Jared's Clean Workstation: One Year Later

We featured Jared's setup about a year ago here at Unplggd, and we liked how he organized the lighting of his desk. Instead of using LED strips, he actually used some spots to light up his frosted glass desk. It gave off a nice diffuse glow, which is something we yearn for when we spend hours typing away at our workstations.

Jared's biggest change since last year (pictured above) is the fact that he added an Apple iMac to his setup. He also reconstructed his desk. The main reason was that he's going back to school, something that many of us are doing or have considered doing, thanks to the current economic times.

Between learning Japanese and programming classes, he needed a nice, clean workspace in order to GTD (not that his previous setup was cluttered!). His desk is composed of two birch IKEA Vika Artur trestles and a frosted glass Vika Glasholm table top. The unusual lighting is still composed of his four IKEA Lagra spots. We love the warm glow of these lights, compared to the somewhat harsher light that stems from LED light strips. He uses an IKEA Markus swivel chair.

Resources

Furniture
- IKEA Markus swivel chair
- 4 × IKEA Lagra spotlights
- IKEA Vika Glasholm frosted glass table top
- IKEA Vika Artur trestles

Hardware
- 27-inch Apple iMac Core i7 with 12 GB of RAM
- Japanese Apple Wireless Keyboard
- Apple Magic Trackpad
- Logitech Performance Mouse MX
- Large Wacom Intuos
- Pantone huey Pro
- TwelveSouth BackPack
- 2TB Western Digital MyBook Studio
- 500GB Western Digital My Passport Studio
- Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones
- Sennheiser 400 Stereo Bluetooth headset

Art
- Wallpaper of his desktop
- 4×6 photo on desk

MORE
Jared's Überclean and Mostly Cordless Setup
Ken's Minimal Mobile Setup
Carolina's Stylish Corner Workstation

(Images: Flickr member Jared Schmidt licensed for use under Creative Commons)

Comments (6)

Really nice desk. at $20 a go for the ikea stands, this is definitely something I will be looking at doing

I love that he got a Japanese Apple keyboard. That should definitely prove useful if he's trying to learn the language, having the alphabet at your fingertips! (Of course, I'm sure there's a bajillion more characters than the English alphabet, but still... kudos for the dedication!)

GTD? Acronym? Abbreviation? WTH? Please explain.

GTD - 'get things done'. Took me a moment to figure it out too.

BTW, what brand of speakers are those? And what is his iPad on?

This is slightly freaky. I have the exact same desk with underneath lighting, sans the computer setup (laptop and external keyboard/mouse).

@ chrispichado
Just a heads up if you intend to learn Japanese: skip the native keyboard in the above setup. Very few native speakers use kana-mode for input. Latin character input for Japanese is quicker and far more flexible. You gain the placement of long vowel for katakana and a few odd bits, but you'll remember the placement of those within your first minutes of typing. My last laptop had Japanese keyboard, my current has Swedish (my native langugage) and I feel I'm far better off with my current setup (Mac by the way, can't speak for Windows setups but it should).

Genki, however (the white book with orange writing on the left side of the third picture) is good one for learners! :)

@micheleyverse:
The speakers are Logitech Z-5. They're a low-powered USB set. I'm typically wearing headphones of some kind, but these do the job well enough in most cases when not.

@blipmusic:
re: desk: Great minds think a like?

@blipmusic, @chrispichado
re: keyboard: Quite true, though it is good to at least have an understanding oh how to type on it if ever needed. I'm not sure either how Japanese input behaves on Windows. Also, I actually prefer the Japanese layout for typing even in English over the US English layout.