MetaScreenshot December 13, 2018 5:54 PM   Subscribe

What does your digital space look like? What type of wallpaper do you use? Do you have a lot of shortcuts/icons scattered everywhere? Or maybe you're more minimalist and you need everything pinned to your taskbar or dock. Or do you consume MetaFilter from your iPad or mobile device? We all type/tap from different places, for those who are game, please share a screenshot. Just being curious. Cheers.
posted by Fizz to MetaFilter-Related at 5:54 PM (35 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

This is me.
posted by Fizz at 5:57 PM on December 13, 2018 [6 favorites]


Laptop. It's like a mullet -- party on the top, bidness on the bottom. Especially if I'd dragging it into work to use with the projectors, I get tired of wallpaper pretty quickly, so in the past few months it's been Tish the slack-jawed yokel, the "I made it with my bum" spider, Cora (formerly Popcorn) being cute, Vavatch, and a drawing/painting of Yuri Gagarin holding Laika

Desktops at work and upstairs use this utility that changes the wallpaper to today's APOD but that seems to be busted now
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:10 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sort of like Fizz's on a Mac. One of a few select B&W favorites for wallpaper on the main monitor that tends to stay for a while, rotating from various folders of interesting pictures on the second monitor, absolutely nothing on the desktop unless it's temporary. No drives, no shortcuts. Dock and menu bar hidden or partially hidden. System logs and monitors running on top of the wallpaper but behind the desktop.

No screenshot because that's how they get you.
posted by bongo_x at 7:51 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Surprised myself by how much barely used or inexplicable crud there is on my desktop, especially shortcuts and random saved stuff all of which massively overflows the generic Fallout: New Vegas wallpaper (was Hedy Lamarr with some weird metal star headwear until recently). Something is periodically saving its .dat files to desktop too, which shouldn't be happening. Think there's a line in LOTR about Orcs sleeping and eating in their own filth which comes to mind for some reason. Screencapped it, redacted a bunch of stuff, thought twice about what was left *coughpossiblysomeemulationrelatedfluffcough* and... that's all folks!
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 8:07 PM on December 13, 2018


I have a very nice nebula background and several chrome windows with a bazillion tabs each (DON'T JUDGE ME) and then a perpetually-open folder with 50 billion PDFs relating to one child's IEP/medical needs, which is why no screen shot from me. :) (AskMe helped me choose Evernote for my online sorting and sharing of these files so I have them all at my fingertips in any meeting and can rapidly push them to any service provider necessary.)

I basically always choose space/stargazing backgrounds, always in cool colors so it recedes visually. Current one is very purple-y.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:13 PM on December 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


My current desktop photo is a scan from a series I did a few years ago of former movie theaters in Pittsburgh. I never really see it though because it's so hard to minimize all windows on a mac at once except for some obscure touchpad gesture thing that I can never remember.
posted by octothorpe at 8:25 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


I do about 95% of my computery stuff off my Samsung Galaxy s6.

http://imgur.com/ixhNq7l
http://imgur.com/4VHsY8H
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 8:48 PM on December 13, 2018


I love this idea -- show off your MeFi Battlestations!
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:13 PM on December 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Each window of the home screen on my Android phone gets a different character from this Nichijou fan art.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 9:52 PM on December 13, 2018


I'm mostly on mobile these days, with nine desktop icons: Facebook, two email apps, phone, Google, browser, camera, and calendar. My wallpaper is a nice picture of Spaceship Earth from a 2012 trip to Walt Disney World.

My laptop has maybe five icons on a plain blue background.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:40 PM on December 13, 2018


Now that I’m out of school, I do 95% of my internet browsing on my little iPhone SE. I deleted most of my apps, and I frequently fantasize about chucking my phone into the bay.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:28 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


I keep my desktop as simple as possible - right now I have a rotating set of Christmas-themed backgrounds. The screen is totally devoid of any icons - a habit I started back around Windows ME and have continued to this day. I love the look of a completely uncluttered desktop.

My iPhone X has two "pages" - the first page includes all my most-used apps (Babbel, Evernote, Fantastical, Dark Sky, Pocket Casts, etc. The second page has all of my remaining apps grouped into folders.
posted by Roger Pittman at 4:02 AM on December 14, 2018


I use a program launcher so my desktop is pretty plain, honestly.
posted by redrawturtle at 4:16 AM on December 14, 2018


My desktop is pretty spare, just the Eggleston photo of a tricycle as wallpaper.

