a watch and see what they see, what their setup’s all about.

I’m traveling right now, which means that I don’t have access to my regular home setup where I have everything set up. Ergonomically, this is generally a typical work setup that people have on the go. It’s minimal, but it’s not exactly good. You have bad posture, bad positioning, it gets uncomfortable after a while, especially if you’re traveling long term. Elevated shoulders, you have a low laptop, you’re looking downwards like this.

It’s very likely that you start slouching like this and working, your body is going to really start to feel it and you’re going to regret it and it’s going to make work more unpleasant. So I’m going to show you, with a couple of tweaks and tricks, how you can create an ergonomic setup anywhere on the go and even at your local cafe. Here is what you’re going to need. Your laptop. It’s very true.

What she’s mentioning about the raised shoulders, that’s one of the main issues I have working for years from coffee shops is how you know if the tables, the tables are generally quite high compared to where the seats are. And so if you place your laptop on top, you’re raising your shoulders to try and maintain, you know, like a decent typing posture. And doing so can really just cause this strain and pain in your shoulders, which I believe can, can, you know, really lead to some serious issues in the long term. So that’s why I think, you know, all of this ergonomic portable setups is so important, you know, just to try and you’re not looking for the perfect setup. You’re not going to get that, to be honest, in a coffee shop, but you’re just looking to find what’s called like the 80, 20.

You’re trying to find the, the 20% of things which, which, wait, 20% of things which give you 80% of results. You’re trying to find a few things which give you the most, the best results. And you kind of accept that it’s not going to be perfect. But as long as you can get somewhere between 60 to 80% there, it’s probably better than just working from cough shop and destroying your, your back, your shoulders and just causing this pain and just basically getting home and being tired, you know, that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do here is what you’re gonna need, your laptop, a roof stand to get your monitor elevated. This is the V3, the latest version.

It’s lightweight, it’s slim, it’s small. Magic keyboard, it’s really slim, it’s really small. Compact. It’s got everything you need. Long battery life and an ergonomic mouse.

This is the Logitech Lift. It’s great for small, even medium hands. I’ll link other ones that are good for medium, large hands and other versions that I really like in the description down below. And if you purchase it using my affiliate links, it’ll help support the channel at no extra cost to you and I’ll send you some good karma. Take what makes sense for you for this video and tweak as necessary.

You may not be able to get a perfect ergonomic setting, but you’re going to have a way better setup than you started with. Scope of the space and see if there’s any low tables. Most tables are actually too high to comfortably work on for the average human, especially if you’re on the shorter side. And see if there’s any tables where you could possibly use something as a footrest too. If you have multiple chairs to choose from, see if you prefer chairs with adjustments.

See if there are smaller chairs that have less seat depth. Anything that basically will allow you to have your back comfortably sitting on the back, rest feet flat on the ground as much as possible or have some sort of support. If the chair seat depth is too big, what you can do is put a pillow, a cushion, your backpack, or even roll up a sweat butter to fill up that gap in the back. And that way you have nice back support. And if you are lucky enough to have a office chair wherever you are, you’re likely to have at a minimum, a chair that can go up and down.

So now we’re sitting comfortably in the chair with our back. Is it just me who has this problem? Like she mentioned placing, you know, like a pillow or more likely like a rolled up jumper or something sort of, you know, in the lower part of your back and. Or just to provide a bit more support. It’s just me.

I think I’m just large. Whenever I sit on chairs that have like pillows on the back, they always seem to just like they shorten the amount of space that, you know, my thighs can actually sit on so much. I feel like I’m just sitting on the edge of the chair. I’m always like, who? Who?

I mean, I live in Asia, so, you know, people are generally smaller. So maybe it is me. But yeah, whenever I do that, it just pushes me too far forward. And if this gets more uncomfortable, if you’re normal, if you’re, you know, regular size, maybe don’t have this issue. It’s just me.

But yeah, I just wanted to, to see. Am I the weird one here? Let me know. Supported. Now take out your Roost stand.

We’re going to elevate the laptop. Generally, you want the top of your screen at eye level. Adjust your posture and be mindful of your posture as much as possible. Try to get that 90 degree angle elbow bend in your arms with relaxed shoulders and tuck the chair armrest under the table. You may not be at a perfect.

