The Desk Is The Docking Station

After years of renting and improvising my setup around whatever the room would let me get away with, I finally got a place of my own. The home office is the first room I've ever set up properly, knowing it's going to stay that way for a while.

The whole desk is a docking station. Whatever sits at the desk (workstation, laptop, anything with three video outs and two USB-A ports) gets the full peripheral stack instantly. Three cables to the PC: HDMI/DP to each monitor, plus ethernet. Two USB cables to two hubs. That's it.

Anything that lives on this desk is wired to one of two hubs. Anything that connects elsewhere isn't on the desk.

The Surface

• Jarvis full-spec sit/stand desk with the bamboo top. Programmable height presets. Realistically I only put it up when I need to adjust cabling and don't want to crawl around.

The Thing Being Docked

Currently a Bitfenix tower with:

• CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K
• RAM: 32GB DDR4
• Motherboard: ASUS Prime H310M-K
• GPU: Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti
• Storage: 4TB Samsung 870 EVO
• OS: Windows 11 Pro

I'm not a frequent gamer, so the platform is older than most people's gaming rigs. The recent changes are just the 5070 Ti and the SSD. Everything else has been chugging along happily. The whole point of the docking-station setup is that I could replace this with a laptop tomorrow and nothing about the desk would change.

The Screens

• Centre: LG C5 42" OLED. Yes a TV, no it's not too big at this distance, yes the burn-in fear is real but pixel-shift + screen-saver discipline has been fine so far.
• Flanks: 2x AOC 24" 1080p in portrait orientation. Chat/logs/docs/email live here permanently. The OLED is for focus, the AOCs are for context.

The EDID Trick

Between the desktop and the OLED there's a HDFury Vrroom. It's an HDMI 2.1 matrix with EDID emulation, which sounds dull until you realise what it lets you do.

Normally when you turn an HDMI display off, the source device (the PC) sees the EDID disappear and either drops the display entirely or downgrades the desktop resolution. Either way, anything running on that "virtual" display has a bad time.

The Vrroom impersonates the OLED's EDID 24/7. From the desktop's perspective, there's always a 4K HDR display attached, regardless of whether the OLED is physically powered. Which means I can turn the OLED off, walk away from the desk, and pick the desktop session back up anywhere in the house via Steam Link - SteamDeck plugged into the living room TV, Android Steam Link on the bedroom projector, laptop in the kitchen, whatever. The PC keeps streaming a 4K HDR signal as if the OLED were on, because as far as it's concerned it still is.

The same trick works the other way for AV - it'll duplicate or matrix outputs across multiple displays without ever fighting over EDID handshakes.

The Inputs

• Vortex POK3R 60% ANSI (non-RGB), blank keycaps, white switches. The blank caps are mostly because they look clean.
• Ploopy Thumb Trackball. Open-source 3D-printed hardware, no drivers, hand never leaves the home row. I've already repaired it myself a couple of times, which is exactly the kind of thing you can't do with a sealed Logitech.
• Cheap mechanical numpad with blank caps. Pairs with the POK3R for any time spreadsheet maths suddenly matters.
• Kensington VeriMark fingerprint reader. Windows Hello on a desktop. Tap to log in, tap to elevate. Worth the £30.

The Audio

• Audeze Maxwell wireless. Planar magnetic over-ears, multi-platform dongles. They live on a stand on the desk and the dongle is in the left hub so they pair automatically wherever I plug in.

The Hub Layout (The Actual Interesting Bit)

Two TP-Link UH720 seven-port USB hubs, one on each back corner of the desk. The split is deliberate:

• Left hub: essentials. Keyboard, trackball, numpad, headset dongle, fingerprint reader, webcam. Everything I need to do anything.
• Right hub: optional. Racing wheel, Rock Band guitar USB-to-6mm jack adapter (so I can plug it into the audio interface for inputting music to PC), HDD dock, anything else that comes and goes.

Plug a laptop in with two USB cables and you've got everything. Unplug the right one and you've still got everything that matters.

Miscellaneous

• Nexigo ringlight webcam. Cheap, the ringlight is the actual selling point, the camera is fine.
• Belkin MagSafe wireless phone charger. Phone goes flat against it, picks itself up when I leave the desk.
• Google Nest Mini for setting timers and the occasional pomodoro.
• Razer Goliathus Chroma mousepad. On a stupidly cheap offer on Overclockers when I was ordering something else, so it came home with me. The RGB has never been plugged in. The black surface is what I wanted.
• Adhesive under-desk drawer for the notepad and pens. £8 on Amazon, surprisingly transformative.

What I Like About It

Everything I use is reachable, everything I don't is invisible. The desk is permanently wired, so swapping the actual computer behind it is a five-second job. The OLED-plus-portrait-flanks layout means I rarely move my head, I just glance.

There's something extremely satisfying about a workstation where the "computer" is essentially a temporary tenant.

The Rack

You'll see a rack lurking in the corner of some of these photos. That's Project Iluvatar, the Kubernetes homelab. Separate post on that.

How It Started

What's the destination without the journey. A few snapshots of how we got here:

2008. Dell Optiplex + CRT, Windows XP Black Edition, mining Bitcoin. Photo taken on a PSP.	2010. Tiny TFT, Vista or 7, amp as a speaker, Wii hooked to a projector running WiiMC for media streaming. Notice the iPod dock - I was running andysipod.tk at the time.
2010 again. First "real" LCD, first "real" computer. AMD junker with RGB and two non-gaming GPUs I'd later swap out for a GTX 470.	2016. First real incarnation of the current setup. Triple monitors, server rack, desktop sat on top.

What's Next

A few things I want to bring back into the room:

• A 3D printer. I've wanted one for ages and finally have somewhere to put it where the noise and the smell won't bother anyone.
• A soldering station. I had one years ago, it lived in a box through a couple of moves, and now it gets to come back out.
• The books out. The room currently doubles as a library and it's lovely, but the bookshelves are eating space that should be workshop. They'll move somewhere else in the house and free up a corner here.

This is the first home office I've ever had room to actually plan. It's not finished, and that's the fun part.