How I Hung A Computer Monitor Over My Bed
648 words.
I’m having a very bad back day today, worse than yesterday. When it gets to this point, I have to lie down until it gets better.
This is typically brought on by spending too much time sitting and typing at a computer, and not enough time stretching or resting. Something pops somewhere in the vicinity of a neck or shoulder muscle and it’s a lot of bad days in a row for me.
Anyway, I’m flat on my back in bed trying to stay quiet and still. It’s maddening.
It gives me a chance to talk about the crazy system I’ve built in order to still kind of use a computer while I’m lying flat on my back in bed. Maybe somebody somewhere might find this useful.
One day many years ago I had an idea that if I could suspend a monitor over my bed, I could still use a computer while lying down and resting my back.
I’ve tried a few iterations. First I used PVC pipes, which worked, but was a bit flimsy. The latest is a clothes rack of the kind that you might see in a store, or that you might put by a door, to hang a whole series of coats on it. It’s just wide enough that it fits around a queen-sized bed. Barely.
Imagine a horizontal metal bar over the bed, held up by posts on either side. On that bar I hung a lightweight PC monitor, using a C-Clamp VESA Mount. I can plug my MacBook into that and viola, I can see a computer screen hanging over my head while I’m lying here flat on my back. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.
The Macbook is sitting on a little table next to the bed, and I use a USB-C to HDMI cable to connect to the monitor. I also use this monitor for the PS5 which also sits next to the bed.
If it hasn’t been previously established, I’m very weird and do weird things like this sometimes. I recognize and own that it is weird and you would never find this in the house of a normal person with normal human sensibilities.
In order to operate the computer I bought a Bluetooth trackball mouse. It’s one of those mice that doesn’t move around, but you use your thumb to move a trackball instead. The one I got is pretty janky but it works, and it works with a MacBook or Windows laptop.
Usually I don’t do much typing, so the onscreen accessibility keyboard is good enough, but just now I dusted off my old Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which I previously used with an iPad, and connected it to the Macbook so I could write a blog post. This isn’t great for my back and neck either, but it’s vastly superior to sitting in a chair when my back is like this.
I can’t see the screen that well because it’s slightly too far away to use my computer glasses, so I don’t often do a lot of reading on this bed-monitor. Usually it’s just for watching videos or playing the PS5, but I can use it for writing sometimes too.
You might be wishing to see some pictures to illustrate this, but unfortunately my back hurts too much for such activities and also my room is never camera-ready.
Anyway it’s a handy setup for times when I need to rest my back like this. Which is fairly often, to be honest. I don’t know why beds don’t come with monitor attachments as a standard feature in this day and age.
P.S. Suprising nobody, AI did not create an accurate picture, so I went through the horrendous ordeal of taking a phone picture from the bed perspective and transferring it all the way to the blog.
Archived Comments
Roger Edwards 2024-08-22T09:17:21Z Necessity is the mother of invention.
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