I love the reclining desk that I built a few years ago. It has made an enormous difference in relieving back pain and tension in my neck and shoulders that comes from spending lots of hours at a computer.

But it has some design flaws. It's pretty big, and kind of cumbersome to use, and it took just a little too much time to get in and out of. What I really wanted was the comfort of a reclining desk with the convenience and compactness of a conventional desk.

In this post, I detail the design and build process that led to my latest DIY reclining desk (V3). I had a few simple design goals:

1. Easy to use (e.g. getting in and out quickly, minimal adjustments needed to use, etc.)
2. Compact size
3. Fewer materials (and thus less expensive)

After six rounds of design iterations, I came up with this design, taking inspiration from a dentist chair where the reclining chair is open to the right and all the tools are mounted on the left and can swivel into position over the chair:

The frame is built out of 3/4" black steel piping, 6 pipe tees, 6 pipe flanges, and a single piece of 2x6 wood. The frame supports a dual arm monitor mount that I repurposed into holding a monitor and custom made keyboard tray that each swing into position after sitting in the reclining chair. The desk legs are low enough to go underneath the reclining chair but provide plenty of support for the frame. The use of black piping not only reduces the amount of hardware but also adds weight to the frame, which helps keep everything stable when swinging the monitor and keyboard tray back and forth. 

This design largely achieved my goals. Having both the monitor and keyboard mounted to the left of the chair makes it very easy and fast to get into the chair and likewise very simple to move the monitor and keyboard into position for use. The form factor is quite compact, and it can work with a number of different types of reclining chairs (though I still really like the simple and affordable zero gravity chair). Finally, the bill of materials is quite modest. Compared to my previous version (V2), this design achieves a 760% reduction in the amount of 2x6 wood used (from 220" to 29") and a 176% reduction in the amount of steel piping used (from 185" to 105").

Perhaps the best aspect of this desk is just how easy it is to build. I started by first assembling the pipe frame and then mounting the piece of wood  to the frame. Start by first making the "H" shaped frame shown in the photos, then mount the piece of wood using 8 wood screws and two flanges, and finally add the two pipe leg extensions to the frame. 

After assembling the frame, I drilled a large hole in the top of the wood to mount the dual arm monitor mount. I also attached a powerstrip and mac mini mount to the left side of the wood.  

I cut the keyboard tray out of some thin wood from Home Depot. I forgot which type, but it's a balance between thin enough to be light but stiff enough to support the keyboard without bending. The dual arm monitor mount came with a tray for holding a laptop, so I repurposed it for mounting the keyboard tray. After attaching it, I had to add a zip tie to keep the whole thing from tipping down too far. There was just too much weight on the monitor mount, so the zip tie held it all at the right angle. Finally, to keep the keyboard itself in place, I used a few more zip ties and cut holes in the tray so that it wouldn't slide around when I swiveled the arm around. With the keyboard tray attached, I could swivel the monitor and keyboard independently.

The only remaining component I didn't describe yet is the chair. I used the same, cheap reclining chair that I used in my previous (V2) desk. It just slides right in over top of the desk frame legs. The monitor and keyboard can swivel out of the way to get in and out of the desk.

Overall I'm much happier with this design over the previous one. I no longer have to use clamps to hold the keyboard tray in place, and it is far easier to get in and out of. It's also a much more flexible design that could be used with a wide variety of recliners.  

I saw this post by Ed Hawkins of a simple, compelling, and depressing visualization that shows the rapidly increasing global temperatures over the past century. Each vertical stripe in the "barcode" plots represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to the present.

I wanted to use these as a desktop background, so I replicated the figures in R. I posted the code to my charts repository on Github.

​Here are some of the versions I made:

​Data Sources:

NASA (2017) "Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)".
retrieved on May 26, 2018 from
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate
at a Glance: National Time Series, published May 2018,
retrieved on May 26, 2018 from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/

If you were a professional guitarist, wouldn't you play on a premium guitar?
If you were a chef, wouldn't you invest in a premium chef knife?

Well, as someone who types literally millions of keystrokes a year for my profession, I decided to invest in a premium keyboard by combining Karabiner-Elements with a customized WASD Keyboard. 

WASD Keyboards creates customized mechanical keyboards. I decided to go with a V2 87 key layout board with Cherry Brown switches, but with virtually limitless options for further customization, I started exploring how else I could extend the functionality of my keyboard.

Enter Karabiner-Elements.

Karabiner-Elements (formerly just "Karabiner", and before that "KeyRemap4MacBook") is a keyboard customization software for macOS that can change any key or combination of keys on the keyboard to do just about anything. I use Karabiner-Elements for all sorts of keyboard modifications, including:

• Use J / I / K / L as arrow keys for navigating the cursor and selecting text.
• Create more convenient and comfortable shortcuts for common commands, like cut, copy, paste, delete, backspace, undo, redo, find, and escape.
• Launch applications like Google Chrome or Terminal with a single hotkey.
• Open Google Chrome to a webpage (e.g. gmail) with a single hotkey.
• Type my usual email send off ("Cheers, John") with a single hotkey.

After I settled on a particular configuration, I customized my WASD keyboard design to align with the expanded functionality provided by Karabiner-Elements. The result is a beautiful and efficient typing experience on a one-of-a-kind keyboard. 

Of course I also regularly use my Macbook laptop, which has a standard Apple keyboard. No worries - I have the same Karabiner-Elements configuration on my Macbook keyboard (minus a few specific keys that only exist on the WASD keyboard). 

You can find my Karabiner-Elements settings as well as the Adobe Illustrator files to create my WASD keyboard on my github page:

In my continuous search for the ultimate computer workstation, I decided to give a reclining desk a try. While I love my treadmill standing desk, I have found that too much standing can be just as rough as too much sitting. Even with frequent breaks, my legs got tired and my low back would hurt after a day's work. Inspired by this way-too-expensive reclining desk by Altwork, I sought out to design and build my own version for a fraction of the cost. I built two versions, starting with a prototype model (V1) and later an improved model (V2) with more structure and better aesthetics. Here's how I did it.

As a Ph.D. student, I spend a tremendous amount of time at my desk, and over the next year I will be living at it as I write my dissertation. This realization sent me on a quest to find an affordable ergonomic battle station for doing my work. The trend of using standing desks over sitting desks has been growing for a while now. After a lot of reading, it looks like a pretty strong consensus that sitting all day is pretty bad for your health over a lifetime. Standing is better, but the real problem is just immobility. Staying mobile is the best thing you can do, so rather than build a standing desk, I built a treadmill desk so I can walk while I work. Inspiration for the idea came from the Baltimore Sun article on the awesomeness of my friends Dorry and Somer, where I first heard of the treadmill desk idea.