Constructing A Geek House

Tilde~ writes: "Ever since the first time i read about a geek house, i've always wanted to live in one... very badly... to share an internal network with several like minded individuals just seemed like a perfect... What i could never do... was find one. So, for those people out there who are living in the know, how does one go about founding a geek house? And are there any individuals in the atlanta area with the same dream?"

Comments

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiring is fairly cheap... You can get speedCable for about a buck a foot... that includes 2 cat5e, 2 rg6, and 2 fiber all in one bundle..
OR you can go for the 2 cat5e, 2 rg6 for about $.70/foot. The distribution panel will run you about a grand. SO... for a typical 3BR house, you should be able to get all the parts for about 3-5k.
The cable I am talking about can be found here
So, before you can the idea of a whole house distribution system and network, do lots of research. It's cheaper than you think.

Are all the moderators on crack tonight?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or did the Zippy Filter get mod points?

Re:Are all the moderators on crack tonight?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is just one troll moderator with points to burn

Re:chicks

[Anonymous Coward]

It may not be "informative", but it's certainly "insightful".

Insightful? (was Re:chicks)

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not insightful, just stupid.
"Sentence."

Re:Geek Greeks

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are interested in becoming a fraternity, I would suggest attempting to become a colony of Theta Tau, the oldest enginnering fraternity in the US. All chapters are required to either have a house or be in the process of getting one. As a current member of Gamma Beta Chapter of Theta Tau, we are trying to get a house. When and if we ever get the money to purchace one in the DC area around GWU, then we woudl attempt to so just this idea of getting a house very geeked out. You might want to also get corporate sponsership of such a house. Let companies come in and let the house be a "Yeah, it can be done, see Frat ABC Chapter XYZ's house. " Great way to cut costs and also promote your chapter... John Gruhn Gamma Beta Chapter 658. Treasurer

How to get your dream geek house.

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy.

- Copyrights all your codes.

- Sell your codes to propierty software companies.

- Put on your suit. Get a real job.

- Sue everybody who tries to liberate your codes.

- Protect, defend your intellectual property rights

- Hope you can make tons of money out from it.

- Say goodbye to RMS and GPL.

- Find VC, and go IPO.

- Buy land.

- Hire an architect, and, custom build your dream house.

- blowfish
(c)Copyrighted by blowfish. 2000. AllRights Reserved.

Fun for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in a geek house is fun for a while. I used to live in what can only be described as a "geek house" for a couple of years. We even started a company together and worked out of our living room.

We were all single when we moved in together. Actually the reason we moved in together was because some of us had just become single and wanted to realize some of our dreams of starting a company.

After a while some of us got new girlfriends. Some were more serious about it than others. My girlfriend even lived with us for a short while, but it was clear that living together with your colleagues, friends and girlfriends was not an arragement that would work wery well. People would always work in the living room, day and night. The place was always messy and the kitchen was a disaster. To those who didn't have girlfriends it may also have been a tad traumatic to hear loud noises of people having sex at all hours of the day.

So eventually people started moving out and the geek house dissolved. It was fun to live in one for a while, but you have to remember that things change. People grow up, they meet other people, fall in love, job situations change etc. Today I live with my GF and work with the same people I used to live with. We managed to break up the geek house successfully, so those people are still my best friends.

So do remember that eventually you will want to move out. Make sure that you've thought about what happens if you want out. Make sure that everyone is aware that priorities can change. Make sure that you stay friends.

Splitting up bills

[Cardinal]

While it's great to think about getting a big house to fill with geeks, issues of paying bills have to enter into it. How do you split mortage payments between several unrealted people? Do you rent, and just split the rental bill? Does one of the people assume the position of 'landlord', with all the tax implications and whatever regulations/permits that entails?

One option I've pondered is having a sole person assume the task of paying for the residence, and the other people do their part by covering costs of net access, cable, utilities, yadda. Naturally this would only work if the costs managed to balance themselves out. Even so, there are probably issues with this approach.

For example, is one person 'owning' the house a good idea? How do you handle people breaking off from the group? What if the 'owning' person wants to jump ship, does he kick everyone else out? That could get seriously messy.

Re:Splitting up bills

[zaugg]

My place runs a "house-bank." As bills come in, we allocate the cost, someone pays it, and it all gets spreadsheeted.

Then you get a running total of credit / debt among the house (it makes for an interesting graph.)

