Original Post
Its getting into summer here in Australia, had a few +30 degree days recently (roughly about +90 Fahrenheit), and on those days I find it very hard to get to sleep. With 6 months of this to go and temps probably getting to the +40 area (+105f) more than once, the sleepless nights will be annoying. Now I could spend my money on an air-conditioner, however last night at about 2am I had the brilliant idea of spending that money on some type of "in bed" programming setup to amuse myself during the wee hours of the morning when there is no chance of me sleeping anyway.
The main drawback to in-bed coding is the position. Typing on a normal keyboard/mouse setup just isn't practical unless you sit ... which then defeats the point. To me there appears two main styles the setup can take. The "wearable computing" style, or the arm mounted style. Let me elaborate:
Wearable style:
- Sceen as i-Glasses for PC. You look like a retard but your in bed with the lights off so that isn't a problem. What is a problem is the resolution - 800x600 is pretty painful when I'm used to 1920*1200.
- Keyboard as Frog Pad, One Handed Keyboard. Looks like it would work find lying by your side or perhaps on your stomach. The main drawback here is lack of complicated key input such as shift+ctrl+home for super text editing goodness. That worries me as I do quite like my keyboard-fu.
- Mouse as Some kind of Trackball. Requires no arm movement, or mouse pad area. First ever "mouse" I used was a trackball and they're more than adequate as long as I don't want to play Quake12 at a competition level.
- PC as Simple Shuttle or other compact PC. I do mostly small 2D games for fun, as long as it can render some quads to the screen I'm golden.
Arm Mounted style
- Any regular LCD screen, simply mounted on some sort of wall mounted arm. The benefits of this full large screen resolution, but the down side is excess light possible keeping my sig-other awake. The arm position for an in-bed viewing angle would be very steep so the arm would need to have quite firm points to stop it falling flat onto my face.
- With the screen on an arm it would probably be very possible to mount some kind of Split freestyle keyboard at a position where my hands could still reach it lying down.
- Mouse and PC would be the same in either case I think.
Since I'm pretty sure I couldn't bear the 800x600 screen res of the glasses it seems that the screen mounted option is really the only choice. Finding an arm that would hold a large screen firmly both horizontally during use, and vertically during the day might however be a challenge as my 5 minute google search didn't turn up anything too promising.
I've also considered other alternatives such as iPad/tablet PC coding and the input method just isn't good enough. I need a normal keyboard/mouse to code properly, taping an onscreen keyboard is fine for twitter posts but not for re-factoring a few thousand lines of code.
Any other great suggestions out there I'm too sleep deprived to have thought of?
The main drawback to in-bed coding is the position. Typing on a normal keyboard/mouse setup just isn't practical unless you sit ... which then defeats the point. To me there appears two main styles the setup can take. The "wearable computing" style, or the arm mounted style. Let me elaborate:
Wearable style:
- Sceen as i-Glasses for PC. You look like a retard but your in bed with the lights off so that isn't a problem. What is a problem is the resolution - 800x600 is pretty painful when I'm used to 1920*1200.
- Keyboard as Frog Pad, One Handed Keyboard. Looks like it would work find lying by your side or perhaps on your stomach. The main drawback here is lack of complicated key input such as shift+ctrl+home for super text editing goodness. That worries me as I do quite like my keyboard-fu.
- Mouse as Some kind of Trackball. Requires no arm movement, or mouse pad area. First ever "mouse" I used was a trackball and they're more than adequate as long as I don't want to play Quake12 at a competition level.
- PC as Simple Shuttle or other compact PC. I do mostly small 2D games for fun, as long as it can render some quads to the screen I'm golden.
Arm Mounted style
- Any regular LCD screen, simply mounted on some sort of wall mounted arm. The benefits of this full large screen resolution, but the down side is excess light possible keeping my sig-other awake. The arm position for an in-bed viewing angle would be very steep so the arm would need to have quite firm points to stop it falling flat onto my face.
- With the screen on an arm it would probably be very possible to mount some kind of Split freestyle keyboard at a position where my hands could still reach it lying down.
- Mouse and PC would be the same in either case I think.
Since I'm pretty sure I couldn't bear the 800x600 screen res of the glasses it seems that the screen mounted option is really the only choice. Finding an arm that would hold a large screen firmly both horizontally during use, and vertically during the day might however be a challenge as my 5 minute google search didn't turn up anything too promising.
I've also considered other alternatives such as iPad/tablet PC coding and the input method just isn't good enough. I need a normal keyboard/mouse to code properly, taping an onscreen keyboard is fine for twitter posts but not for re-factoring a few thousand lines of code.
Any other great suggestions out there I'm too sleep deprived to have thought of?
