Standing Desks

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve been thinking about standing desks and my ideal workspace for, well, a few years now. My interest has been spurred in part by people I know who, like me, write for a living, having positive experiences with standing desks. And of course there are the articles, like this one from early this month in The Wall Street Journal, touting the popularity of standing desks in Silicon Valley. Then there was this report from the American Cancer Society that stated:

women who sit for more than six hours a day were about 40% more likely to die during the course of the study than those who sat fewer than three hours per day. Men were about 20% more likely to die.

Then I started hearing from friends who worked in large Silicon Valley complexes that their employers had gone beyond offering standing desks to standing-desks-with-treadmills. Marko Kloos, writer and VP alum was a standing desk convert, first with a trial setup, and then via a local Borders Bookstore closing, a more permanent pair of standing desks.

I’ve had a lot of different tables and desks for writing on a computer. When I worked in media production at a software content company, my desk was a solid door; it had plenty of rooms for a task light, a keyboard, a mousepad and two 20” Apple monitors. In a lot of ways, that was my ideal set up. I have a good task chair and a lovely adjustable computer desk made by the now defunct ScanCo company in storage, and no room at all in the apartment for a large desk. Mostly these days, I sit in a comfortable easy chair and use a piece of fiber board as a lapdesk under my Mac Book.

I know a lot of canonized writers—most notably Hemingway—favored standing while writing. Thomas Mann used to write while standing and using the top of his refrigerator as his desk. At over six feet, he has certain advantages that at 5′ 3”.5 I lack. I’m not writing anything like the books they wrote, or keeping their hours, but on a long day, especially one that’s deadline-driven, even with frequent breaks and moving around and actually leaving the apartment to take a walk, I notice my back and shoulders hurt, and there’s sometimes noticeable eye strain. I’ve been reading about standing desks for a long time, looking at other people’s standing desks and investigating the various possibilities. As an experiment about six months ago on a whim, I move my laptop to the top of a half-height bookcase. It wasn’t quite the right height for me, so I put the hard cover unabridged American Heritage Dictionary under the laptop. That’s actually worked pretty well for me. I can easily move back to the easy chair when I get tired, and there’s enough space that I can even shift easily on my feet if my legs or back get tired. Plus, the cat has claimed the bottom shelf of the bookcase as Hers, which means when she gets bored she attacks my feet.

The experiment has worked better than I expected. All the same, I keep looking at adjustable standing desks, like this one from IKEA, the Fredrik:

Ikea Fredrik computer desk imageI know several people who use the IKEA Fredrik as a standing desk and are quite happy with it, and with it’s $149.00 cost.

Or there’s this one available from Amazon, the Safco 1929CY Adjustable Height Stand-Up Workstation, 29w x 19-3/4d x 49h, Cherry PVC Top for $290.07. It comes in cherry or oak finish for the PVC top. Image of the Safco standing workstation I’ve two friends whose employers at different companies offered them this Safco standing workstation. The top shelf and the keyboard tray are both adjustable, and the keyboard tray slides in or out.

Still, both are really designed for desktops, not laptops, and neither really offers the kind of space I’d like for a work area, so I think I’ll stick to my experimental bookcase for the time being. I note that oddly my feet hurt; less so than they did the first few months, but I’m contemplating clogs and possibly one of these “Anti-Fatigue” mats.

Sublime Imprint Anti-Fatigue Nantucket Series 20-Inch by 36-Inch Comfort Mat, Espresso

Crown Comfort King Antifatigue Mat, Zedlan, 24 x 36, Royal Blue (CK0023BL)

Anyone tried either of them? What are your suggestions for new adopters of standing desks? Did you purchase a desk or build one?

Posted in Hardware | 4 Comments

Take Control of Using Lion Matt Neuberg

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Lisa Spangenberg

After upgrading to Mac OS X Lion while following along in Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Upgrading to Lion, I began reading Matt Neuberg’s Take Control of Using Lion, and I’m awfully glad I did.

cover of Take Control of Using LionOne of the features I love about Take Control books are the Quick Start pages. These pages, which link to specific sections in terms of typical users and what they’re most likely going to want to accomplish first, are extremely useful. Neuberg’s directions to set up the Dock and System Preferences—especially his suggestions about making text easier to read and work with—work particularly well in terms of making every other aspect of using Lion much more pleasant and efficient. His succinct commentary about which new Lion features are particularly innovative, and ways of using them are equally useful, and easy to follow. It’s no easy thing to explain the changes to saving that Resume brings, for instance, but Neuberg manages it quite well.

For me, in terms of needing to adjust to using Lion immediately in order to keep on schedule, Neuberg’s helpful discussion of Mission Control was especially useful; I was able to start using Mission Control with Spaces immediately to switch quickly between applications and their windows, and my own Spaces with particular groups of windows for particular tasks.

