Home Office September 2009
Mon, September 7th 2009 at 11:15am
Just finished cleaning up the cabling and older gadgets that were cluttering up my work (and play) area. It was a much longer task than I had expected it to be. Sorting out cables, drilling holes using a hole saw and trying to route all the cables in an organized way. Took most of Sunday to do it all. But you know what it really is worth it because when everything is clear you just feel a lot better about doing work .
Home Office 2009: Overview Shot
The overall effect is quite dramatic, I forgot to take a before shot, but you can trust me it looks better. Even though it was never really bad, I was starting to get gadget clutter with my 5.1 Speakers, external hard drives, USB hubs and the new set of cables coming out for my Macbook Pro. All those things have been removed or streamlined making everything much easier to use.
Home Office 2009: Macbook Pro 13.3
As you may have read in my previous posts I have recently added a Macbook Pro 13″ Laptop which I am very happy with. It fits in well with the PC desktop system and what started out a luxury purchase for me has become a pretty important part of my everyday computer workflow. I use it for everything form Media Player to Skype Caller to Website Editor.
Home Office 2009: The Stand
The most recent addition was the M-Audio AV40 Speakers, which are amazing. I replaced a 5.1 system which had three speakers on my desk (left, center and right) and a large sub under my desk. These two speakers (which as not small but not huge either) produce much better all around sound and really good bass. The bass does not shake the floor like the old system, but that is a good thing. Because when the bass shakes the floor the sound is distorted and you can not hear anything anyway. The highs and mids are really nice too, I hear details in my favorite songs that I have never heard before. For under $200 I think they are well worth it.
Home Office 2009: The Two Towers
The smaller tower is a recently re-conditioned AMD machine I am using as a Ubuntu test bed. It is a headless server I use to host test websites and generally play with PHP scripts and databases. A must have sort of system for anyone who wants to get into web development more advanced than plain HTML and CSS design.
Home Office 2009: Behind the Monitor
Finally I am using as Rolls MX28 stereo mixer to take the outputs from my Mac, and PCs and mix them together so they all get output to my speakers. This allows for a much more versatile setup. For example, I often have Front Row running on the MBP playing audio over the speakers and I still get all my audio notifications from the Windows Machine. If I get a Skype call on one system I can simply lower the level of the other system, and the master volume and just use my headset to hear the call. The MX28 is nor really designed for this, I had to buy a bunch of 1/4″ to RCA adapters to make it work, but after that it works great.
Just thought I would share, after several hours of cleaning and organizing I thought the least I could get would be a blog post out of it. 
Here’s a link to the Flickr Photoset.
