What’s most interesting about having a AIO water cooler on my gaming PC? Is it gurgles on the regular…. like whatever water is in there has collected and it now “gurgles” to clear it out… it’s weird and unexpected and its done this since day 1. I don’t know if it’s an AIO thing, or just the AIO I have.
Anyway I thought I would put up a couple of updates from things over the last few months.
I did buy an office chair for the standing desk… it’s quite nice and is very comfortable for sitting in for about 1.4 hours… and then I want to stand. So mission accomplished.
The Unifi Dream Machine has been replaced by it’s big brother… and I have download speeds off the router of 1.3Gbps. 10Gbps networking is on the horizon film at 11ish.
No workspace updates, as it turns out having an office for work and an office for “fun” works out really nicely to get you to stop thinking about how to make your office less office like.
Once back to the office office full time, the “pay the bills” office will most likely be slowly migrated into some sort nerd knick knackery of some sort.
I have become the thing I hate… (see bit about knick knacks, and reference any house that my family has a hand in that has been decorated by my mother)
So I’ve recently moved into a new house… and one truth over the years is your neighbors WiFi network names can tell you something about them….
In the case of me… I have “OpenThePodBayDoorsHal” as my main network and “GlaDoSS” as my IOT/Guest network (which I detailed in another entry on my whole vlan and home security isolation thing).
So one fo the neat things about the Ubiquiti gear is it will also scan in the background to optimize your wireless network(s) performance. I popped open said log and found this…
I really need to not pull titles from the music I’m listening to it rarely works out well for the entry.
Anyway it’s been a minute or two since the last entry, and well I’ve moved (again) and this time I write the check to a bank and not some faceless person that I only email with. So with the move comes the new shiny, or more like a refitting of the exiting shiny and figuring out where to put those maintenance dollars.
Well the good news is outside of some very minor things there is nothing that needs dealt with right away, there are a few things I will have to deal with in the not distant future. So until I have to deal with those things, let’s talk about the other plan. I’m on the record as being a smart home person… while I should be in the realm of “no internet connected things that run the home” I’m not and I’m ok with this. I did make a couple of decision changes on smart home re-fit 2.0
I’m going with a platform that supports multiple device vendors (i.e. not Nest)
I’m not going to be be-holden to the one platform rule, if something works outside of that platform and works well for me I’m going to use it (i.e. Sonos)
Everything. Must. Have. Manual. Controls.
If I’m home and the internet goes out, shit still works (the internet going down is a bigger issue then it should be… THANKS XFINITY/COMCAST!)
So with those in mind I’ve already got a foundation in place in the form of an IoT vlan via my Ubiquiti Dream Machine. On the human interface layer I’ve moved to mostly HomeKit, I know shocker. It makes sense though, I need automation based on location (phones), I want flexibility if I decide to leave the Apple eco system (if it works with HomeKit it works with Google or Alexa typically). And HomeKit has a hub centric architecture vs a cloud centric architecture. Which takes care of point 4 very nicely. Point 3 seems to be the sticky wicket right now, but I’ll get there.
Oh also the only exception to all of this is appliances, don’t get an internet connection… there is no earthly reason why my toaster needs to be on the internet… there isn’t a better way to make toast…. toast the bread and go away.
Oh also there is a whole new workspace for the offices, but that will be another day. Maybe….
For real… for someone who takes their blog entries from the music they listen to… I find some real weird stuff from time to time, but that’s what you get when you listen to Soundgarden.
So Let’s talk about this blog’s favorite topic… HOME WORK SPACES!! In previous chapters you will notice the bit where I was definitely not working during the initial stages of Covid-19 and instead was living in my parents garage playing Borderlands3. Well everyone has to get back to real life at some point and I did in May. And one of the earliest discussions I had with my leadership was that I would be working from home (as would the whole team) come the end of July once I was trained up and some upgrades had happened. In anticipation of this and some other smaller stretches of remote working I made some purchase.
So I purchased some monitors, monitor arm, and a USB-C dock for the work laptop. And what I found very quickly was that I was not that happy with this setup.
