THE HOME SETUP
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THE HOME OFFICE Home offices range from the simple and expedient to complex, professional tax-write-off spaces. Recently the New York Times ran a story about the essential technology that you need at home, saying now that everyone is working from home all the non-essentials are being weeded out. It's interesting but I think lack the detail that you need to make your home office awesome.
A home office has to be functional and has to coexist among all the other functions in a home. There are a great many creative ways to set up a home office. When I was creating this page about working from home, I was looking for a picture of a representative home office. All the pictures I was finding looked as if they were lifted from GQ or hermanmiller.com. They certainly didn't look like the average home offices I was acquainted with (in my years as a self-employed computer repair pro, I've been in a LOT of people's home offices) and they certainly didn't look like mine. What about my own home office, warts and all? Everyone's office is quirky and idiosyncratic. So the above picture is my home office as I type this, un-retouched. I decided to use my own office as a framework for an extended discussion of setting up and configuring the many aspects of home office technology. Even if you're happy with your own setup i think you'll find it instructional. 1. OFFICE GENERALITIES & CONSIDERATIONS 2. YOUR COMPUTER & PERIPHERALS |
THE HOME NETWORK Your home network is the framework that everything is built on: working from home, video meetings, the kids doing their schoolwork, all your financial & shopping transactions, your family's entertainment hub...everything! Any changes here make life good or bad for all of the above. Is your network working optimally or is there room for improvement? Sometimes small changes can have big results.
Doing work from home requires a home network. That (above) is MY home network. I just went downstairs and took some pictures of it in all its current squalor. This picture illustrates one thing perfectly: I can be pretty stupid. I was working on transferring large amounts of files a couple of weeks ago (note the two external drives on the mouse pad). To facilitate this, I temporarily disconnected my backup drive to the Synology NAS. That was two weeks ago...damn! Not pictured in this shot is my router/firewall/WIFI access point. After a lengthy period trying to increase my WIFI coverage I moved it to the top of a cabinet in my (centrally-located) kitchen. I built a cable that runs from my cable modem To my router, and another cable that runs from the router to my switch. Again, I'll use my network as a launching point for discussing home networking in general. 2. YOUR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER (ISP) 3. YOUR ROUTER/FIREWALL/ACCESS POINT/WIFI 7. MISCELLANEOUS NETWORKING ISSUES
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