If you can get a 90 degree bend on your elbows in a coffee shop or in a co working space, probably more likely. This looks like a co working space. Great. I’ve not, I’ve found in most coffee, in most coffee shops, you’re not going to be able to get that. The, the chairs, they’re not made generally like coffee shops.

The tables and the chairs are not actually made for working, they’re made for drinking coffee, eating food. So, you know, generally the, the table heights would just be too high for that. So you’re generally not going to get those 90 degree angles. However, her point on raising the laptop screen to eye height, I find this is so true. If you can have the top of your laptop screen be just above eye level here, so you’re kind of like looking straight on.

And what it means is when you’re actually looking at the screen, you don’t have to move your head in order to see the lower parts of the screen. You can just move your eyes up and down or left and right. So it keeps a good neck posture, it keeps your shoulders sort of balanced in a relaxed position. So yeah, if you can keep just getting that laptop up, I find it’s so important. It’s basically like the most important thing here.

The product she’s using is the Roost stand. Great product. Or you can, you can look into the neck stand, which is a. I think it’s a knockoff. I’m not sure. I don’t know who came first, the rooster or the neck stand.

But yeah, look into these stands. They are great. I actually own two of them. My girlfriend uses one and I use one as sort of like a backup when I’m using them. Yeah, I use one as a backup.

Essentially great products, they get the laptop up really high, but again, they can take up quite a lot of table space. So just be aware of that 90 degree, but as close as possible is good. And then make all the tweaks necessary to your roof stand, to your chair, to your backrest. And since your laptop is elevated, you’re of course going to need a separate keyboard to now work on and an ergonomic mouse which will help reduce tension by having your arm in a more neutral, natural and comfortable position. That’s the end of a workday for me.

I love how easy, compact and portable this system is and that you can apply most, if not all of these tips whenever you’re working on the go. So let me know your comments down below, let me know your setup and I’ll see you in the next video. That’s cool. Video. Yeah, I love the Logitech the lift mouse.

Again, it’s any product or any way you can have your wrists and your arms sort of resting in a handshake position is a good thing in my mind. If you can even keep your hands in this position straight ahead of you in a handshake position as much as possible while you’re working, you’re going to minimize pain. I think that’s how our hands are kind of, they naturally rest. If you just put your arms by your side, you’ll notice that your hands kind of rest in that sort of like your palm against your thigh sort of position. So it kind of makes sense that you know, products which replicate that are good for us and very comfortable.

So yeah, that mouse looks interesting. I’ve never used it, but it does look like a good buy. All right, that was a good setup. Let’s move to the next setup. This is me always needing physical therapy, making best friends with my massage therapist.

Always there. Why? Because my posture at the computer. Like you probably. This one’s interesting.

It’s a short. I found it just briefly shows a setup. It looks like he’s using like a roof stand, like a MacBook Pro Pro. And he has this, this keyboard. I was looking into trying to buy this keyboard before I bought my, my softle ergonomic keyboard.

He has a gold touch keyboard. It’s a split keyboard and it kind of has like built in tenting. Looks very interesting. If you’re just looking for like a regular, regular keyboard that’s just split in the middle and allows the, the sides to sort of 10 inwards. Like this seems to be a good option but they’re kind of hard to find.

I think you can find them on Amazon or you can find them on like Aliexpress. There’s some like weird like small sellers who just selling on Aliexpress. So have a look there. I Think it’s called the Gold. The Gold Touch Go to split raised keyboard.

Yeah. So let’s check out his setup and yeah. See what it’s got for us. We sucks. Hunched over.

Got the external keyboard, got the mouse, but still hunched over. Well, beach. Great navigation. I started using a laptop stand. Now I started getting even higher.

I started doing reformer Pilates. Fix my hands, shoulders, neck, Kegel muscles even. I got the even taller one here stand. And it’s all set up finally. Now that’s all on my blog here with Product Rec.

Yeah. That. You saw the keyboard there. It’s the Gold Touch keyboard. It looks like he has a roost stand.

Yeah. So roost stand. And it looks like he’s actually using a trackball mouse. Maybe the. The MX Ergo trackball mouse from trackball.

Yeah. Pretty decent little setup. I thought that was interesting for. To share that with you quickly. Let’s move on to the next setup.