The discussion of new Finder options, and Launch Pad and third-party launchers—complete with practical scenarios for why a user might favor one option over another—is thorough and helpful. Another of the things I love about Take Control books is that the authors are very aware that there’s usually several ways to accomplish the same task on a Mac, and they’re very good about discussion multiple methods—and why one way might suit a particular user or scenario. Neuberg is especially aware that users and their objectives are matters that depend on the individual. He adeptly accommodates a variety of users and scenarios. I am especially grateful for the attention paid to using the keyboard instead of the mouse or trackpad. Neuberg’s thoughtful discussion of keyboard shortcuts, and creating new shortcuts is extremely helpful, and not something that I’ve seen explained nearly as well as it is in Take Control of Using Lion.

The book offers very thorough coverage of Lion, especially in terms of customizing the OS to suit personal preferences; a few other highlights that I found particularly well done are the discussions of font management, something that most users are terribly frustrated by, since the Apple Help for the Font Book is less than adequate. The explanation of Lion’s new Text Substitutions feature is likely to save a number of people from early hair loss from textual frustration. Text Substitutions’ potential for causing extreme irritation is such that I suggest Take Control and Matt Neuberg might explicitly mention Text Substituions in the Quick Start items, instead of subsuming it under Tackle Your Text.

Take Control of Using Lion is well-written, with easy to understand step by step directions and explanations. I honestly can’t imagine anyone using Mac OS X Lion who wouldn’t find Take Control of Using Lion exceedingly helpful; I say this as someone who has been using a Mac daily since 1989. Matt Neuberg has written a book useful to both the diehard cultists like me, and the new users, both of whom can find what they need easily and quickly.

Matt Neuberg’s Web site is here. I note that he’s yet another scholar of dead languages who has found a second home in the digital realm. There’s a free .pdf sample of Take Control Of Using Lion you can download. You can purchase Matt Neuberg’s Take Control Of Using Lion here.

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The Mac OS X Lion Project Book Scott McNulty

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Lisa Spangenberg

Cover of Scott McNulty's The Mac OS X Lion Project Book

I should confess right up front that The Mac OS X Lion Project Book is from Peachpit, my publisher. Scott McNulty has been writing about the Mac for a long time, and I was familiar with his work on the Macworld site, so I was curious about this book. My editor kindly sent me a free digital copy when I asked for a review copy.

This is a book for people who want to learn how to do stuff and make stuff using Mac OS X Lion. It’s organized into six sections, each of which contains several projects:

Managing your Mac has projects that, like the entire book, range from the very simply (downloading and installing apps from various sources) to the more complicated and exceedingly useful sections on really learning to use the power of Spotify for searching, customizing your printer’s output and learning the inner workings of the Finder.

Interacting from a Distance includes step-by-step walkthroughs to using iChat, screen sharing, and remote access, all thoroughly explained using real-life scenarios.

Managing Media shows you how, step-by-step, to encode or rip DVDs, how to properly rip and encode a season’s worth of a tv series for proper play back from iTunes, and how you can safely move your entire iTunes library to an external drive with more room.

Making Magic covers basic and intermediate editing and effects in iPhoto, creating a slide show that people will actually want to watch, and creating a basic Web site using Rapid Weaver. That last one is a rather tricky project to lead someone through (I confess I would have gone with Google Sites) but McNulty manages it admirably.

Getting Productive Let me start by noting that I love that McNulty opens with using the free NetNewsWire Lite to walk people through setting up a custom reading list of news and blogs. This is one of those things that if more Mac users knew they could, they would. He follows that with an introduction to TextExpander, which, again, has me cheering. I’m on a tight budget, but TextExpander is worth every cent, and McNulty’s intro is quite decent (though I heartily endorse checking out Take Control of TextExpander for more in depth how-to). I note as well that McNulty is eminently practical in his nice Tip advising readers they can download and try TextExpander for free for thirty days. His discussion about ways to limit distractions while working on a Mac running OS X Lion is quite helpful, and will likely be a highlight for many readers; McNulty is both thoughtful and practical.

Additional Hardware Required has a solid basic introduction to podcasting using GarageBand. McNulty then discusses using TimeMachine and SuperDuper as a core part of a backup strategy using external hard drives, including covering a crucial step most explanations of backing up omit; Scott McNulty tells you how to restore a folder, step-by-step, something that you really want to know how to do before you need to do it. The explanation of a practical way to create a digital signature in order to sign .pdfs is useful.

I’d recommend this book for someone new to Lion, someone who likes practical hands-on learning rather more theoretical approaches, and someone who wants to do more with Lion than they’ve been doing. The section on Interacting From A Distance alone is worth the price of admission, even for a long time user. McNulty offers clear instructions, and a genuine awareness of how ordinary people use Macs. Nicely done.

You can purchase The Mac OS X Lion Project Book from Amazon, or your local bookseller or Peachpit, or iBooks.

Scott McNulty blogs at Blankbaby, and you can find him on Twitter as @blankbaby.

