Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:03:15 GMT
When my wife and I moved into our house almost 7 years ago, I claimed one of the bedrooms as a home office. I crammed a desk, an 8’ folding table, and 2 big bookshelves into the room, filling it up with Linux systems, big CRT monitors, 2 or 3 printers, a couple scanners, and other big, heavy bits of hardware. I wanted to maximize my desk space, so I put the desk and table up against the walls and worked with my back to the door most of the time, never quite understanding why I didn’t enjoy working in there as much as I’d expected.
In 2002, I bought a PowerBook and discovered that I could work from any room in the house; I wasn’t tied down to big chunks of glass and 30 lb computers anymore. So I mostly stopped using my office for anything but storage. There are a couple servers in the corner, but most of the space is full of hardware that I don’t really need.
I finally realized a month or two ago that I actually want a quiet place to work, and that most of the problem with my home office is that the layout is designed to maximize the number of big CRTs that it can hold. That’s irrelevant now, and has been for years. What I really want is a quiet, comfortable room with one or two LCDs, a place to read, and some place to plug in my laptop.
So, I’ve started on a quest to fix my office. My long-term goal is to repaint, replace the nasty old carpet with something more livable, and maybe even pick up a couch to fit along one wall, but for now I’m starting by moving the desk around so my back is away from the door and getting rid of the big folding table. Then I’ll add a bit of extra lighting so it doesn’t feel like a cave anymore, and replace the two big bookshelves with someplace to cleanly store cables, random camera gear, CDs, and a couple dozen books.
I moved the desk around last night, then moved my 24” LCD onto it. Then I dug the speakers that I bought in 2001 and have never really been able to use out of the mess, plugged them into a nice little surround sound decoder, and wired my Xbox 360 and Wii into the LCD and decoder.
I’m only half-done with the “clean the room up” phase of the plan, but it’s already drastically better. Getting the desk away from the door made a huge difference. I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago.
Tags cleanup, computers, home | 6 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 05 Jan 2005 03:33:02 GMT
As part of the 4-day weekend that work gave us for New Year’s weekend, I spent some time cleaning and rationalizing the A/V system in our bedroom. Since we bought the projector a couple months ago, we’ve had 30-foot long audio and video cables snaking between the ceiling-mounted projector and the receiver and TiVo that were sitting on the floor right below the projector image. There had been a cabinet there that held them, but it got in the way of the projected image, and we couldn’t move them very far without running into the limits of our satellite cable.
The receiver wiring itself was a total rat’s nest, with TiVo, satellite receiver, and DVD player cables all tied together in a knot with a bunch of unused speaker wire. Since we cancelled the satellite and extracted all of the video from the TiVo, they could both be removed from the pile. Similarly, there was an old RCA DVD player–since we’re using MythTV for DVDs, we could remove it, too. Once we were done removing hardware, we were left with nothing but the receiver and the PC that runs MythTV. Since we weren’t tied to the cable jack in the wall any more, I moved the receiver closer to the projector, shortened the audio and video cables, and then re-ran longer speaker wires. Finally, I wired up rear speakers–the first time since 1997 that I’ve had rear speakers connected to any receiver I own. I also took the time to cable-tie the projector wires and discreetly stick them to the wall. That keep the projector from swiveling slightly ever time something bumps the cables, which makes for a more stable image.
Finally, I dragged the Xbox upstairs and wired it into the projector. Amazingly enough, in the whole time we’ve owned the projector, we hadn’t used it with the Xbox once. It works okay, but the interlacing is kind of nasty and the Xbox’s output looks fuzzy when it’s that big; I’m probably going to buy the Xbox component video kit, a component video to VGA cable for the projector, and a cheap 2-port KVM switch for switching the video input on the projector. That should give me a better image, plus the ability to use 720p on the handful of Xbox games that support it.
My one remaining job is to find a cheap IR transmitter for the PC and then program it to turn the projector off and on. Does lirc support any cheap USB IR transmitters? I notice that they have the IR codes for InFocus projectors on their web site. Given the codes and a transmitter, it should only take a couple minutes to get the PC to control the projector’s power.
Posted in MythTV, Personal | Tags cleanup, home, mythtv | 2 comments
