September 12th, 2009
I find it tiring to work for more than a few hours on my macbook in the office. The chair is comfortable, the desk is at the right height, but leaning over the machine makes me feel stiff after a while. To change this I experimented using an external keyboard and mouse while lifting the macbook to the eye level on a bunch of books. That felt much more comfortable and confirmed that a getting macbook stand was a good way to go. If you are also looking for a stand, here’s what I found in my quick market research.
At first I looked at stands with adjustable height. I couldn’t find any that were aesthetically pleasing until I came across the Ergotron laptop stands. These are definitely the most impressive stands I have ever seen for ergonomic features. Unfortunately they are rather heavy and big for our setup so not a suitable option but they are definitely worth checking out!
Next, I came across this forum thread about Macbook Pro stands which brought to my attention two more choices, Griffin Technology’s Elevator and mstand by Rain Design. Also, while browsing around I came across Just Mobile’s Xtand Pro.
mstand, Copyright © Rain Design, Inc. 2007
All three are well designed and they match the aesthetics of the macbook pro. When it comes to height adjustment Xtand Pro has two positions, a low and a high, while mstand and the Elevator have fixed height as far as I understand. While I would like to have height adjustment as an option I was charmed by the simplicity and the looks of the mstand. Its features page says it elevates the screen by about 6 inches (about 15.3cm) (which I think will be about right for me so I ordered one). Griffin’s Elevator lifts the screen by 5.5 inches, and Xstand has a center height of 1.5 inches at the lower position and 4.5 inches at the high position which lifts the rear of the laptop at 6.5 inches according to the MacWorld Just Mobile Xtand Pro review.
I hope this helps you in your search for the perfect macbook stand, best of luck!
Tags: macbook stand
Posted in Office | No Comments »
September 6th, 2009
My partner and I are about to move into our first office in a few days. Our office equipment consists of just a Macbook Air, a Macbook Pro 17″, and a rather old -but trusted- HP 1320 laser printer. For a small office of just 2 people, our initial requirements are simple; we want to have a wireless network, share the printer, and to share files. A backup solution would be nice too.
The first question that came to my mind was, “So, how do we create a small network for our Macs?” We want to get started quickly with solving problems that matter to our business rather than getting into networking adventures. I looked at what Apple has to offer as a drop-in solution.
As far as I understand the 2 solutions from Apple that meet our needs are the AirPort Extreme with an external USB hard-drive plugged in, or the Time Capsule which has a hard-drive (1TB or 2TB) built-in.
Apple Time Capsule
With either of these, we will have a wireless network (with the option to let our guests connect to a guest network), we can connect our printer to either of them and print over the network, and we can have shared folders to store business files. The Time Capsule also works as a Time Machine backup.
I thought that the AirPort Extreme with a USB drive connected can function as a Time Machine too. After a bit of searching I came across Using an Airport Extreme and USB hard drive as a small office backup system. According to this discussion using AirPort Extreme with USB drive as Time Machine may require a tweak to work and that makes it less plug-and-play. If you are interested in following this route, I would advice you to do some more research to confirm if the setup will work the way you need.
Overall, the Time Capsule solution seems good enough for creating our small office network, it ticks all the boxes and seems adequate for 2 to 4 Macs that we will be using. I toyed with the idea of using AirPort Extreme with a Raid USB drive but I think the ease of all-in-one solution of the Time Capsule fits our modest needs the best.
At some point in the near future I will look into off-site backups to complement this solution and I may write about our experiences with the Time Capsule.
Tags: Airport Extreme, Networking, Sharing Files, Small Office, Time Capsule
Posted in Networking | 1 Comment »