How to setup a pro digital home office
After taking nine months to get his digital lounge room in order, Adam Turner decides it's time to turn his attention to his office.
A man's home might be his castle but, when he works from home, his office is his Fortress of Solitude. My Fortress of Solitude has been little more than a glorified storage room since I moved house late last year.
The fact that I've managed to work without a proper office for so long vindicates my efforts to create a mobile-friendly work environment. Sit me down in front of any computer with internet access and I can work just as effectively as if I was sitting at my desk. Of course that's not hard considering my desk his been sitting on its end in the garage since August. Instead I've been working on my MacBook at the dining room table, the lounge room couch, the outdoor setting and even the nearby cafe.
If I lived alone I'd probably be happy to keep working this way, but randomly commandeering a room when I need to work obviously creates tension with the Lady of the House. I also need somewhere to retreat to when the kids come home from school, so it's time to set up my office in the spare room downstairs.
My poor old six-foot work desk is showing its age after one too many moves, so I screwed on a few extra supporting brackets before pushing all the boxes down to one end of the office and setting up shop near the doorway. So far all I've done is run an extension cord from the other end of the room, grabbed a chair from the garage and sat my MacBook on the desk along with a coffee cup. My stuffed Dilbert has taken pride of place on top of a stack of boxes, so he can oversee proceedings.
Now I'm sitting here working away on my MacBook as usual, connected to my 802.11n wireless base station upstairs. So the question is, in the internet age, what else do I need to make it a full-fledged office?
Sadly even in the internet age I can't escape the evils of paper. I've got an old mono laser printer and an even older colour inkjet Multi-Function Printer which get dragged around the house as required. Right now the laser is in the rumpus room and the inkjet in lounge room, but I think it's time they found a permanent home in my office. Of course the question then is where do I set them up and how do I connect to them. In the short-term, I might stick an old PC under the desk and hook them up to that - with a USB wifi stick in the back of the PC for linking to my 802.11g home network. Thankfully my office is directly under my lounge room (the heart of my digital home) and I've got some CAT6 and phone cable running down through the wall ready for the day my office networking requirements grow.
Next I'll pull my LCD monitor out of mothballs, rustle up a keyboard, trackball and speakers and then set up a small workstation at one end of the desk. Having a PC under the desk - running XP, Windows 7 and maybe Ubuntu - will also make life easier when I need to dabble in the dark side.
If I had some serious cash to splash I'd probably set myself up with a new widescreen monitor, network laser MFP and PC, so I could take advantage of the 50 per cent small business tax break. Sadly I don't have that kind of money to spare, but the offer runs until the end of the year so I'll reevaluate after my mid-year chat with the tax man.
The other evil I can't escape in the internet age is the telephone. My home line is PSTN while my work line is an Internode NodePhone VoIP service, which has been very reliable. I use the G.711 codec so the voice quality is as good as PSTN. The phone forwards to the mBox voicemail service, with a message that basically says "bugger off and send me an email". If people are brave enough to leave a message, mbox emails it to me.
My terse voicemail message is surprisingly effective, but there are still times when I need to resort to using the phone. I spent a lot of time thinking about phones when I moved from a small house to a big multi-story house last year. I eventually settled on the Uniden 2-line DSS 7960 +1 handsets, which are 5.8 GHz DECT so they don't interfere with my other gear. I still found I had call quality issues if I didn't keep the base station a few feet away from my wireless routers. The voice quality is still a bit muffled at times (I think the handsets have mediocre microphones), but the ability to make and receive calls from two lines, as well as make internal calls and transfer calls between handsets is fantastic when you're trying to work from home.
Using a cordless phone means I don't have a physical phone line for sending the occasional fax from the MFP, but I might try out mBox's email to fax service - which could work out cheaper as it's 18 cents to anywhere in Australia.
I've had a Uniden handset and charger sitting on the bench in the downstairs bathroom, waiting for me to set up the office, but it's kind of handy to have a phone within arms' reach when you're sitting on the can so I might leave it there and spend $100 on another handset. If the budget allows, I might even pick up another Apple Airport Express, which will let me hook up speakers as well as offer an Ethernet port running off my 802.11n backbone. Of course then I'll want another set of Harmon Kardon speakers, because the ones I had in my old office now live in the lounge room. Maybe I'll hold out until Fathers Day, as my kids have very god taste in presents.
If all the computers, phones and speakers in my office are wireless, then it's easy to shuffle things around without worrying about the proximity of wall sockets - all I need to worry about is power. It looks like the pieces of my digital office are starting to fall into place.
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