Home Office Improvement

I don’t have a lot of general geek OR design interest to say today, but I feel compelled to post about what I’ve been up to. I don’t know why. But I’ve invested a combination of business money and personal money in improving my home office, so I’ll tell you about it. I already had an Ikea Jerker desk, my PowerBook G4, your basic office supplies and a few PC’s lying around. I took some hardware from my regular office and some leftovers from other computers around my house and added some new hardware yesterday. The goal is to be able to get more done more comfortably, in or out of the office. Having the home office set up around a laptop and portable hard drives makes it easy to combine the offices when the need arises. I use Backpack to handle my scheduling and todo lists these days, and keep my client notes there, so keeping track of my lists and what not is an easy task between offices. I sync my address books with my PDA and Missing Sync for Windows Mobile. And I got a 2Gig jump drive on sale last week which makes transferring projects a breeze. Here’s a basic overview of my new setup…

Existing Hardware:

Phillips External DVD-RW
USB 2.0 120G Hard Drive
RCA Lyra Wireless
HP Deskjet 5740 Printer

Hardware added:

Samsung 19" Flat panel monitor
My Book 320G FireWire Hard Drive
Logitech Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (USB)
7 port USB Hub

The setup:

My Ikea Desk has a swivel platform for the laptop to sit on, which becomes the "extra" screen for mail windows, RSS readers, and other sidebar apps. With the 19" monitor in the center of the desk, and VirtueDesktops installed, I have more than enough screen real estate for all of my apps. There’s a 3.1 GHz Dell sitting by my desk, and I have a KVM switch that could tie it in to the whole setup, but there’s little point. I have a PC running as a makeshift Tivo and can connect to it with Chicken of the VNC to test websites in IE6 Win, which is really all I use PCs for these days (besides recording The Daily Show and playing movies).

The printer, hard drives and DVD burner have their obvious uses. The Western Digital My Book external hard drive comes with pretty decent backup software, so I've been regularly backing my entire PowerBook up to it. Individual projects get their own CD's and a final DVD upon completion.

The Logitech Wireless keyboard and mouse was an inexpensive addition that reduced desktop clutter. With a little freeware package called DoubleCommand I was able to remap the keyboard to act just like a Mac keyboard. The mouse has a few functions I haven't been able to port yet, but I'll figure it out when I have a little more time. For now, it gives me 3 buttons and a scroll wheel, which suits my needs just fine. And it's extremely responsive. I also have a Wacom tablet that travels with me between home and work. It came with a mouse (it's bluetooth) but I don't like it. I'll stick with this little RF guy for now.

The RCA Lyra Wireless is a discontinued piece of hardware that was designed for PCs but works great with OSX. It transmits crystal clear audio wirelessly for about 100 feet. It plugs into your computer using USB and gives you an 1/8th inch out on the other end. It has 4 channels, so you can actually run four of them at once and broadcast 4 different sources to 4 outputs from 1 computer. Ostensibly, I use it for audio projects and soundtracks, but mostly it seems to end up trasmitting Pandora to my surround sound system, which happens to be in the same room as my home office.

Of course, TextMate, Quicksilver and my other favorite OSX apps are all part of the equation, in addition to the Adobe Creative Suite. I use Bookpedia to keep track of the books I bring home with me from the office so I know which ones are on my desk at home (or by my bed) and which are at the office. I'm sure the office will evolve (and get messier) over time, but for now I'm finding it a great place to work, and I don't have to spend weekends at the office. Except when I have a big video project, I still need the G5 and dual monitors for that. Anyway, this was a little self-obsessed, wasn't it?