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Take Control of Upgrading to Lion Joe Kissell

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Lisa Spangenberg

Joe Kissell’s book is hands down the best guide I’ve seen to upgrading to Lion. He takes you through the questions you need to answer before upgrading, downloading the installer and Cover of Joe Kissell's Talke Control of Upgrading to Lionbacking up, as well as the install process itself. Take Control of Upgrading Lion covers how to determine if your hardware is ready for the Lion upgrade, if you’re Rosetta dependency-free, even how to purge your drive of duplicates and archaic leftovers from previous versions of OS X. Perhaps most importantly, Kissell includes an especially helpful section on the initial configuration steps you need to take once you’ve done a basic OS X Lion install.

Perhaps most helpful of all, Kissel even covers Apple’s new built in Recovery mode if you need to re-install Lion.

I used Take Control of Upgrading to Lion before, during, and after my own Lion upgrade; it was exceedingly helpful. The one change I’d suggest is perhaps adding a note about moving or copying the Lion Installer before beginning the install to the Quick Start page.

You can read the table of contents and the introduction to Take Control of Upgrading to Lion.

Buy Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Upgrading Lion

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Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit 10

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve been waiting with great impatience for BBEdit 10 to be available from the Mac App store since July 19, when I read this enticing review by Adam Engst of TidBITS. Today, Apple approved BBEdit 10 for the Mac App store, and I’ve been benefitting from the re-design and new features already. Note that BBEdit 10 requires Snow Leopard or Lion, and Intel processors.

BBEdit is a text editor. It’s the more powerful version of the excellent and free Text Wrangler. BBEdit has features that TextWrangler lacks, like very powerful tools for HTML and CSS, though I suspect BBEdit is still used largely by programmers writing code, I’ve been using BBEdit for HTML since 1997.

I spend much of my day in BBEdit, since it’s so flexible and while it’s extremely powerful, BBEdit doesn’t get in my way when I simply want to write. I now use BBEdit even when I’m not writing HTML, just because it’s so very useful. You can remove various sorts of invisible leftover binary or odd characters, you can covert to ASCII, the Search and Replace features are very powerful, easy to use, and include GREP.

The first thing I noticed is that the Preferences have been completely overhauled; they’re compact and better organized; it’s much easier to find where a particular setting lives. Some of the more obscure Preference settings have been removed from the GUI, but you can still set them via Terminal, via Help –> BBEdit Help –> Expert Preferences.

Other items have been moved to the new BBEdit Settings window; you’ll find Settings under the Application menu (that is the BBEdit menu) in BBEdit. This is where your FTP/SFTP accounts and paths (Bookmarks in BBEdit parlance) are stored, as well as Search/Replace patterns you reuse, and your HTML Sites information.

New features include support for DropBox; that means you can create an Application Support folder in DropBox and move the BBEdit folder from ~/Library/Application Support/ to ~/Dropbox/Application Support/. That way you can share your templates, text factories, snippets etc. across all the Macs on which you use BBEdit. Packages, a related new feature, makes it easy to share ancillary files with collaborators via DropBox.

Another really cool new feature is the ability to edit files from a Zip archive, including using Search and Replace, and save them back to the archive. That’s nice, but what makes it a cool new feature is that ePub (or ePUB as Adobe would have it) books are really a collection of text and HTML/CSS files in a Zip archive. BBEdit 10 can edit those files inside the Zip. That’s very very cool.

Image of the HTML palettes in BBEdit 10In terms of HTML specific new features, there’s a popover that lists the attributes of a specific tag, and which allows you to choose all the attributes for the given tag. If you control-click a tag in your document, you can choose to Edit Markup, and display the popover. For those new to BBEdit, that image to the left shows two of the BBEdit Palettes associated with HTML and CSS. There’s also an exceedingly convenient Entities palette.

The re-design of the Document Window and the addition of a Project window, which allows you to group related files together are both very interesting; I previously turned off the option for the document drawer; it annoyed me, terribly, but the new Document Window is worth a look, and the Project Window might actually save me time and help with organization, especially with the use of the Scratchpad, a global note pad that has all sorts of use in terms of cleaning up text before HTMLing it, or stashing bits of CSS.

That said, I’m Profoundly Not Happy about the absence of the Phrase palette. I miss the easy select-text-and-click access to Em and Strong, but I’m absolutely beside myself at the absence of the Cite tag. Yes, I know, it’s still there in the Markup menu, but honestly, as a book-and-scholarship writer and blogger, I need easy, efficient access to Cite.

Normally, BBEdit is $49.99. Right now, until October 20, 2011, you can buy a new license for $39.99. I note that the educational price I paid for BBEdit Pro in the 1990s and first half of this decade was between $75.00 and $90.00. Anyone who purchased BBEdit 9 after 1 January 2011 is eligible for a free upgrade. If you’re a long term user of BBEdit you can still upgrade directly from Bare Bones Software, otherwise, you can buy BBEdit 10 from the MacApp Store. I suggest, if you’re new to BBEdit and cautious, that you might want to download and use the free 30 day trial of BBEdit 10 first.

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