DISCLAIMER: probably won't work if someone is an arsehole.

--zaugg

.sig free for 8 months

Re:Splitting up bills

[djozone]

Weel, what I did was rent a house (from a fellow geek!), and offer to install all the wiring if he'd pay for it.

I put all the house bills in my name, and produce a monthly statement for each roomie.

When Cobra-R moved out, he took his hardware :-( but life went on.

What would happen if I moved out is a debatable point, but I expect that the bills would be transferred to a different person, and the landlord would raise the rent ;-)

This is Silicon Valley, and there simply aren't any vacancies. If I owned the house, it would be about the same. I'd rent out a few rooms to geeky friends, and have veto power over construction and wiring. Othere than that...

Net access is just another utility, so the bill gets split 3 ways, just like cable and power. I have no desire to calculate how much bandwidth everyone uses.

Really, the hard part is finding someone you can live with. You could be in a world of hurt if your new roommate started hacking external sites, but no more than if he turned out to be a coke dealer. Bottom line: know who's moving in. Just because they can code C++ doesn't make them a good roommate.

I have found that living in a geek house is a really good way to learn stuff. I taught one guy perl, and he taught me about security. And if you're building a new box, you can always hit people up for spare parts.

Interestingly, this is the 3rd geek house I've lived in. The 1st was full of bike geeks: guys who rode 100 miles a week and had seen "Breaking Away" 50 times. The second one was music geeks. We were all djs who were obsessed with music and the surrounding industry. And true to form, we networked a killer stereo system. This time out, it's tech-geeks (the classic type of geek), and it's just the same: our obsession dominates house conversation, and the evidence therof (books, parts, cds...) are everywhere.

All hail the alpha geek.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Alan]

No way...

Hard Drive Magnets! Everyone has a few old 100meggers sitting around that aren't being used in the mp3 server, take them apart and use the (very strong) magnets in them for the fridge. You can hold lots with one, like... an ORA book.

Disclaimer: I've never done this myself, but have one, so I can't say if it's from an old HD, or a new one, or what. But heck, I have my bat book up on the fridge with this.... :)

Whiteboard

[Chris Johnson]

*g* really. I feel so cheap, I only have about 2x6 (in three separate parts).Must go and get a third jumbo sized one to match the other two so that the mini one can go with the matching corkboard :)

Where do you _get_ a 4x8 sheet of whiteboard? I've been wondering about that...

Work?

[gavinhall]

Posted by polar_bear:

If you have a techie job you shouldn't have to look to far past your co-workers to find someone looking to split rent. Once you put more than one geek in a habitat the whole geek house thing just kind of happens...

Just make sure it's someone you can get along with and have similar tastes in entertainment with. There are two geeks in my house and about 9 computers and a cable modem and DSL, but only 1 kitchen and 1 TV.

Why do you expect to grow up?

[Paul Crowley]

I have no plans to indulge in this "growing up" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, maturity means doing all the sex and drugs and rock'n'roll you used to do, but having a good meal first (thanks, Warren Ellis). Why to you want, plan, or expect to "grow up"? I know people who've avoided it all their lives, and are pushing sixty.

I'm serious here. And yes, I'm also just below thirty.
--

Re:Why do you expect to grow up?

[GooseKirk]

I turn thirty in just two short months... shudder... and couldn't agree more. Growing up. Pfft. I'm not done having new experiences yet.

I like the Warren Ellis quote - was that in Transmet or one of his columns or ?

Re:Geek Greeks

[pb]

Psi Phi
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[CaseyB]

* lots of fridge magnets for the pizza menus

Also Perl Poetry magnets.

I smell money.

[Chemical Serenity]

I'm at the stage in my financial development when I'm able to start pondering house purchases 'n stuff. While I'd like to buy a house for the Ms. and myself, the idea of tricking out a house for geek occupation and turning it into revenue property sounds pretty sweet... Seems to me that geek rentors would be close to the optimum tenant (little or no party action, too many toys around to be the kind that would engage in property destruction, and more than likely to be able to come up with rent money on a regular basis).

Hm. I think I'll start scouting around for some places that can be fixed up right.

