Nick Projects

In any job there will be a certain amount of hardware required to be effective.  Working from home is no exception you will want some stuff that may not be typically required for an office type environment.  This stuff will make your life more pleasant so eventually you will want to have most of it.

First: you want a second computer to run communications off of.  Since I haven’t gone into communications yet you may not see the relevance of having an independent machine dedicated to coms,  but it’s the way to go.  Having items on different machines helps in a few ways.  First it is a natural division of labor,  You won’t fill your chat screen with sticky notes,  because you won’t have a sticky note program installed on your coms machine.  When the image your editing crashes your PC,  your coms machine will still be up.  Also it keeps your communications separate from your work.  No one needs to have IM notifications popping up in the middle of their screen all day,  it’s annoying, and when you work from home it happens even more often.  A division of labor is a good way to go.

For a comms laptop I recommend something with average processing power,  and a nice screen.  You can use a touch screen PC if you plan on also using this box for a stereo or some other fun things.  Otherwise a cheap Ebay laptop will cut it.  I strongly recommend using synergy to connect the two machines.  Synergy allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple machines.  This makes having a second computer effortless.  Hopefully in the future some of these functions can be docked to smaller dedicated screens like the ones showed on gizmodo in the linked post,  but these items are hard to come by.

Also you will probably want to pick up a web cam and a microphone.  In my experience microphones that come with web cams are pretty bad quality.  Their good enough to get the job done,  but will drive people crazy if you use one all day.  Monoprice.com has great deals on this type of stuff.  If your office telephone is something IP based and you will be using it from your computer,  you may be able to use a headset for both.  Skype has a wireless headset/microphone that they endorse which looks pretty good.  If your office phone is an actual phone or not built into your computer,  it’s sort of annoying to juggle putting on and taking off your headset all day.  I would recommend a good desk microphone for that environment.

Now that hardware is taken care ouf,  we can get into the more fun business of software to facilitate all of this work from home fun!.

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In any office it is pretty much a requirement to be able to move files across different machines.  Many companies have several shared network drives and highly organized directory structures to allow data to be easy to find and available for all employees to access.  There are dozens of methods to accomplish this in a distributed manner.  This post will cover just a few. 

Hamachi allows users to create VPN networks with minimal configuration.  Simply install Hamachi on all computers to be networked and you are pretty much done.  Setting up a VPN has several advantages.  For starters it networks the computers which will allow file, print and screen sharing across the machines.  This will allow users to map network drives and is also a great way to set up multiplayer games. 

Drop Box:  While simple file sharing utilities won’t give you as much flexibility as the virtual VPN created with Hamachi, it is a great way to move files from one computer to another very quickly.  Dropbox is crazy simple to use and has tons of flexibility for controlling which files get shared and who can see them.  For more information about drop box see my previous post on dropbox. 

Jungle Disk:  Jungle disk is a little less flexible than dropbox but it uses Amazon S3 as the backend.  Jungle Disk is primarily for creating mapped network drives based on S3 buckets.  The advantage is that you get to use the ridiculously powerful Amazon cloud network.  Also for this reason it is a good solution for people who have tons of data to share,  if you deal with large images and can see yourself requiring a network drive with 20 - 40 gb of data on it;  jungle disk is the way to go.  For more details on Jungle Disk see my previous post. 

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This article is to introduce the theme of distributed work groups. Going forward I will highlight several tools that can be used to facilitate remote work conditions The techniques here would be useful to established companies that cope with running multiple locations, or who allow people to work from home but require collaboration between employees. Also these techniques could prove useful to companies that have emerged in a distributed fashion IE web development studios who are essentially a synchronized network of independent contractors working from home in their slippers.

Let’s start with a typical real world office and then attempt to identify the actions that would be required to reproduce that environment. When I sit at my desk I can hear that a colleague is on the phone and two other colleagues are working together on a different issue. When a person finishes they may walk by my office and see what I’m doing and we may talk about nothing for a few minutes. Also I may do the same thing as I get up to refill my coffee. I can also see if someone is frustrated or laughing about something when I walk by to talk to them. The morale of the office is obvious even if no one is saying anything. If an associate needs help on something they will likely yell over to me or walk over and ask me questions. I may want to take a look for myself so I’ll walk over and take a look at their computer. The office is arranged so that people who commonly work together can talk without disturbing groups that work on non-related tasks.

In my opinion the perfect solution would be an implementation of a second life style virtual office environment. Sort of like a cross between a 3d first person shooter and the Sims.  Once in this environment people would be broadcasting and receiving audio through their PC microphones and speakers. Volume would adjust based on someone’s proximity to the person speaking and barriers in the office environment. Two people could theoretically enter an empty office and close the door to isolate themselves from others while speaking. Users should have a seamless transition into video chat at some point in the interaction so that some of the information conveyed non verbally can be transferred. Of course there could also be a host of virtual tools in such an office, things like a cone of silence for private conversation, or force fields for when you don’t want people to bug you. This virtual office could also facilitate virtual white boards for public announcements and other typical office amenities. Not to mention if the solution had the capacity for 3d first person paint ball it may even be fun.

Since this system doesn’t exist the next week or so of posts will evaluate products that can facilitate as much of this functionality as I can find.

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