First to the left (just out of frame) is my main computer for doing not work things and not gaming things.. i.e. my Mac which I do use for work things on occasion, but not on the regular.
This was 3 feet from the space where I played video games on my gaming PC
It faced a East Window upstairs so it got a ton of light in the morning.
The room it self is just warm because of the placement of the ventilation and getting sun 80% of the day.
The ergonomics suck
Needless to say I figured out pretty quick that this was not going to work for extended remote working. I started thinking about what I wanted and what my plans were for the next couple of years. I knew the following things.
This was a temporary setup as I plan on moving in the next year or so
I know that the next place I live will have a dedicated home office that is for *work* and dedicated space for “work”
Ergonomics need to be a consideration, and I can’t cheap out anymore
With these things in mind I started thinking about what I wanted in a home work space that was for *work* that I would be spending 8 to 10 hours a day in 5 days a week. When you start thinking about that kind of time in a space you really start to have some conversations with yourself about what you really want. At the end of the day I wanted to have a seperate space from my “fun work” and “pay the bills work” and deciced that since I’m using a couple of IKEA desks from 2005 that I think I might have spent $300 total for back then and they are still going strong. I decided to put the money in upfront and get what I had been looking at and really making it work.
I ended up purchasing a standing desk (the 48×30 Varidesk if you are curious) I basically came down to I had a couple of trusted sources that had purchased this desk and found them to be excellent for their work. I found the price to be in middle of what I was looking for in terms of the feature set, and not so large that it would take over the room. The down side is the unit is in my living room so I have to look at it on the weekends, but it’s surprisingly easy to ignore when everything is turned off. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and the only thing that I’m not totally sold on is a chair. I’m using a kitchen chair right now and it gets the job done, but it’s not great for extended periods of sitting. Surprisingly I still do with a standing desk as I don’t have a mat to help with my hips yet. I’m 50/50 on buying a dedicated chair for the setup and just sucking it up.
My guess is my next entry will be about whatever office chair I ended up putting in the space.
Because again.. I think is is a home work space blog now?
So I was planning on this to be a post about some big changes… but much like the rest of the country I find my self in a Covid-19 cloud so instead I present the following things…
There are a crap ton of Nine Inch Nails concerts on YouTube
The Mandalorian is better the second time through
Was anyone else hoping for more Federation ships in Picard?
After all of these years I still mostly pick the titles of the entries from whatever music is playing in the background… and well tonight that is Queens of the Stone Age “Auto Pilot”
Some things never change….
I was going to write something, but then a shiny internet object dashed in front of me… and now I can’t remember what I was going to write on. I think it was a treatus on world peace and building a space economy… or it might have been about my personal office setup, which seems to be the main topic of this thing over the last couple of years.
Huh would you look at that it’s been 6 months since I posted anything… I’m sure the person who still reads this is shocked. That person would also be the kind of person who names their fantasy football team something “shocking” and use an ephemeral third state of electricity as their online tag.
Yes if you are reading this… you are that person.
Anyway…. since the last post in June, I fixed the monitor situation on the Windows machine… by replacing the windows machine with a new PC. It’s nice to have a gaming PC again. Also widescreen monitors… WHO KNEW?
Anyway happy 19th birthday to the blog that started because I didn’t want to do COBOL homework in the year 2000 (If you don’t have Conan O’Brien and Andy Richter singing ‘In the yeeaaaarrr 22220000000‘ in your head… you are reading it wrong).
So yeah I guess happy holidays, new year, and all that jazz.
So uh yeah… pictures are not fixed after all… but the HTTPS is working….
Also a comment on bluehost and their default install of wordpress…. There is so much junk that is pre-installed on this site I don’t know what can and can not be turned off…. so far I have most all of it turned off except for the things I know I need.
I mainly moved because of the cheaper hosting and “free” HTTPS (as opposed to what I would have paid for the equivalent length of hosting and an additional fee at GoDaddy).
It’s all good… says the one guy who still keeps a personal blog in 2019…