So this one’s interesting. It’s another short. I think what’s interesting about this is just that he has an external monitor above like a MacBook Pro. But I just found the placement of the external monitor to be interesting. It seems to be like a. I don’t know, some sort of stand product which sort of brings the monitor up above the MacBook Pro.

It’s kind of interesting setup. Just want to show this to you. Yeah. Let me know what you think.

It’s.

Yeah, like I said, it’s interesting little setup. Yeah. I have the same problem with external monitors like you see here. He’s using external monitor at coffee shop. I don’t know, it might just be me, but I just feel like sort of whipping out a whole.

Whipping. Whipping out a whole external monitor. It’s just so, so kind of massive. If you’re in like a coffee shop where there’s no one. No one else working.

It’s. I just feel a little bit obnoxious. This might just be. I’m British, so, you know, we get embarrassed about working weird things. This might just be the thing for me having external monitor in the shop also.

It just takes up so much space. But if you are going to use an external monitor, this seems like a smart way to do it because you’re essentially, you’re just like raising it. You’re raising up above and it’s sort of flat against your. Against your laptop, the back of your laptop. So it’s actually not taking up too much table space.

It actually seems like this was quite an efficient setup. It looks like he has the MX MX4 mouse or MX3, I’m not sure. And he has one of these. I think they’re called the Carpio. It’s like a, like a palm rest which you sort of placed by your mouse there.

They’re made for gamers. Interesting little products. Never tried them, but seem kind of interesting. Interesting way to kind of like. I think it just raises up your wrist a little bit.

I’m not sure how good the ergonomics are on them. It might just be a gimmick. It might work, I don’t know. Yeah, interesting little setup. If you’re going to do external monitor setup, this is probably an interesting way to do it.

As a thought I’m watching it, I’m kind of like, oh, you could just use an iPad. An iPad versus an external monitor, especially if you have an Apple computer, seems to be the way to go. Just because, just because you can, you can use it as an external monitor or you can actually just use it as an iPad too. So it’s kind of multifunctional and yeah. Will it allow touch input for Apple?

I’m not sure. I don’t have an iPad, so I don’t know. Yeah, an iPad could be a good alternative to an external monitor, especially if you have a slightly older one lying around, which a lot of people seem to do. That’s why I don’t have one because I’m pretty sure I’ll just turn into one of those people. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve got an iPad.

It’s been sitting in a drawer for three years and I never use it. But great product though. I just don’t want to be one of those people. All right, let’s move on to the next setup.

All right, so this one’s interesting because it’s seems to be this custom project which is made by this guy called Tinker and Hack. He seems, I think he has his own YoYouTube channel. I think I found his like GitHub project as well. And he’s kind of building this out. This whole little project he’s building out.

It’s all open source. This is like a custom orphilinear split keyboard. It’s called the PSKEB PSKEB and it’s a custom made 3D printed case. And the case also acts as a like a laptop stand, which I thought was really clever. I saw this and I was like, oh, if this wasn’t a three row or four row design, if this was like, you know, a regular four, four or five row keyboard, I might try and build this.

This is interesting is that they’re talking my language here. So, yeah, this seems to be an interesting little project this guy’s building out here and I love that it’s all open source. Yeah, let’s check out also. Yeah, he also has a track point, the little red nub that you see there. He has that built into the keyboard, which is genius because those track points, they come by default on the ThinkPad laptops, the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.

And while they’re not, they’re not, in my opinion, they’re not the perfect like mouse pointing device. I know there’s a lot of like ThinkPad fanboys who, who love them. They’re like, oh, it’s the best mouse ever made. I don’t. They’re not, in my opinion, they’re just not that.

But they are great, like kind of like quick, quick movement devices. If, you know, if you’re just kind of like, you know, scrolling a document and you just want to just click on something and you don’t want to have to move all the way over to your mouse. All the way over. You don’t want to have to keep moving your hand back and forth just to make small changes. Having that there and maybe even just using your thumb to sort of use it as your pointing device.

That could actually be. That’s a great, It’s a great idea. I just thought it was very clever. So, yeah, let’s check this out. Let’s see what he’s.

Let’s see what he’s built here.

