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Ask HN: Coding outdoors

45 points| innsmouth_rain | 11 years ago | reply

Hi

Being outdoors in the sun makes you high. It gives you energy and vitamin D, relieves headaches and is just generally great (within limits, of course - no skin cancer, please). Most of us here use the computer to make a living and some of us work from home or have flexible work place and hours - could we be doing this outside and improve our health and productivity?

I'm not posting to argue whether it's actually better or not to code outdoors, I only want to ask: How can this be achieved technically?

Personally I only need to be able to ssh to my server and have at least 20 lines of vim to work with.

I saw this last year: http://www.raspberrypi.org/kindleberry-pi-the-second/

This set-up is very cool but kind of unwieldy and maybe unnecessarily complex?

How can this be done in an easier way?

54 comments

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[+] easyname|11 years ago|reply
Currently I live at rented room on roof top of a residential building. Temperature of my city(Bangalore) is around 22 degree centigrade(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangalore#Climate), mostly cloudy. I have setup a table with four chair outside on the roof. I find it pleasant to work outside mostly during morning and evening. In day time if its cloudy and little wind, I feel better working outside.

I use macbook and sublime to do my work, light reflection sometimes blurs the text, but it is mostly tricky, I try different position and get it working. It's little difficult to work outside during sunny days.

At times I love the reflection of sky on my screen http://imgur.com/a/ZhOv2

[+] QuadDamaged|11 years ago|reply
I work in an open space in London. Even if I could setup hypothetically get access to a rooftop like you, I'd be pretty much drenching my laptop and catching a cold.

TL;DR: Jealous!

[+] bicx|11 years ago|reply
That's a nice setup! Really like the rocks, even if they are just holding down the table cloth.
[+] arh68|11 years ago|reply
I do like printing code out and editing it from the hammock. You can't do it all day, and it doesn't seem very fast, but it sure is nice to plan all the edits on paper (4 color pens = colordiff!) and then type it up, test it, commit it. My hammock is about 30 paces from my laser printer, so if I wanted to go much further than that I'd need a portable printer.
[+] presty|11 years ago|reply
Rich Hickey, is that you?
[+] bildung|11 years ago|reply
I sometimes work in the garden. On cloudy days my Thinkpad display works just fine. If it's really sunny I use a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet pc I bought used on ebay, along with an external keyboard. The Stylistic tablets have (at least used to have) models with transflective displays (the ones with frontlights instead of backlights). Those are awesome in daylight, but look dull indoors. The resolution normally is not that great, but for ssh it should be just fine. Still kind of unwieldy, though :/

Hah, I just remembered that my alternative would have been a netbook modded with a Pixel Qi display from Maker Shed. Maker Shed does not seem to have them anymore, but perhaps you can find one of the prebuilt devices with pixel qi displays: http://www.pixelqi.com/devices

edit: I cannot recommend working in nature enough! I'm usually both super productive and in great mood while working outdoors.

[+] innsmouth_rain|11 years ago|reply
This seems extremely interesting but I can not find any pixel qi android or possibly linux compatible product for sale anywhere.
[+] archagon|11 years ago|reply
Phone tethering makes it really easy; I'm having a lot of fun spending my afternoons coding in the park. Otherwise, if you're away from any connectivity and you're working on something local, I highly recommend the Stack Exchange data dump[1] along with Samuel Lai's excellent Stackdump[2]. I worked without internet for 2 weeks using this setup (+ offline documentation) with great success. (Warning: Stackdump copies the SE XML data into a local database, which currently takes 7 hours on my Haswell i7 and requires extra disk space. Prepare ahead of time!)

[1]: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[2]: http://stackapps.com/questions/3610/stackdump-an-offline-bro...

[+] colinramsay|11 years ago|reply
I've tried this a couple of times. IMO screen technology in sunlight is the limiting factor - no-one's made a laptop screen good enough to make this work without you straining your eyes. Shame, because I write this from my office and I can see that it's a gloriously sunny day outside!
[+] bildung|11 years ago|reply
There actually are quite a few devices with transflective displays out there, and for quite a few years, too (at least ten IIRC). Most of them are in tablet format, tough, marketed for the medical and construction industries. Panasonic has the Toughbook line of notebooks and used to sell them as outdoor capable. I don't know whether these use transflective/reflective panels or just really powerful backlights, though.
[+] urlwolf|11 years ago|reply
I've worked from the beach for months. Granted, this was in the UK, and there wasn't much sun to worry about :)

But the best solution I could come up with was a screen cover. It attached itself to the monitor, and created a foldable 'camera obscura' for the screen. Works great to avoid reflections, and to minimize brightness needed.

[+] danschuller|11 years ago|reply
If you're working on your own projects or freelance, all you need is a bit of shade. Depending where you are then using mosquito coils, once the sun goes down, is a good idea.

I was in Ubud, Bali earlier last for a few months and worked in my garden under an awning. ( photo here: http://goo.gl/p1HdNG ). The garden had a power socket. Nicest working location I've had! On the downside wifi could be a bit spotty and there were occasional power outages.

[+] innsmouth_rain|11 years ago|reply
The most viable seem to be getting a tablet with a pixel qi display. This way the battery life will be good, it's in a good package and you won't need to rely on your own modding skills.

