ZD 24.25: Only the Best Office Gear
Better gear for a better you!
In this issue: Burning Man bonding; new Champions League; summer 2024 trend summary; Fingerspitzengefühl; the best in office gear.
The Distilled Spirit
🔥 Team Bonding at Burning Man ()
Burning Man is intertwined with startup and Silicon Valley culture. Andrew McAfee has one of the more interesting analysis — he looks at is from the perspective of building companies and culture. How it blends synchronicity and intoxication to create lasting ties between campmates. The event creates high trust relationships. Maybe the “marketing team bonding trip to Burning Man” is not as fanciful as it seems.
⚽ Swiss Model Champions League (The Guardian)
UEFA had a problem to solve. It wanted to have slightly more group stage games and more knockout games in the Champions League. Their solution is so complicated they had to borrow it from chess. The four-team group has been replaced with a big table theoretically guaranteeing more “competitive” matches. Games kick off September 17 on Paramount+, will likely be great football no matter what the format.
📊 All the Summer of 2024 Trends ()
Casey Lewis pulls together all the summer of 2024 trends in one long list of links. Keep it handy if you need to relive the season or for tracking against the summer of 2025. I vote Irish Tween Rappers for song of the year.
👍 Fingerspitzengefühl (Taylor Person)
Fingerspitzengefühl is one of those wonderful German words that encapsulates a concept that does not translate directly. The word itself translates roughly to “finger tip feel.” It encapsulates that feeling of intuitive sense to operate complex machines and procedures. It represents the expertise you get after Malcom Gladwell’s proverbial 10,000 hours. Taylor Person looks into what happens in your brain as you master a complexity. Link discovered via
Best Office Gear Roundup
Summer is over. We are back in the office and back to our regularly scheduled virtual meetings. Here are some gear ideas to keep you looking and sounding sharp. Here are some gear trends that I’ve been watching of late.
🖥 Big Screens and Docking
I have used a lot of different computer monitors over the years. Curved, wide-screen monitors are about the perfect form factor for desktop use. You can vary the degree of wide-screenedness depending on need. 32:9 is overkill for most applications but insane when you do need it. The 21:9 form factor is a pretty sweet spot — wide enough without being overwhelmingly so. More pixels is more computing experience.
Personally, I’m a die hard desktop PC user. I’ll also be the first to admit that laptops are the way to go for most modern workers. You give up a lot — screen size, high-end keyboard and mouse precision. But portability is worth it. Docking stations offer the best of both worlds—portability with your primary device and a fully functional workstation with comfortable peripherals. What is new in 2024 is that you can skip the docking station and go directly to a USB-C monitor with all of these functions. Something like the Dell U4025 pulls all of this together very nicely.
If you truly want a huge yet very portable monitor, the SpaceTop AR laptop is worth investigating. Rather than operate a physical monitor it projects an a giant augmented reality screen through tethered glasses. You can have hundreds of inches of virtual screen real estate. A big limitation is that It works with web-based applications only. But that is not that huge a limitation in this day and age. Many things have effective web versions. The device is worth a look if your workflow fits it.
🎙 Sound Great
Audio is a challenge to get right, but sounding great is worth it. A newer tool that has worked well for me is the modern wireless mic system. I’ve used the original DJI version extensively. It is a great form factor. It ships with two wireless mics that work seamlessly with a transmitter. Said transmitter serves as the control plane for the system. You can plug into your laptop|phone|iPad|camera via the included adapters. From there the device appears as typical microphone option in your software. Very very little fuss and muss, but a great way to get the mic on the subject. It has been a few years since I went shopping. There is an updated version of the DJI device, and I’ve heard good things about the RODE equivalent.
📷 Look Your Best
If you are like most people, your camera is mounted above your screen. It forces a user to very unnaturally look up at the camera while they are talking to a picture below the camera. What if you moved the camera some where more natural? Putting the camera in the middle of the screen would make it much easier to look your virtual colleague in the eye. The iContact Camera Pro does exactly this. It is a pretty genius device — it combines a high quality mic and camera that drops in an arm to hit mid-screen, putting the camera right where you should be looking.
For more traditional web cams — and other peripherals — I have really been falling in love with Corsair’s Elgato gear. Their current wave of web cams is great. One caveat is they are web cams only — no mics at all. The Facecam MK.2 hits a sweet spot in price and performance. The Facecam Pro features a 4k picture that is “almost too good.” Has pretty good management software that allows you to save multiple settings.
🎮 Pro Show Control
Elgato makes more than just cameras. Their hottest device is known as the Stream Deck. The back story of the device itself is a fascinating tale of repurposing parts of failed projects. What the device, combined with the software, lets you do is program it’s keys to do various things. Because it is just a wrapper around a little LED screen it can be setup for custom feedback based on your needs. The software lets you connect it with just about anything — I use it to control the lights in my home office. I really like them for controlling presentations. It does require a little setup, but you can effectively control just about anything online with the device without too much trouble. I would not setup main computing without one these days.
Stat of the Week
US Manufacturing decline in one stark graph via Visual Capitalist:
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