Finish crafting this year. The model is called PSK5, which means it’s the fifth generation design in the PSK series. So what do you think? Pretty sleek, right? I’ve been into ergonomic keyboards for eight years now.

first I was into keyboards like the Daktol, the one with tons of key and really unique shapes. But after using them for. I was just looking at a dactyl. I was looking at these keyboards. These are custom built keyboards where they have this kind of like curved keyword.

So yeah, the keys essentially are supposed to be kind of like formed to the natural movement of your fingers and your fingers kind of move in an arch when you go up and down. And these people, nerds have developed these, these keyboards which are sort of optimized towards that. It’s like peak, you know, if you, like I said, if you get into this ergonomic keyboard niche, it’s a deep rabbit hole and you end up here. This is like near the final boss level. There’s, there’s more sort of out there keyboards.

But this is when you, when you start entering this area, you’re like, oh man, I’m deep in it now. Yeah. And so I thought it was just kind of interesting. Also, I just want to point out I really like how high he gets the, the. The.

The custom 3D printed laptop mount that he’s built, which is essentially the case for the keyboard. I really like how high it gets the screen. It seems like a really well thought out and well designed case there. So yeah, kudos to him for that. Very smart.

Let’s keep watching. I realized when I travel for work or when on vacation, it’s really hard to lock this big thing around. But because I was already used to the layout, I still wanted a keyboard that can handle both my daily work and, and my knee when traveling.

So that’s how the PSKey Siri was born. Now the P in PSKey stands for portability. So keyboards in this series are in a compact form factor. They are basically all 36 key designs and symmetrical. So they can be stacked by together to reduce the space.

Furthermore, the case is 3D printed. One advantage is that you can get really creative with the shape. And another is they are actually pretty light. Next, the S stands for split. As a seasoned programmer, I suffer from all kinds of RSI issue.

So to last longer in this career, a split design is absolutely essential. Also, having a tilt is part of the ergonomic design. One thing not reflected in the series name is efficiency. Programmers are a group that naturally pursues efficiency. Plus, I am a pretty impatient person.

So this characteristic is something I consider in everything I make. It is always a hidden must have requirement in this keyboard series that is reflected in the 36 key design. Why are 36 keys considered the most efficient? Let’s first look at a regular keyboard. This one has a 68 key layout which is considered relatively small form factor among mass produced keyboards you can buy.

Now. When I use a keyboard like this, I always find it is error prone using my pinky to tap these keys, especially the 0, minor and the equal keys. I often press the wrong one even after decades of practice. Maybe my fingers are just too short. But what if we can type them without stretching our Pinkies?

Say for example, when I want to input 0, I hold space and press U for 0 and correspondingly press I for a minus sign or O for the equal sign. My chance of pressing the wrong key drops dramatically. Our fingers don’t have to stretch as far. You can keep them mostly in the home row. Area to complete all our typing.

Now, what about even fewer keys? For example, less than 36? Well, thanks to Ben Burrock had done it for us. Where fingers can comfortably reach without being too few. Some people might Wonder how can 36 keys possibly be enough?

Alright, that was actually a pretty decent summary of why these ergonomic keyboards are actually quite good. Like he was showing like a visual example of how you really minimize finger movement and how you know, you how home row mods work, how the layers can work and the ideas behind it. I think he explained it way better than I did. However, it seems like the rest of the video is him mostly talking about, you know, innovations in his, in his keyboards which are awesome and I’m going to watch them personally. But I don’t think it’s necessarily about setups.

It’s more just nerding out on keyboards. So I’m going to move on to the next setup. Again, I think this is a great project. I love the. I love how the, the case has the laptop stand built in and how well that seems to work.

I’ll try and include a link to. I will be including links to all of the setups shown today in the description down below. So go and check those out if you’re interested and if you want to find out more about his PSKE keyboard project. It looks awesome. Welcome to the video.

I’m going to show you the best setup that I know from six months of traveling as a digital nomad. And this setup really served me amazingly well. I actually adapted it and refined it over the first three months of my travel and now it’s become an incredible.

What’s going on with his nose? These nose strips, is this like a, like a YoYouTuber starter kit kind of thing? Should I get one? I’m trying to, trying to make my name on YoYouTube. Do I need a nose strip in order to find success?

In order to find success? Is that like to get to the first 10,000 subscribers? By the way, subscribe like down below. To get to the first 10,000 subscribers, you need a nose trip. Is that how it works?

