Computer Room suggestions...

Stemming from the picture thread, what unorthodox, unusual suggestions do you guys have for my computer room? I'm moving into an apartment right now and have yet to setup my desk or anything.

My computers, other than the one in my signature, are a custom build in a Cosmos 1000 case, another 15" dell (info escapes me atm, it's old) and soon to be a netbook of some sort.

Worth noting, I've always wanted to setup a home-automation system. The last time I checked into it, I intended to use a beagleboard as the heart of it, but it was still too resource consuming to consider. Anyone have experience with this topic?

Any creative substitutions for the vinyl chairmats? I hate these things, and a $130 bamboo chairmat isn't sounding like a good deal.

 

You can borrow a lot of ideas from --> here, some cool ideas

 

I stumble onto that site every 18mo or so and just soak all of the new stuff in. I really should make it a regular read.

The whiteboard room on there is pretty neat. I've been using some 2'x2' whiteboard panels that I picked up at Home Depot a couple of years ago; velcro command strips holding them to the walls so that I can pop them off and carry them to school if need be. [Long story short, a prof. asked me to prove something I hypothesized in class and I did...but didn't have time to write it down before leaving for class, and didn't expect her to be able to read it from a cell phone picture. So, pop and go. ]

 

get a home server. there on, you can then even do some home automation if you want.


and to get yourself onto crazy ideas think about one thing: how can you make your computers non-obvious. girls don't like big loud computers standing somewhere, marking you as a geek. (so don't you like it yourself if it's noisy all day long).

so try to think how to integrate them into your living place, how to make them blend with the rest, or even hide completely.

once you got that start, you have tons of funky ideas.

one of the ideas out of this base idea was the way to construct my home server. check my sig

 

Some random thoughts:
1) I used to build my desktop computer with dual hard drives so I could mirror my data, but then my laptop had no access to it. Recently I bought a NAS (miniature file server) so now my desktop and both laptops have access to all of my data.
2) The trend these days is to multiple monitors so at work I got dual 22" widescreens. After using them awhile I tend to favor the left one over the right one and I end up sitting left of center so that monitor is more directly in front of me. I still use the secondary monitor to park windows that I'm not accessing as much. I had the idea that I should get a single larger monitor and put it in the center, then a couple of other monitors to flank it with. Maybe a 24" or 26" widescreen in the center and a 20" or so non-widescreen on either side.
3) Right now at my home I have my desktop computer on the floor at the end of the sofa. I have a small table in front of the sofa right at the end, the table is the height of a footstool, and my keyboard and monitor are on the table. I can use the computer and watch tv with my wife at the same time. Most of the time I use my old Logitech wireless trackball. I'm going to buy a keyboard with integrated trackpad and try that.

 

I think Ikea has always had some nice generic, good ideas on items for rooms..

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/10710/

Cin...

 

Some extreme set ups:

http://tutorialblog.org/cool-workspaces/

 

you should get a home server instead of a nas. it's nas on steroids