Ernest Hemingway at his standing desk

Stand up desks have been used to counteract back pain and improve productivity for years, but there might be a more important reason to consider changing the way you work.  A recent study suggests that more time spent sitting increases mortality risk regardless of physical activity.  So even you exercise a lot, your health may be negatively impacted by sitting at a desk all day.

“Several factors could explain the positive association between time spent sitting and higher all cause death rates,” said Dr. Patel. “Prolonged time spent sitting, independent of physical activity, has been shown to have important metabolic consequences and may influence things like triglycerides, high density lipoprotein, cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose, resting blood pressure, and leptin, which are biomarkers of obesity and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases.”

I can’t say that I have ever noticed much back pain from sitting all day myself.  However, I tend to prefer decreasing my risk of death.  When I heard about this study, my stomach dropped thinking about how much time I spend sitting each day.

I decided to look into standing desks and explore some alternatives.  Some of them were fairly expensive, but I feel that it’s foolish for me to not spend a little money to improve my health and possibly improve the experience that consumes most of my day.

Here is a gorgeous desk from Stilvoll that I haven’t found the price for yet.  I have a feeling that if you need to ask, you might as well not.

StilVoll Crescendo C2

An uglier but utilitarian desk is available from GeekDesk.com for $799.

Geek Desk

And if you are really on a budget, Lifehacker has a $20 solution.   I showed this to my girlfriend and she nearly strangled me.

Stand up desk on the cheap

Finally, don’t forget the ergonomic mat to stand on.

It’s hard to picture changing the way you work, but I for one am going to give it a try by assembling a trial version using some inexpensive cabinets and a desk top.

A disturbing news story about computer security came out this week. In a high school in Pennsylvania, the students were given laptops with webcams to use outside of school. It was later discovered that the school was turning on the webcams remotely and spying on the students inside of their own homes! Hopefully the school administrators will be appropiately punished and prevented from doing this again. However, there is something simple you can do right now to prevent this kind of spying from ever happening to you. If you borrow a laptop with a webcam from someone, just tape a small piece of paper over the lens. You could just use tape for privacy reasons, but the paper will prevent damage to the lens from the glue on the tape. It’s a simple solution that will give you peace of mind. – Gretchen Bily, 18 East Web Design

Read full article: School gave kids laptops to spy on them at home

So I went to MacWorld 2010 and was surprised at how many cool things there were. Most of our client’s machines run on Windows, but scientists and designers still tend to prefer the Mac experience. I am even working on a project in which we are replacing all the Windows machines with Macs and running the one required Windows application within a Windows VM running XenApp on a Mac OS X server. XenApp serves up Windows applications to any client (even Macs) via a web based Java applet.

The iPad discussion was so popular that the 1500 person capacity primary room filled up and they had to open an overflow room. The discussion covered most of the topics which are being discussed in the gadget blogosphere. Probably the most contentious point is Apple’s control of which apps can be installed. Other platforms allow users to set a well-buried option to enable 3rd party apps. One panel member likened this to Cuisinart forbidding users to cook pop-tarts in their toaster ovens. I actually sympathize more with the stability argument. Also, why shouldn’t Apple get more revenue as a reward for building the most cohesive mobile experience? If people want more choice, HTML5 might be an alternative going forward. Google built a good Voice app for the iPhone using HTML5. This might open the door to many more applications to side-step the apps store.

Here are my favorite products from the show:

These little external batteries will prove handy to keep those cell phones charged without having to swap out the internal battery.	Flexible solar panel charges large battery in just 2 days! Bring on the ThunderDome.
Then again, you can always spend $1000 for a brick that will run you laptop for 30 hours. Great for the survivalist laptop user.
There were some cool touch surfaces, but they were all running VISTA! I was surprised that there weren’t more multi-touch interface products.
The kids loved the multi-touch table for adults!	Touch whiteboard and multi-touch table from SMART Technologies.
Touchscreen Gloves by iTouchGloves.com. Cool multi-touch screen by 22miles.com.	I was fascinated by these nanotech-enabled leather gloves that work with capacitive screens. I understand that the process is integrated into the tanning of the gloves and is very durable. I also like this touch screen which brings us one step closer to Minority Report.

Priority One: Client-side software that remains unpatched.

Waves of targeted email attacks, often called spear phishing, are exploiting client-side vulnerabilities in commonly used programs such as Adobe PDF Reader, QuickTime, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Office. This is currently the primary initial infection vector used to compromise computers that have Internet access…

Priority Two: Internet-facing web sites that are vulnerable.

Attacks against web applications constitute more than 60% of the total attack attempts observed on the Internet. These vulnerabilities are being exploited widely to convert trusted web sites into malicious websites serving content that contains client-side exploits…