I don’t know. Every time I see them I’m like, I get it. If you’re trying to sleep and you’re trying to. Because you know, they actually, they’re good for keeping your nasal passages clear. So I think for a lot of people when they sleep, you actually need stuff like this in order to stop from snoring and also just to maintain healthy breathing when you’re sleeping.

I don’t get wearing them in the middle of the day, especially while you’re recording a YoYouTube video. I don’t know, maybe try not to be a hater, but I don’t get it. But yeah, this setup looks interesting. That’s my little run out of the way. I like the fact that he seems to have a yes roost and external monitor.

I do like. I want to see his keyboard set up here. It’s an interesting little foldable keyboard, which I think he’s kind of using as kind of like a split keyboard. I just want to see how he’s using that. So, yeah, let’s check this one out.

My travel. And now it’s become an incredible approach and way for me to travel. And so essentially I’ve got a dual screen set up, a 4K secondary screen that’s 15.6 inches. And then both monitors are elevated so that I’m not craning down. I also have an amazing sort of Bluetooth sort of travel keyboard that is pretty ergonomic.

It’s actually angled. And then I have my Ergo mouse. Now you can get this in left hand, right hand, whatever you prefer. But the, the beauty of this setup is you get both screenshots. You get two screens while you’re working, and that’s what makes it so magical.

And for most people, two monitors is going to be plenty for what you need. You’re golden. And then the other aspect is elevating your screen so you’re not bending your eye level down to your. Your screen. All in all, it’s pretty simple, it’s not expensive.

And I think you’re going to find that this is the setup that will work for a lot of people. We’ll put links to the description down below, but take a look at what I have, and let’s go through it all. All right, Please ignore the crazy craziness, but here we go with the flyby. So we have basically cable management here, which is where you put all your cables when you’re traveling. You need something like this.

I cannot recommend this enough. All your monitor cables, your maybe your keyboard, your power adapter, your usb. I haven’t spoke about this for like the whole video, but yeah, like the cable management bag. I find it kind of interesting. Like I mentioned earlier, I feel like, you know, power problems have been solved with, with portable work setups.

Just because USB C cables, sort of. Everything’s USB C now. I feel like because everything is usbc, you can kind of just carry around like a few USB C cables maybe if, you know, you want a Phone charger. You need like a USB C to Lightning. If you’re using an older iPhone or something, maybe you need just one of those cables, but really like carrying around.

I think I carry two USB C cables and a USB C to Lightning cable, as well as a power brick. And that’s pretty much it. Those are the only cables I carry around anymore. Previously I used to carry around like a micro. Was it micro?

Micro, micro USB to regular USB cable as well as, like, you know, just for charging random devices, as well as, like, I used to carry around like a HDMI cable. Sometimes you need like a USB USB to C to HDMI cable, but now, like, everything’s just usbc. So you’re gonna chuck those all out. Maybe it’s just me. That’s, that’s why I don’t really cover cables and like cable management and, you know, having separate pouches and stuff for it.

I, I just don’t, I don’t utilize them anymore. So I guess I just kind of gloss over it. But. Yeah. Is that, is that like a big thing?

Is that people still doing tech cable pouches? Do we need that anymore? Just carry around two USBC cables. You’re good, man. Everything’s covered.

That’s just my. That’s just something I notice. Keyboard, your power adapter, your USB dongle, any sort of cables, you’re going to throw them in here and then this thing just flips so easy. It packs clean, you get a quick up and down, and that’s all about efficiency. Then we have an old, old Gen 1 roost stand.

I just happen to kind of keep it because I didn’t want to spend another 90 bucks or 80 bucks on a new one. And I’ve got the Gen 2, which is better. And now they only sell the Gen 2, if I’m not mistaken. And this bad boy allows you to adjust the laptop up and down. What’s beautiful about this setup is I can go in here and I can actually raise and lower the monitor.

It’s got tracks up to 7 degrees, so depending on the surface, the desk height, what I’m at, I can work with that. And then this keyboard actually. Okay, that, that roost gen 2 looks pretty nice. I’ve never seen one of these. I don’t own one, but yeah, I kind of see like the knockoff version that I have, the neck stand.

I see why, maybe it’s worth spending there. Did you say 80 to 90 bucks? Oh, I think my, my knockoff version was like maybe like $10, maybe 15, something like that. It was, it was cheap. So I don’t know.

