I'm in a new house. My office is finally set up the way I like it, but I am always looking for ways to optimise and make it better, more useful, and more efficient. This post is for me give you a tour, inventory, and justify nearly every object in my office.
This will be broken down to a worrying level of detail, so you'll have to endure, or ignore this post, depending on what you prefer to do.
The most important parts of my life are in this room, and I cherish it greatly. It's where I spend, and will spend the majority of my existence on an ongoing basis.
As you enter my office, you're met with two images hung on the side of the wardobe. The first of these is a signed image of two actors from Babylon 5, which is my favourite TV show. Both men depicted in this image, now deceased, are security officers in the show. Below this print is an image from the artist Linda Bergkvist, called "Spoiled", and its one of my favourite pieces of art.
Spoiled features a feminine mother nature dragging her child, a mere human, away from the petty concerns of life and death, in a bid for her to be consumed by the truth, that all things wilt, rot and ultimately die. There's hope in the image, though, too; which shows birds and flowers in various states of decomposition. It's a very representational piece, with lots of hidden meaning in the background and down to the features of dirt and blood on various parts of the character's bodies.
I talk a lot of art, because it is very important to me, after all, it is what I spent five years at university studying. Its a big part of my life, and something that I discover more and more about each and every day.
Below these images, is a very narrow shelf that is actually desgined for use within kitchens. I've repurposed it as a bookshelf, removing the wheels. Here you see another one of my passions come to life: Science fiction and fantasy novels. Once I'm through reading these for the first time (or again) - I'll be getting an ebook reader, which will make it easier to read in bed.
On the bottom shelf are some music books, which do indeed circle round to another hobby - the piano and the guitar, which I'll go into more depth later, as we get around the room.
Next we have the interior of the wardrobe. There's a shelf, and a set of draws. It is a bit messy in this photo, as I think I'm subconsciously using this as a staging ground for various projects, but there's a few permanent objects.
Most of these are on the top of the shelf. There's a vintage, circa 1900s Kodak camera, an old Polaroid Spectra, and a very slimline Kodak camera. Then there's my multimeter, because I have no idea where else to put it.
On the shelf, there's a lot of art theory books and some of that "project" stuff, some smart globes that I hope to build into a home-made lighting rig for photography, but I'm having a hard time finding B22 lamp mounts that I can repurpose. The box of the power board, tape, velcro, and brackets (inside the zip lock bag) are all part of that plan which is yet to come to fruition.
But what of the contents of the draws?
The top draw is useful stuff. Mainly for my photography. Things that will be often used, yet permanently stored when not in use. That's things like this LED bowens light, and its manual.
In the next draw below, there's even more seldom used photography objects. Diffusion material, extra light stands / modifiers that don't get regular use, and I guess other photographic junk.
Finally the bottom draw has some games, important / significant items, and various collector's pieces that I want to store in the hopes that their value goes up some day. If they don't, they don't. Either way, its a bunch of mostly cardboard, bubble wrap, and plastic.
Swinging around to the other side, we have my photography gear. Two cases. The one on the left has all my camera gear and things that I would ordinarily take to a shoot. The one on the right has light modifiers, light stands, and tripods. The sort of stuff that I would selectively take on location.
Above this, I have all the boxes for the stuff that might get sold down the line at some point in the future, or those that are easier to store in their boxes as they're special use items, or used very intermittently. You'll also notice some PC boxes in that location, which has some IT gear in them, too.
You might wonder how I charge all my photography gear. I've set up a charging draw which conceals the power board under my desk, and enters the draw from the rear so I don't have cables flying around everywhere, which was an annoyance at my old house.
If you spin around and conduct a 360 from that location, you'll see my musical corner, which is more like a musical wall. I've been learning piano for almost a year now, and have wanted to learn guitar since... forever, so I've been learning music theory on the piano, and the goal is to translate this over to the guitar in time. Its a good thing that my neighbour used to be a music teacher and has been playing guitar since they were a child!
Then there's the place where I spend most of my days, the computer. I don't want to upgrade it, apart from dual booting and running linux as much as possible instead of windows. It's got the following bits, for those who care:
- 5950X CPU
- 64GB of RAM
- Gigabyte 4090
- ASUS X570 Pro - Prime Motherboard
- 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVME
- 2 TB Samsung NVME
- 2 TB Sata SSD
- 1 TB Sata SSD
- 1 TB Sata SSD
- Fractal Torrent Case
- Thermalright CPU cooler
Its plugged into an Gigabyte FV43U monitor; which has been dying for quite some time now, and a secondary ASUS VG27A monitor which is in much better shape. I'd like to get new monitors, but I don't want to spend money, particularly with how expensive the move was.
Here's a wider view. There's two laptops on the tablke. One is mine (M2 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD), and the other one is not mine, the one for work, which is some Dell 12th gen thing with 32GB of ram and a basic GPU to ensure I can use all the system RAM for my data analysis tasks.
There's also way too many peripherals on my desk. An audio interface, a stream deck, a webcam, some edifier speakers, a desktop 5-port USB charger, earphones, headphones, and over the ear headphones. I've also got a couple of USB keys lying around, and other stuff ... too.
Then there's the nerve centre of it all, or rather, should I say the nerd centre. This is where all the home networking comes into a 36RU server rack. On the top, there's a router, a TP-Link TAPO hub which controls home automation (I'll do a seperate post on that later) - and a control unit for the home's roller blinds which are located in the living area.
On the top of the rack there's a patch panel. It leads to all the other ethernet throughout the house. Then there's a switch to handle... err... switching of all the various things.
Then, below that, there's a Network video camera for the security cameras located around the house, and a Power over Ethernet switch to power a few other devices like the doorbell.
Below that, a monitor. The monitor can be used to monitor the security cameras or extract footage.
The next shelf down has some spare hard-disks, to be used for either the NVR, or the NAS that sits on the shelf right next to it.
That NAS, a 2bay, basic QNAP unit, backs up important files from the server below, such as my photography projects, and does another mechanical back up to the hard drive along side.
Finally, on the bottom shelf, I have two UPS devices to keep the power on if power is dead from the grid.
Everyone has a junk draw. Here's mine. It isn't really junk, but with these tools alone, I put together much of the internal furniture, and fixed many many objects in the house, not to forget ripping open and taking apart countless cardboard boxes.
