Every year I take a photo of my desk and write about what changed. This is the seventh one. The desk is older than some of my friendships. It has survived two moves, one minor flood, and whatever I did to the left corner in 2022 that left a half-moon scorch mark nobody has been able to explain.
Here's what changed this year.
NEW ADDITIONS
OLED BUDGET TRACKER
A Raspberry Pi Pico with a 128×32 OLED that pulls my weekly transactions from a local script and shows the burn rate. Built on a Sunday. Has been on ever since. Cannot overstate how much this has quieted my brain.
★ KEEPCORNE I ACTUALLY FINISHED
Started in 2023. Abandoned in 2024. Completed in January. Split, ortholinear, forty-two keys, lubed Gateron Browns. Typing speed is back to 75% of my old keyboard. Will report again in six months.
★ KEEPTERRIBLE LAMP
A desk lamp with a joystick for color temperature. Sounds great. It flickers imperceptibly at dusk and nowhere else. Took me three weeks to notice. Now I know and I cannot unknow.
✕ RETURNA SMALL CERAMIC CAT
Gift. She lives next to the monitor. She has no function. I am, at 31, a person who has a small ceramic cat on his desk, and I am calm about it.
★ KEEPWHAT STAYED
The thinkpad is the same thinkpad. The monitor is the same monitor I wrote last year's desk post on. The speakers are the ones I inherited from my college roommate a decade ago and cannot bring myself to replace because they sound fine.
A consistent theme across these annual posts is that very little changes. Which is, I think, the point of having a desk in the first place. A desk is supposed to be the part of your life that doesn't change.
A workspace is good when you stop noticing it. This one is mostly good.
THE LAMP STORY
I need to tell you about the lamp. I wrote last week that it flickered at dusk. What I didn't say was that for three weeks I thought I was getting migraines. I thought I was dehydrated. I bought a humidifier. I drank more water. I went to bed earlier. Nothing helped.
Then one evening I glanced at the lamp at exactly the right moment and saw it — a flicker so fast it wasn't even a flicker, just a quality of shimmer. I stared at it for five minutes. My headache started. I turned off the lamp. My headache went away. I turned it back on. My headache came back.
There's probably a broader lesson here about environment and attention, but the lesson I actually took is: return the lamp.
NEXT YEAR
I'm going to try to build a little wooden tray for the keyboard and the cat and the OLED so they all sit at the same height. I will probably not finish it. If I don't, I'll tell you about it.
Until then — thanks for reading. The desk sends regards.