But this seems to have some genuine like useful kind of like creative innovation into it. So maybe it’s worth spending. I don’t know. Go and check it out. Roost, Roost.

Stand. I think it’s like roosterstand.com I think Google it. AI chat, GPT Claude. I don’t know. Check out.

They are interesting products. I’m sure there’s probably like, I don’t know, someone online is talking about how like hey man, you know, you shouldn’t use those knocked off versions. Like they’re stealing from the creative. I’m like hey man, 90 bucks.

But that’s just me. Don’t cancel me. Don’t come for me. Roost, roost. Stand people up with the computer via Bluetooth and it flips closed.

So it’s golden from that perspective. Mouse, whatever you have your preference. If you want a wireless wired, I just like wired whenever I can find it. And then the second 4K monitor is awesome. And this is not the brightest mode.

It can obviously adjust to a brighter screen. Here’s the other thing with this monitor. Some monitors you’re going to find they require like a janky separate power adapter. This monitor, none of that. You just have one USB C. It powers both the power to the monitor and the actual displays.

Let’s get into specific individual parts and I’ll break it down for you. All right, first up we have the travel keyboard. This is straightforward. It’s just a standard travel keyboard. It flips closed.

This actually packs into the compartment over here so I can slip this in. This is called a bag Smart. I just got it on Amazon. I think it was like 30 bucks. This one I put up in here and then it slides right in here.

I’ve put together kind of like the components. So I have my, my 110 watt charger for the MacBook Pro 16 Max. I’ve got the cable that goes to the charging block with the Mag Safe connect. I have the dong here for USB. Cs to USB as well as Ethernet on the back.

All right. I think this is similar to some of the previous apps we’ve seen. Cool, cool setup. It seems very, you know, practical. Seems to be work for him.

I wanted to see more about the keyboard, but it seems like he just, it’s just a portable Bluetooth keyboard. I think he’s maybe, you know, he uses it because it’s so portable. It just folds up into, into a small, small little thing. I was more interested to see if it had any sort of benefits. You know, I use it.

I utilize split keyboards. All my keyboards are split keyboards. So I just wanted to see if, like, these kind of foldable keyboards kind of had like, a secondary benefit of being like, you know, close to split keyboard. What’s so great about split keyboards, by the way, is just that by cutting your keyboard in two halves and separating them, and it allows you to. To rest your shoulders in like, a more comfortable position.

When you’re using a typical keyboard, you generally, because your wrists are both sort of like coming in towards the center, it can kind of create this tightness among the back of your shoulders. I have a few friends who. They had really bad, like, shoulder issues and shoulder strain and switching to split keyboards essentially solves that for you. And same for me. Yeah.

So I want to see more about that. He didn’t seem to cover it, so I’m going to move on to the next setup. Okay, so this one’s a Reddit post that I found. I thought this setup was kind of interesting. I think what this guy’s doing is using a gpd.

It’s one of those mini laptops, and he’s using it kind of like in tented mode. So it’s like you turn the screen, I think you can flip the screen or maybe you just. You fold it backwards against itself. So it’s kind of using the screen up close. And then he has two halves of split keyboard on either side of the screen.

I like this setup just because I like those mini laptops. I want to get one for. They’re really cool. I want to get one, install Linux on them. And I think this is kind of a cool use of it.

He’s also using a Korn keyboard there. I mentioned the Korn keyboards before. Great keyboards. You can kind of find them on, like, AliExpress for quite cheap. I think if you get like a wired version, you can get them for like under $50.

Great keyboards, a few. Like, the. The amount of keys is just a bit too small for me. I have the Soffle, which is basically the same keyboard but with an extra row added on top, which is the number row, essentially just feels way more natural to me. Similar to the Ergodox keyboard that I have here.

But yeah, he has Korn keyboard. And I like the Sling. This like, army sling. I like, you know, if you. I like this idea of having like a small, A small laptop, which is like, actually pretty powerful, but it’s just tiny in form factor.

Like under, like under 10 inches. Pause, like under 10 inches. But it’s, you know, it’s just powerful enough to do all the work that you need to do along with like, you know, like a simple keyboard. I like just the sort of lightweight setup that you could sort of take with you anywhere. So, yeah, let’s check this one out.

So if you see here.

