Home Desk Setup 14 Aug, 2008
Berto asked about the state of my home work area, so here’s a quickly-annotated photo. The two desktops stay on all the time but with some powersaving (Moya could sleep if I play with WOL and get it working). Aeryn Sun is my G4 PowerBook (I joke it’s a SlowBook Pro), which is still fast enough for a whole lot of tasks. (Actually I’m writing this post on it!) I’m slowly becoming a Mac shop as machines are becoming fast enough to run all my testing VMs on a single Linux box.
The printer is a HL-2170w which has a quaint Web interface for configuring it, but works great with the Mac. You can’t really see the SUA1000XL which is the most awesome UPS I’ve ever been able to hold off the ground without help. It’s around 55 pounds and able to run the whole setup for 39 minutes (something on the order of 38% load, when I leave and the monitors powersave it goes down to 10% load and around 90 minutes runtime). Behind the printer is the D-Link gigabit switch which works great and supports jumbo frames, and next to it (also not visible) is the first photo backup drive (HFS+, covered in a couple of paragraphs) and two external ReiserFS data drives. Of course the printer is not on a UPS, since it draws too much on startup (the main UPSes actually kick on because the line voltage drops too much at that point, since I only have one circuit to my bedroom).
The backup scheme I use for photos is pretty solid, I think. Coming out of the camera, I keep the photos on the flash card until they’re backed up fully in Texas, at which point I mark the card as erasable. The last couple of months stay on my laptop, and everything before that is then on the external hard drive and in Texas, on a machine named Toothpaste (simply for the sheer joy of asking people “Where’s Toothpaste?” in everyday conversation). Yearly it also gets burned to DVD and the DVDs are kept in a box with the expectation that I’ll never have to use them. Toothpaste is a lowly Celeron 566 which is optimized to the hilt for low power consumption (around 25w idle, 45w with all disks spun up and transferring large amounts of data).
Astute readers who spend as much time at Ikea as I do might recognize the Galant desk surface and Vika Fagerlid legs. I actually got the desk surface first from the as-is area and decided on the legs later (as I was running short of shelf space). What you can’t see is that there is another, different leg at the back corner which is from another series which is 3/4” shorter than the others. The solution was pretty simple, cut a piece of 1 × 4 and screwed it on (this probably qualifies me for a post on Ikea Hacker, since “cut the allen wrench and use in a drill” made it into a post last month).