Whats on your desk, Sean Hollister? – The Verge

The drawer doesn’t come with the desk, and, in fact, it’s from a rival brand: it’s the Uplift Bamboo Desk Drawer, a recent addition, and I’m not sure I’ll keep it. Maybe if I sand off the corner where I keep bumping my knee and find a way to get it to open smoothly…

Most boom arms I’ve seen on desks hold mics — but yours holds a smartphone…?

Yeah, I totally stole inspiration from Taylor Lyles’ What’s on your Desk by buying the same Tonor mic stand, and a good friend who used to work for Polygon recommended the wonderful Blue Spark XLR mic and Blue Icicle XLR-to-USB adapter that typically hangs from it. But recently, I’ve been thinking a lot more about quick videos than podcasts or voiceover, and the boom looked like a good hands-free way to film a few things. We’ll see!

I see you’ve really thought out the organization of your cords and the other tech necessities that go under your desk.

Thanks! I’ve had a rat’s nest under my desk for ages, and I’ve tried a number of cord keepers and wraps before… but this year I stumbled onto these privacy panels with built-in pockets for cables. They’re not perfect — this one relies on velcro strips that I’m pretty sure will give out over time, but it lets me hide a lot of the mess and also holds my ethernet switch and an Intel NUC where I’m running Home Assistant. The monitor arms have some built-in cable management, too, which helps, and so do the grommets on the desk, and I like having a power strip with rotating outlets (this is mine) so you can point them out of the way.

That whole power strip plugs right into a Tripp Lite uninterruptible power supply, by the way — a hand-me-down from a friend with way too much gear on his hands. It’s only got enough power to run everything for a few minutes during an outage, but that’s been long enough to save my work (or game) and shut things down.

I understand that the coaster your drink is on has a history — do tell!

I swiped it from the desk of fellow Verge co-founder Joanna Stern the week she left — ten years ago now? — with her blessing, of course. It’s just a nice silicone coaster that reminds me of when The Verge was just 16 or so people with big ideas in a single room. And the song Wonderwall, for reasons only a few of us know.

My go-to water bottle is this Contigo because it’s so easy to use one-handed without worrying about any leaks near my PC. Just press the button and sip.

Is that a desktop cleaner that you’re holding?

Yeah! Modeled after the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train, which I’ve had the pleasure to ride a couple times. It’s got a little foam broom that sweeps up tiny crumbs with a reciprocating action when you roll it along a surface. I eat more meals at my desk than I should, so it gets some use; it’s not just a fidget toy.

I bought this one at Daiso for a couple of bucks; my dad’s got a much nicer model of the world record-setting MLX01 maglev train that I also got to try when I studied abroad. Its successor is now the fastest train in the world, but it could be many more years before the first real passengers board.

I love the rocket ship pictures. Who drew them?

Mostly my daughter June! She was three, I think, and I helped. Now she’s five and drawing much fancier things all by herself.

Is there anything else about your workspace that we haven’t covered?

My webcam is just a plain ol’ workhorse Logitech C920 — no fancy Opal or DSLR webcam for me. I subscribe to the Allison Johnson school of refusing to care about webcam quality; there’s plenty else for me to tinker with, particularly given how pricey a better cam would be.