Yes. You see the GPD laptop here and this sort of sling, which seems to be like a, I don’t know, one of these, like tactical slings. Kind of cool.

Just another angle. Okay. So yeah, this is a GPD laptop. GPD laptop is kind of interesting because they seem to build in these like little trackpads in like weird positions. I’ve seen some which have like a gamepad here, which is like super weird.

I guess maybe they’re made for gaming. Yeah, the, the keyboard, I could see why you wouldn’t really want to use that keyboard. It does look a little bit cramped. I hate when you have like, we oddly spaced. I mean, this is not too dissimilar from like Apple spacing on their, on their keyboard.

So I guess it’s not that bad. But I hate this kind of oddly spaced thing here. Also, I. Sometimes you’ll notice like, weird modifier layouts. Like on the thinkpads, for example, they have a FN key, I think, on the far, on the far left of the, of the bottom row.

And then, and then I think they have. It’s just, it’s just slightly. It’s just aligned weird. And I hate when people just do these odd layouts on the bottom. If you see here, it also has a what says the colon key and the apostrophe or the quotation key, the quote marquee.

It’s just. That’s such odd spacing, I guess because the, there’s not enough space to place them here where they should be. And I guess the enter key is quite small and it also makes the backspace key small. Keywords like this are like, you know, if you’re writing an essay or know if you’re like an author or book writer or something and you’re just trying to write long documents, these become a nightmare because you just, you, you make the mistakes so consistently using them that it’s just, it just drives you crazy. And then whenever you switch back to a regular keyboard, you then make errors on that keyboard while you switch back because like, you, you know, you adjust your brain to kind of say, okay, the position of this key is just slightly different, so you’re kind of tapping in different places.

It just becomes a mess. And then when you go back to these keyboards again, you’re making the same errors. They frustrate me. So that’s why I love this, because he has the Korn keyboard which is obviously set up perfectly for him to kind of like make up for that. You don’t even have to bother with this terrible bloody built in keyboard.

Just another angle of that horrible keyboard.

This is from Top Gear. Yeah, I resonate with this. I resonate with this. Yeah, man. All right, let’s move on to the next setup.

So I found this set up on Reddit as well. This is also kind of interesting. Right. So it’s combining a few, a few interesting little details here, which I kind of wanted to touch upon. I like here that he has the, the external monitor again.

You’re going to use an external monitor. This seems like an interesting way to do it. Placing it above the laptop screen. Screen. So in this kind of stacked configuration.

It’s kind of interesting here he seems to have like a stand for the laptop and then another stand which goes super high. I don’t know, is that a tripod to mount the screen upside down? Cool. On top. That’s kind of clever.

And the keyboard, I love this keyboard. I think this is the Ergo Haven. What’s it called? It’s like. Oh, it’s.

I can’t remember the name, but it’s made by this company called Ergo Haven. I think they’re based out of Russia, I want to say. So it can be. It’s kind of hard to order. I don’t think they accept like Visa, I don’t think they accept credit cards.

I think you have to use like a crypto, like a crypto payment service in order to pay. Super weird. But I mean, you know, it’s the struggles of I guess a business trying to operate from Russia. Yeah. And so, but you know, there are reviews, they do make, seem to make solid products and there are reviews of them online.

And obviously this person here has one. I like this keyboard because it has the built in trackball here, which is really cool. So this, this layout seems interesting. It seems, it seems that they have like custom shaped keys. I think these are called like KLP lame keycaps.

And so it’s like the keycaps are sort of tilted. So people, again, keyboards, ergonomic keyboards, super nerdy rabbit hole to fall down. But people have been custom designing their own keycaps which you can place on any keyboard which is sort of like curved or shaped towards to match the travel shape of your fingers. So, yeah, I think he or she has those keycaps here on this keyboard. I don’t know if they’re custom made.

I don’t know if they come from the manufacturer from Ergo Haven, but yeah, so he has these KOP Lame keycaps, this trackball built into the actual keyboard, which is pretty awesome. I want that. I want a trackball built into my split keyboard. And it’s kind of like. I think I’m gonna do it.

Probably make a video about it if I do. Yeah. So I thought it’s kind of interesting to see. Okay, so that’s how he’s getting the screen up so high. Kind of has this, like.

