I was bored today...

digitalscream

...so, on a whim at 1pm, I decided that it was about time I put some carpet down in my office instead of the half-room of carpet offcut and the rest as bare floorboards. We've been in this house nearly 10 years, and this is the one room we've done nothing with (mainly because I didn't want the wife getting her grubby mitts all over it and making it pink).

Anyway...cue a quick run to Homebase to get some carpet tiles, followed by 2 hours of clearing everything out...filling the top of the house while I'm at it. There's a reason I sent the wife to Rutland Water with the dogs.

Anyway, 45 minutes of laying down carpet tiles later, and here we were:

Right then...priorities. I needed music while I worked, so time to test the desk layout:

Seems OK. The three screens on the right are for my main work machine, and the one on the left is for the recording computer. The second one from the left is shared between the two (just a button on the monitor to switch between them), and I use Synergy so that I can use both from the main machine's keyboard and mouse.

After that followed 5 hours of sorting through all the accumulated crap from the last 10 years and binning a huge amount of it. This room was an absolute shit-tip before this exercise, and the main point was to trim some of the fat. So...

Anyway, @Emp_Fab...that's how you do it. Decide you're going to do a job, and just get it done. OK, so it took me nearly 10 years of considering the possibility of doing it in the first place, but...

xmrchi

Brilliant work, you seem to have a well sorted set up there, 

Fazer

K-9

spark240

But dude!...non- matching drawers and work surface ...cmon ! 

digitalscream

spark240 said:

But dude!...non- matching drawers and work surface ...cmon ! 

Temporary situation, that - those desks are £20 Argos specials from years ago. Currently trying to source a decent 2.7m x 60cm x 3cm bit of wood to bolt to the walls for something a bit sturdier.

digitalscream

Oh, and another thing...that Eminence Wizard on top of the rack? I don't even know where it came from; certainly don't remember buying it. Awesome.

Fretwired

Seriously impressive ... are you a Mac or PC user?

monquixote

Man cave win!

axisus

I am envious of your room! Marvellous!

digitalscream

Fretwired said:

Seriously impressive ... are you a Mac or PC user?

Cheers

I use PCs, and only ones that I've built (I don't trust the build quality of pre-built ones). My main machine runs Linux, because...well, Windows and OS X suck in my opinion. The recording machine runs Windows 7, because none of my interfaces (including the current Eleven Rack) have drivers for Linux. When the native Linux port of Reaper comes along, that may change...I'll see if there are any decent interfaces out there if/when that happens.

monquixote said:

Man cave win!

That's what I thought

johnnyurq

Good job dude.

My only concern is your excessive speed from conception to execution.

It makes us procrastinators look even worse and poor Emp will have a nosebleed when confronted with such speed in auch a task.

Awsome setup though.

monquixote

digitalscream said:

I use PCs, and only ones that I've built (I don't trust the build quality of pre-built ones). My main machine runs Linux, because...well, Windows and OS X suck in my opinion. The recording machine runs Windows 7, because none of my interfaces (including the current Eleven Rack) have drivers for Linux. When the native Linux port of Reaper comes along, that may change...I'll see if there are any decent interfaces out there if/when that happens.

What flavour of Linux are you using. 

I dusted off my old Gnome 2 Ubuntu box recently and was quite pleased with how usable it was. Unity just killed trying to use Ubuntu for me.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

What flavour of Linux are you using. 

I dusted off my old Gnome 2 Ubuntu box recently and was quite pleased with how usable it was. Unity just killed trying to use Ubuntu for me.

I'm actually using the vanilla Ubuntu 14.10 beta. I quite like Unity now that it's got some sensible options (like menus in the title bar etc). It's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be - that was my main gripe with it, to be honest.

When I feel the need for a bit more snap and sizzle, I tend to switch to XFCE. Doing that really brings home how much bloat there is in just about all of the other desktop environments (and other operating systems) - while computers are several orders of magnitude faster than they were 10 years ago, I find that the actual feel of the desktop hasn't really changed all that much. XFCE takes the brakes off and lets you know what it should be like.

monquixote

The last version I think I tried to use was 13.04 and it just ran like dogshit on a machine with 2GB of RAM a 2.5GHz core 2 duo and a dedicated graphics card. 

Everything was painfully laggy and it used to crash or lock up about twice a day. I need to do some work on a machine with Kubuntu 14.04 this week so I'll be interested to see what that's like as I had to use 10.04 a while ago and that was like being in one of those nightmares you can't wake up from.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

The last version I think I tried to use was 13.04 and it just ran like dogshit on a machine with 2GB of RAM a 2.5GHz core 2 duo and a dedicated graphics card. 

Everything was painfully laggy and it used to crash or lock up about twice a day. I need to do some work on a machine with Kubuntu 14.04 this week so I'll be interested to see what that's like as I had to use 10.04 a while ago and that was like being in one of those nightmares you can't wake up from.

Yeah...things got a bit better in 13.04, but 13.10 is where they really started to optimise it. 14.04 is good, but 14.10 is a vast improvement over that. Still...XFCE's where it's at for me. When 14.10 is released, I'll probably jump to XFCE pretty quickly.

KDE's just bloated rubbish IMO. Absolutely no need for it.

monquixote

I used to use an 800 MHz PIII with 512MB running Xubuntu as my main machine up until a few years ago and it ran absolutely fine. I even used it for development.

digitalscream

OK, so I should probably be in bed. I just installed XFCE on 14.10...jeez, it's fast. A couple of minor UI gripes, but aside from that it's golden.

carlos

which of the 4 screens is the porn screen?

johnnyurq

All of them.

Deadman

You have an office!? I'm well jel innit.

spark240

digitalscream said:

spark240 said:

But dude!...non- matching drawers and work surface ...cmon ! 

Temporary situation, that - those desks are £20 Argos specials from years ago. Currently trying to source a decent 2.7m x 60cm x 3cm bit of wood to bolt to the walls for something a bit sturdier.

I face the same dilemma..I know that a 2.3m kitchen worktop is the answer, but I keep thinking there is something better out there .