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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