Kind of like, you know, you see this wraparound stand here? That’s pretty smart. That actually does look like a light stand or a tripod. Maybe it’s a phone stand. Maybe it’s a. Yeah, maybe it’s like a. I don’t know, a selfie stick.

That’s it. Maybe it’s a selfie stick with, I don’t know, wraparound feet. Yeah, with the stand. That’s pretty smart setup. Again, this seems more sort of optimized towards, like, hotel setup, although, you know, that’s not actually taking up that much space.

If you look at it, this would fit in a backpack. There’s a problem with the ThinkPad laptops. This is a ThinkPad, right? Yeah, this is a ThinkPad laptop. They have massive power bricks.

I think, you know, the newer ones, they all. They can be USBC powered. Like I said, USBC’s taken over. So, you know, you can kind of just chuck these massive power bricks out and get yourself like, a small 120 watt. I think you can get up to like, 160 watt USB C plug sockets, which are way smaller than this.

But, yeah, something about ThinkPads, they all come with massive power bricks. It’s very annoying to carry around, but, yeah, this setup doesn’t seem to take up too much space overall. Yeah, this is pretty sweet. All right, that’s a great setup. And I think that that is going to be the last setup that we’re going to be covering today.

Yeah, so that’s the last setup that we’re covering today. This is the first episode that would we. That I’m doing of this setup. Reacts and. Yeah, I hope you enjoyed it.

We’ve covered, I think, like, 10, 11, 12 different setups. And yes, it’s taking a bit of time, but we got through it. We got through it together. Hope you found some cool setups here. Today, I hope you found something that’s inspiring, that gives you some ideas, you know, different things that you can kind of steal from different setups.

Some good ergonomic tips in there. Some interesting or some highlights, I guess, like floor sitting, which is something I might try one one day. Maybe. The fact that I hate external monitors in coffee shops. It’s just too clunky, it’s too large a setup.

However, if I was going to do it, I would probably place the external monitor above my laptop. That’s genius. I never thought about that before. As well as some other highlights, like, you know, just some ergonomic tips about all four linear keyboards, split offlinear keyboards and how they can be very sort of optimized to healthy typing as same thing around tenting, you know, maintaining neutral wrist positions with your devices while you’re working. And yeah, overall, I think this was just a good sort of deep dive into ways that you can, you know, if you need to get work done while you’re out and about, whether you’re traveling, whether you just want to head to your local coffee shop and, you know, just work from a different location than your home kitchen table or home office.

Yeah, this is a good setup. There’s some good ideas in here. We’re going to try and do this on a weekly basis. I’m thinking maybe every Tuesday, possibly every Thursday. It just depends on the schedule.

I will leave links to all of the setups that have been mentioned or videos that have been shown here today in the description down below. So if you want to dive deeper into any of them, go and check those links out. Check out the original creators. Make sure you drop a subscribe. Drop us a like subscribe to the channel if you like this.

We’re gonna be having way more setup react videos coming your way. Also, I’m going to be setting up a website for specifically for setup [email protected] if you go to Depends when this video goes live. The site may not be up yet, but it will be up soon and it’s going to have more details about how you can potentially submit your setup to be featured here in one of these videos. That would be kind of cool to see yourselves. We do plan to offer prizes and like a ranking system.

Maybe even have like a tournament that will, you know, carry over multiple episodes. That’ll be kind of cool to see. Also, Please check out [email protected] it’s my new keyboard business. As a keyboard, essentially, we’re creating devices that help you execute creative work faster. That’s our goal.

Our first product, it’s going to be called the BuildBox. It’s a Macropad. It’s going to have a screen on it. It’s going to have one of the best dials that you’ve ever, ever used. Maybe.

I don’t know. I can’t say that it’s going to have a very good dial on it. It’s going to be a hall effect dial. So it’s going to be using magnets to get very smooth motion. It’s going to be great for scrubbing through videos, audio productions.

Yeah. And just documents. It’s just great for scrolling. So, you know, I’m really trying to create something special here. Create products that can help you get your work done faster, get it done easier.

Just be more productive. Be more happy while you’re working. That’s what we’re trying to do. Check us out inputzen.com Sign up to our email list. Updates are coming out, I think every week, maybe, maybe more often.

Check us out. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed this and come back for the next episode of Setup Reacts. Until next time. Take care, Sam.