I’ve always had mixed feelings about long-haul flights. On the one hand they usually mean travel and adventure; on the other, long hours sitting in a tin can are never fun.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that both my recent flights with Singapore Airlines had Wi‑Fi! Streaming video was off the cards, but could you write code?

What’s the bare minimum?

It’s amazing what you take for granted. When I first asked myself this question, I thought all I needed was enough internet to Google the odd problem and read some Stack Overflow answers.

I’ve always wondered if I could. You know those videos from Bali showing digital nomads working on a laptop in a cafe? I’ve never seen myself being able to work effectively that way.

For me, the blocker was always a second screen.

Screen real estate

I first got a dual-screen setup somewhere between 2000 and 2002.

Two 17" CRTs. They were massive and took up nearly the whole desk. Digital photography was still in its infancy, so this photo looks like it was taken on a potato, but it’s the only one I have!

Resurrecting this blog after… well, a while.

A quick history lesson

A WordPress blog on this sub-domain started back in October 2007 for very different reasons. It was trawled by The Wayback Machine showing the first post in December 2007.

I might add those articles back in later, but for now I wanted to talk tech.

I loved that WordPress blog. Even back then, WordPress was seriously impressive. I used it to build several websites for clients. Most of them were blown away by the fact that they could modify the content themselves. Remember: this was 2006–2008, and a customer managing their own content was very new.