The (mildly) more interesting thing is how computers are named in our house. As a hobby, I take old PCs and set them up under different flavors of Linux. All of the computers have names on our system, and all of the names are characters from Kurt Russell films. This started with the obvious ones: Snake Plissken, Jack Burton, MacReady. But now there's also Dean Proffitt, Captain Ron, Rudy Russo, and thanks to Netflix, Santa Claus.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:54 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


I do 95% of my computing* on an iPad Pro. The red feathers are bold, yet soothing.

*basically everything except reporting Twitter racists, which is much faster on a desktop.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:00 AM on December 14, 2018


My work desktop on Windows 10 has whatever random icons IT put on it that I never see or use, because that's not how I start programs and we are categorically forbidden to store files locally -- they all have to be entered into our information management and version control system.

My home desktop on MacOS is an ever-loving disaster, because I am not really an Apple person, and I never really got the hang of the MacOS file system so I just save a ton of crap to my desktop. Not because I use the desktop icons to find them, just because it is easier to find things if they're just sitting in the Desktop folder. It's actually kind of embarrassing -- there are files on my desktop from first year law school and that was four years ago. I will never need them again, I just can't be arsed to clean them up.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:03 AM on December 14, 2018


I've sort of settled on a left-side bar and maximized windows for most applications, so my desktops are pretty dull. Wallpaper tends to be whatever is default.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:04 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


My work desktop wallpaper is a lovely view of Death Valley, CA, which is WARM, and beautiful, and warm. Did I mention that it's warm and beautiful? And warm?

The icons are mostly work applications, plus a folder where I save all my cartoons and funny jokes/images. There are subfolders for Dilbert, Doonesbury, Zits and Stone Soup.

At the bottom of the screen are three Firefox minimized windows: 1) the latest politics megathread; 2) my personal gmail; 3) the news page, usually the Boston Globe or Washington Post. Sometimes, ok, most of the time, I have additional windows when there's a hot Askme or FPP to follow.
posted by Melismata at 8:33 AM on December 14, 2018


Current screenshot/backdrop.
posted by Wordshore at 9:03 AM on December 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


Let’s hear it for Mac OS dock on the left! Get that damn thing out of the center of the screen where I’m trying to work. My wallpaper is whatever installs with the latest version, I think it’s a sand dune or some shit right now.

I had to switch to Windows 10 for school recently and I’m actually loving it but haven’t bothered to figure out how to personalize. All of the available themes are appropriately bland.

We have windows thin clients at work with the mandatory plain blue background because someone at work thinks we should be in Soviet Russia. I complained that I am color blind and they weren’t accommodating my disability because the screen was hard to see so now I am allowed to change the theme every morning to “high contrast” which is like a hideous black and neon yellow and such. It’s important to keep poking at the bureaucracy.

But most of my Metafiltering happens on my iPhone X and I’ve been using kozyndan’s Bunny Uprising as my wall paper for like a decade. I was at one of our infamous MeFi pub quizzes and was charmed to learn quiet coyote has the same one.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:22 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Where my skinners at? Yeah, that's not me, either, though I sometimes pine for the days of hunting down, or even making, application skins to match my mood, sometimes even making desktop photos that blend into the apps.

The closest I get these days is embedding a dumb version of my work calendar with paydays and holidays into my pairing of favorite Windows 10 photos from the recent past, then getting clipping out the appropriate bit of background for a custom background in Sense Clock (via Windows Store) to get a bigger clock on my desktop, but without (most) of the bulky framing of the app, except the silly white app bar on top. I also have some more obtrusive Sticky Notes on my desktop, which I generally ignore, defeating the purpose of having them there in the first place :( At least I had fun "hacking" the app by copying text from a Word document to insert custom fonts, instead of the awkward font and spacing that is native to the app.

