Many people have now settled into some hybrid form of working from home and the office during weekdays.

This invariably means storing office kit at home or having a permanent home office setup – which may be far from ideal.

Either way, work is now part of your home. What if you could also repurpose your work kit into attractive home kit that can be stored in plain sight?

Most people work on laptops and you can, of course, put the laptop on a stand and use a keyboard so you’re not permanently bent over squinting. However, for many, the luxury of an external monitor and the additional screen real estate is appealing and increases productivity, or at least reduces squinting. But this external monitor will also be your biggest piece of home kit.

Digital photo frames come in at about 160 quid for 20 inches, though there’s often some palava involved in getting the images onto the device and it’s a unit designed only for one thing.

But now you, with your external monitor that you’re not using when you’re not working, have the potential to use it as a digital frame and a whole lot more.

A 27 inch monitor will set you back around 180 quid but now has the potential to be a device that serves way more purposes.

You can see where I’m going. 

However, for all this to be effective it has also got to be easy to transition between ‘work mode’ and ‘home mode’ – otherwise it will just be too much effort to sort out. The setup I created takes about 15 seconds to go from ‘Portrait Gallery’ to ‘Work Mode’.

Here’s what I did:

I work on the kitchen counter (or if we’re being la-di-da, breakfast bar). There’s a gap nearby where the monitor can be stored and, with a bit of technical jiggery, become a decent digital frame, entertainment centre  and voice assistant.

I opted for a white monitor, with 2560×1440 resolution, with the option to spin it 90 degrees – which is how I have it in ‘I’m not at work anymore – gallery mode’.

The less fiddling to get to work or back to normal the better. That’s where some of the bits and bobs stuck on the back come in.

I use an XPS 9310 which can conveniently be fed power through USB-C as well as outputting video to the monitor.

The relatively neat spaghetti on the back is:

A
1 x power supply that gives power to the monitor and the laptop = less trailing cables over your workspace. 1 short kettle lead for the monitor and:

B
1 x 65w PD USB-C charger which plugs into E, to supply power to the laptop.

C
1 x Google TV, powered by a USB port on A (the built-in monitor USB ports just aren’t juicy enough to power it, unfortunately).

The Chrome TV powers the gallery on the monitor, and can also be used to watch Netflix etc when in landscape mode.

D
1 dual HDMI switch to switch from Google TV to laptop.

E
1 USB-C to HDMI converter to output the laptop video to the screen.
Plus, the power output from the 45w USB-C jammed into it – to keep the laptop charged.

F
I don’t want the monitor on overnight in gallery mode so I’ve attached a Wifi plug to enable this to be shutdown remotely at bedtime. #nerdalert

2 x short HDMI leads and a USB-C cable to link everything together and hey presto, you’re in business.

I also threw a handful of teflon disks onto the base of the monitor so I could easily slide it over the work surface.

Sidebar: Batch rotation

For the portrait gallery to work on Google TV (which was designed for landscape viewing) – I collated all my portrait images into one folder (on Windows), selected them all, right click ‘Rotate left’. Then uploaded to a Google Photos album.

Using your phone in the Google Home app, find the Google TV and configure which galleries play when it’s in ‘Ambient mode’.

NB: I did try this initially with versions of Amazon’s Fire Stick but it’s almost impossible to get it to play your gallery infinitely without timing out.

Google TV / Coco Pops

When you’ve finished working and the laptop is stored away, the Google TV then gives you the option to watch your streaming platform of choice whilst you’re eating your Coco Pops.

And when you’re done, it’s fifteen seconds to slide it all back into gallery mode.