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Article by Sam Alex
Source: http://blog.linuxtoday.com


What does your home computer lab look like? Do you have a dedicated office, a corner of the living room, a lounge-in-bed setup? Maybe you're set up more like an old-fashioned terminal server, with a big workstation in a closet and several remote PCs. Maybe you have whittled your computing herd down to a single sleek laptop.

Every time I help a friend with their Mac or Windows computer it's a good reminder of how restricted those platforms are. Every little thing is a big hairy deal, and the only flexibility you have is do you want to pay through the nose now or later, and how many times do you want to hear "No, you can't do that"?

My home setup has evolved. I used to keep everything in a single room and it was a nice setup. Lots of shelves, lots of tables, lots of computers, and a big closet for storing the usual herds of parts and manuals that breed and multiply over time.

As time went by I got tired of spending so much time in that one room. I got tired of hanging on to old parts that weren't any use to me. So I did a major cleanup and adopted out all the old gunk to happy geek packrats, and bought a nice laptop for wandering. Built a good secure Linux wireless access point on a PC Engines WRAP board and lo, I could roam freely about my premises. I have a little farm so there is plenty of nice premises for roaming.

For awhile I considered converting the computer room to something else and having only a nice laptop. But in this modern red tape era it is convenient to have a dedicated office for taxes, record-keeping, and all that crud that will someday devour us entirely.

Then I got back into music because my excellent significantotherperson is a musician, which evolved into setting up a little recording studio and music room in another part of the house. Of course this room required its own computer, which became the photography and audio production computer. So we have as many computers as ever, they're just spread out more.

This all reflects my own evolution as a computer nerd, progressing from enjoying the technology for its own self, to putting it to work in all kinds of creative and satisfying ways.

So how has your tech life evolved?
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* Carla Schroder: Country Geek

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10 Comments
Sam Alex said:

Hi... At one point I also had a huge room devoted to my computer hobby, and at any given time I'd have 3-4 desktops, 1-2 laptops, and whatever classic computer I was in the mood to play with setup. That was before I got married, had a kiddo, and went back to school. Now I don't have time to 'nerd out' for hours a day, so what was my computer room has evolved into my daughters room, and a closet and corner of a spare bedroom are now where most of my gear sits now. My wife and I both have moved to using laptops exclusively (me on a System76 PanP system with Ubuntu 9.04 and her a MacBook running OSX 10.5 Leopard).

I still have a dedicated Linux server running in that spare bedroom which hosts various websites, and a second server for backing-up our laptops, both running Ubuntu Server 8.10. But outside of those, I don't have a desktop per say that I use on a regular basis.

Some day I'll go through my stash and take most of this stuff to Goodwill or give away to others in our LUG, but for now it's still hard to think of giving any of it away. I guess kinda like the guy who still holds onto his classic car from high school that sits in a garage collecting rust and dirt.

In the end I'm good with our setup because whether at home, at work, or on the road we have all our stuff with us, and also we're not tied to a desk or room, but still having that monolithic room full of monitors was just neat, in a geeky sort of way

Take care,

Sam Alex