My work phone background is a a local landscape pic of my own making, and my personal phone has three family photos, loaded with FiveWallpapers, which allows up to (you guessed it) five separate background pictures, plus other options to shuffle and swap them out.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:53 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


What type of wallpaper do you use

I like to rotate between different paintings and other artworks. Currently it's this Matisse.
posted by zeusianfog at 10:32 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


I used to have multiple nature scene backgrounds (both color and B&W, sometimes taken by myself), cycled to match the current season; I eventually gravitated to a sold neutral-color background for all my computers. Yeah, boring, but since my screens are either always filled with multiple windows or turned off, I didn't see much point in bothering with backgrounds anymore.

Frequently-referenced links and files on the desktop (usually no more than 15), 5 or 6 most-frequently-used applications/utilities pinned to the taskbar.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:08 AM on December 14, 2018


CAT CAT CAT

His name is Mike but if I wrote MIKE MIKE MIKE you wouldn't know what I was talking about.
posted by something something at 11:19 AM on December 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


Every new laptop I get, the first thing I do is change the background to that custom colour and pin the taskbar to the right hand side. Then, I can get to work. The icons are free form and more or less end up the way you see them.

I have managed my 'real estate' consciously since the late 1990s.

I have managed to emulate this look in the other Win 10 device, but also obtained a refurbished older Win 7 machine as backup for when this one i'm using fails. I'll do that until the whole thing falls apart, only then will I upgrade to the whatever is going on then. I've found my level and I'm going to stick to it for as long as I can.
posted by infini at 1:27 PM on December 14, 2018


I hate apps, android, and all this newfangled stuff. I'm using a Nokia brand featurephone because I don't have to struggle through oodles of data hogging app updates with every breath.
posted by infini at 1:30 PM on December 14, 2018


Marlboro Boy
posted by clavdivs at 1:50 PM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Laptop plugged into desktop monitor for the dual screen effect: calendar and lists on the laptop monitor on the right, work on the left.

I like a tidy desktop, but that just means the "Scratch" folder is total mayhem. There's files in there from like 1998. Of course, I have scads of open browser tabs when I'm deep into something, but those hide away in the taskbar in a snap.

The wallpaper is a shot from Goresat looking back at the planet with the moon in transit.
posted by notyou at 3:13 PM on December 14, 2018


I'm a multimodal internet user. Phone is a iPhone 6 Plus with a screenshot from Snapchat from a vacation with friends this summer captioned "All my friends are heathens". Laptop is a MacBook with a background from the Civil War Battlefields Road Trip with my bestie this summer. My desktop on the MacBook is a mess because I take a lot of screenshots because I teach college and they all dump to the desktop. iPad mini has my favorite picture of our family (wife, wife's GF, wife's GF's husband, wife's GF's teenager) from wife's graduation. Work desktop is backgrounded with a picture of Linkin Park, RIP Chester. And I read here from all of them, though I'm a lot more likely to comment on a device with a physical keyboard.
posted by joycehealy at 3:43 PM on December 14, 2018


I've been using this for some years. Taken on the black sand beach in the village of Vik in Iceland.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:59 PM on December 14, 2018


Mike Mike Mike the cat cat cat is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:05 PM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


Mike looks like he loves a good brushing.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:19 PM on December 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh my god, he hates it. SUCH a drama queen. But I persist, 45 to 60 seconds a day.
posted by something something at 7:40 PM on December 14, 2018 [3 favorites]


This thread made me come over to the laptop, turn it on, and start going through my desktop. I am already procrastinating by MeFi. A lot of it is articles and documents from megathreads.

I just have the Mac river stones background, which is really soothing and neutral. Or it would be if I were not looking through a blizzard of files.

Is there an app that will enable me to organize stuff on my desktop by putting them where *I* want, like I used to do in Windows more than 12 years ago? And Apple no longer uses label colors across the whole filename, just stupid dots which are hard to see.

My dock is on the left, and I don't see how people work with it on the bottom.

I am new to my job, and I've been very good this far on the desktop and have just 3 or four documents, if that, on the work desktop. The file system is evolving.
posted by jgirl at 5:07 AM on December 15, 2018


I hope this MetaScreenshot is meta enough for ya. Left dock with auto-hide is clearly the correct way to do it, but I navigate almost everything by keyboard anyway. I very rarely see the nice diagonal-striped space background but I do like it.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 11:30 AM on December 18, 2018


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