Ask HN: Coding outdoors | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Coding outdoors

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?

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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

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!

That's a nice setup! Really like the rocks, even if they are just holding down the table cloth.

Yeah, its very precious too :-) hand picked from west coast of India.

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.

Rich Hickey, is that you?

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.

This seems extremely interesting but I can not find any pixel qi android or possibly linux compatible product for sale anywhere.

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...

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!

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.

Ha, I'm also in the UK. That was one of the solutions I came up with - in fact I built the first one out of cardboard. I just would feel like a bit of a tit sat on the beach with a cardboard laptop hood but I guess if I spent a bit more time making something sleek looking...

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.

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.

Maybe a tablet/laptop with a Pixel Qi-screen?

"The advantage of Pixel Qi displays over conventional LCDs is mainly that they can be set to operate under transflective mode and reflective mode, improving eye-comfort, power usage, and visibility under bright ambient light." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi

http://www.pixelqi.com/devices

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.

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!

What's your total monthly expenditure including shelter, food, drink, entertainment, supplies, travel, insurance, upkeep, etc.?

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).

Can you spare a moment to educate me about the panels (what, how different, which machines)? (I've got a 2011 15in MBP - last of the models one could maintain oneself, so am keeping it alive as long as poss)

You should be fine, MBPs have had IPS panels for a long time IIRC. It's mainly about viewing angles, colour reproduction, and brightness.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tn+vs+ips

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.

If my garden was big enough, I'd get a shed. Or a gazebo, but I'd still call it a shed.

http://www.shedworking.co.uk/2010/07/neil-gaiman-shedworker....

I tried this for a short while until a local cat pissed on my netplug! I actually found it quite hard to get comfortable. That's the biggest barrier to being portable in my eyes.

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?

I guess that's how the corporates argue. Maybe if it was crowdsourced...

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.

Chrubuntu may be the solution you're looking for.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I enjoy working outside on a covered porch (for shade). I have neck and wrist issues though, so the standard laptop-in-lap setup doesn't work for me so I build a laptop stand: http://benjiyork.com/pictures/outdoor-office.jpg

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.

You might be able to flip this a little. I can spend lots of time sitting in front of the screen and achieving pretty much nothing. Whereas sometimes a good walk and logical run through of the problem is all that's needed, in fact it's pretty vital for positive head space.

Is the screen in google glass big enough or bright enough to work on? Ideally, it would be nice not to have to lug around the laptop and burn your thighs. Just have a bluetooth keyboard/mouse connected to a head mounted screen system.

Doesn't that negate the upsides of being outside?

Isn't it for the air and the nice environment to look at around you? What other upsides are you talking about that are negated by the suggestion?

I am not advocating something that covers your entire field of view. But a smaller screen that you can focus on in your field of vision while still being able to see around you.

I would think a tablet along with a wireless keyboard would be the best option if you are looking for something small. A tablet with a data-connection even better. The biggest problem would be a good enough screen to use in the sunlight.

Display is definitely challenging since better, bigger displays do improve productivity.

It would really depend on what sort of programming one's trying to do. Perhaps sitting in a serene and quiet outdoor environment would help you formulate an algorithm and maybe quickly prototype it or something along these lines which has more to do with creativity than with writing complex code.

But yes, there's a reason why the new Apple campus will have almost all offices which will have outdoor view :)

I recall the Microsoft campus was designed on similar lines - small rooms with an outside view. I certainly like being able to open the window, have a nice view, and smell sweet fresh air.

I did buy this phone http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_z_ultra-5540.php (6.4" display)

And I paired it with an apple bluetooth keyboard. But the display is too weak for sunny days. Even in the shaded parts of the park, it's almost impossible to work. Maybe some phones/phablets/tablets are better suited for this than others?

I have this "travel" setup of a:

- Omni 10 HP tablet (mid-class) - Bluetooth KBD - Pen

You can really do some work in various of places. I personally write a lot, thus it helps. Not to mention it can open all websites without a problem and if needed, supports desktop apps.

Drawback is the low visibility under direct sunlight.

You need to find a screen what works in a sunny environment. Even if you sit in a shade the ambient lighting is too much for most laptops. Glossy screens are horrible, matte ones slightly more readable but not nearly enough for my eyes.

When I code outside it's on my Air, on my local copy of some project/repo. Get a good bag so you can take your kit anywhere. I love my Freitag for this purpose.

If your connection isn't extremely stable, Mosh is a very good solution: http://mosh.mit.edu/

From my personal experience, I just want to suggest you to avoid swimming pools areas and kids with water guns. Anyway, no working outdoors for me anymore.

If someone made a display, or some sort of filter for my macbook so I could see the screen properly outside, I'd be out there all the time!

The Pi / kindle solution looks fun, but I agree - I wish there was a simple external screen solution perhaps

Try it and see - experiment with different setups, equipment, locales and work out what suits you best

I've had a lot of success with my MBP and a cellular modem.

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