However, the first Adam tablet is out of production. It also got obliterating reviews. The only two devices I find is the Adam II which is only available for shipping in India and the SOL 7" android-g.

Adam II: http://www.amazon.in/Notion-Ink-Adam-Tablet-White/dp/B00HYVR... Android-g: http://www.solcomputer.com/sunlight-readable-tablet/7-androi...

The Adam II got good reviews by the Indian users but I haven't seen any western review of it.

I would so back a kickstarter campaign for something like this.

[+] abrkn|11 years ago|reply
At least in Thailand, most beach bars have both wifi and power outlets these days. Even on small islands, they have surprisingly good satellite Internet.

Even on a Macbook Air, the screen is bright enough for me to code during the day (in the shade). As a bonus, you have an unlimited supply of alpha testers for whatever you create!

[+] curiousHacker|11 years ago|reply
What's your total monthly expenditure including shelter, food, drink, entertainment, supplies, travel, insurance, upkeep, etc.?
[+] simi_|11 years ago|reply
Airs still have TN panels, just get the cheapest 13" Pro and enter a different world of display quality (source: I own both of them).
[+] alltakendamned|11 years ago|reply
I am currently travelling around Asia and often work outdoors. I think it's already quite easy to do, though I am not sure whether you mean working 'outside' or in 'the outdoors'. Mark that up to English being far from my native language.

Requirements for me: - shade: the sun is too harsh to be exposed to it for any considerable period of time and causes plenty of screen glare. - decent hardware: I'm using a standard laptop. XPS 13 in my case. Too small kills productivity but YMMV. - internet connection: easily found in hotels and restaurants. data card if further away or with bad signals. local if no connection is available. - reasonably quiet: I don't like headphones, but if the environment is too noisy it makes longer stretches hard/impossible.

[+] rudenoise|11 years ago|reply
The kindleberry pi has all the elements I think are essential:

- low power - out door readable - light weight

The problem is that it isn't in one, handy package.

Laptops are limited by displays, it sounds like transflective-LCD is ideal. Panasonic Toughbooks have them, so could be a good bet.

I'd like to build an enclosure for a Pi and a PixelQi setup (they made the screens for OLPC). https://www.adafruit.com/products/1303

I assume there just isn't a market large enough to force these into existence?

[+] innsmouth_rain|11 years ago|reply
I guess that's how the corporates argue. Maybe if it was crowdsourced...
[+] jongold|11 years ago|reply
A couple of years back I bought a MacBook Pro with the antiglare display for this very reason. It was great to be able to work in the garden, in theory, but then you realise MBPs have/had awful battery life, especially in the sun, and when they get hot they're literally painful to work on. Oops.

Would love a simple, cheap, tiny Linux netbook with high quality keyboard & trackpad. Resigned myself to the fact that I'll always need a Mac for design (Sketch etc), but I oculd happily hack on code in Arch.

[+] jnbiche|11 years ago|reply
>Would love a simple, cheap, tiny Linux netbook with high quality keyboard & trackpad.

I've had good success with the Acer Aspire One netbooks and Linux. And other than the power jack (which I've had to replace), I've been very happy with the quality.

And if you run a distro like Crunchbang, it boots up very rapidly. Even Linux Mint with Mate or Cinnamon runs well on it.

[+] scarlson|11 years ago|reply
Chrubuntu may be the solution you're looking for.
[+] Illotus|11 years ago|reply
Laptop with reasonably bright screen and good battery life gets you pretty far. Currenly I'm sitting in the shade outside my workplace with Lenovo X230. Its 26 degrees celsius in the shade, which is cooler than the 30 inside my office (3rd floor, no air conditioning, even ventilation is shut off for repairs).

The screen is an issue though, I'd much rather have the Lenovo W530 I had in my previous job. It was really nice when working without external displays and had very nice battery life to boot.

[+] tomwalker|11 years ago|reply
Although I don't work outside, I try and go for a walk outside most days at lunch time. It gets the legs moving and the detachment helps me think.
[+] keenerd|11 years ago|reply
Most people here have mentioned how a reflective or transflective display helps a lot. These used to be much more plentiful, they were standard on PDAs for example. Kind of rare and expensive now.

One thing that no one has touched on. It is much easier to work if you use an inverted color scheme for your terminals. Black text on a white background works better when front-lighting LCD technology.

[+] SanderMak|11 years ago|reply
I'm sitting in my garden doing work on a MBP right now. Only 'downside' is I have to sit in the shade. Glare/flare makes it unworkable otherwise. Otoh, sitting in the sun for prolonged periods doesn't sound too good either. I'm perfectly happy with strolling around in the sun while mulling over some problems, then returning back to my laptop.
[+] kromodor|11 years ago|reply
This started into a realm I had some knowledge and ended into a realm with zero knowledge from my part.

I can't help with cracking the reader. Keep in mind, while it has a benefit of not reflecting sun light with a glare, it still is not 100% immune to it.

You can always try making some shade where you work. Bring some headphones and music, as some environments can be distracting and noisy.

[+] aashishkoirala|11 years ago|reply
I find it very hard to work with just a laptop. At minimum I need it connected to a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse - which means I obviously need a desk at minimum as well.

As long as that setup can be carried outdoors feasibly, I would not mind working outdoors if that was an option - weather permitting of course.