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

Most geek houses are geek wannabe houses

[substrate]

Whether its a communal geek house or the prize home of a lone geek most geek homes are only geek wannabe homes. Pervasive network wiring throughout the house, more than the usual number of computers and a pretty well decked out entertainment system... *yawn*

There's plenty of opportunity to be a hacker in a home or make use of products designed by hackers. At the same time you can make a positive impact on the environment, or at least less negative one than your neighbours. Consider the homes at Entertia, they're designed to make it possible to live off the grid, they do their heating and cooling via non-photovoltaic solar energy. The designer of the concept behind these homes is somebody I'd be proud to see use the term 'hacker' to describe themselves. Much more proud than seeing the Kevin Mitnick's of the world describe themselves as such.

There are other alternative energy or renewable resource methods too, this just happens to be one I'm seriously considering for my own housing needs. A home is a system, there's got to be better systems than just a simple thermostat, or even standard electronic thermostats. Put your coding skills to good use and design a heating and cooling system with mechanically inclined friends.

Re:IMHO...

[Tor]

Brag time, huh?

The near perfect geek recipe (found in my house):

• A Corel Netwinder (StrongARM cpu) running Debian as DHCP/Samba/Print/WINS/NIS/Masquerading/Mail/Web/FT P/IMAP/NFS/Automount server (with tons of domain names pointing to it).
• A Sun Ultra 1 from work. (Shared NFS/NIS/Automounted home directories from my Netwinder). Used for telecommuting (most of my work applications, such as Rational Rose RT, and Lotus Notes, run on it).
• Monitor from this SUN is hooked into a VGA switch box (via a Sun-to-VGA converter), and is thus shared by all my machines.
• A cable modem, switched hub, and wireless ethernet bridge.
• A laptop from work with a Wireless PCMCIA card, dual-boot between Linux and Windows (using DHCP in both cases, plug&play both home and work).
• A PC with OpenBSD/Debian/Win95/WinNT...
• A VPN tunnel (TCP/IP, Netware, AppleTalk) to my work LAN, initiated by my Solaris workstation there, using VTUN and IPNat.
• My wife's PC is setup with her own home directory on my Netwinder as her primary document directory.
• Her cousin's computer equipped with a wireless ethernet card.

What I'm most proud of? Not a single one of these machines is faster than 350 MHz! :-)

Re:/. want ads?

[PiMan]

small apt? why not use the official debian archive, it's bigger, and free...

Re:hey - Upstate NY - 716

[Avenger]

Man that would be an awesome idea ... a nice big house out in Pitsford... or Fairport .. Fairport would be better .. cheaper electric. (With an RS6000 running in my basement, electric gets mighty expensive!)

Re:IMHO...

[Malor]

The proto-geek line was intended as humor, not to be taken all that seriously. I just happen to find that image particularly amusing. :-)

Most Geek Houses are assembled one piece at a time. If you continue to live with net-savvy people, you'll get there. Look back on this conversation in 5 years -- I bet your house by then is fully wireless, remote-controllable, and only gets hacked into once or twice a week. ("God dammit, who made coffee at 3AM AGAIN?") :-)

<<RON>>

Re:IMHO...

[Malor]

Sounds like you have an embryonic Geek House -- perhaps that means you qualify as proto-geeks. :-)

I think the Real Deal has at least one (preferably about four) cat5 drops in every room and at least a small networking closet. A well-funded Geek House would have a switch as a network backbone, a good-quality firewall that does NAT/PAT, local WINS, DHCP, and DNS servers (can all be on the same box of course) and some sort of high speed connection to the outside world. It would also have a server with installation programs for all the house network games.

Target functionality: any geek can walk in, wire his computer in using DHCP, and be off and running. No CDs or other admin attention required. This allows you to throw impromptu LAN parties, a staple in any modern geek house.

If you have a house full of college-age geeks, you may also want to have a fridge with plentiful alchoholic beverages. But geeks of all ages will appreciate a good stock of liquid caffeine-infusion mechanisms. Coffee is relatively inexpensive but usually doesn't go over with the under-18 crowd. Colas work for almost any guest. If you have an extremely well-heeled geek house, you can even provide munchies, but this will impact the pocketbook nearly as much as a bad computer-games habit.

It is generally a good idea to have maid service, too. :-)

What now, Personals? =)

[dew]

Well, danged if slashdot isn't turning into geek classifieds of sorts, but I'm heading out to the San Francisco area in the next two weeks and am looking for a geek pad myself, to crash at for a few months to a year. Anyone within 50 miles of SF? =)

Seriously, though, is there a real place for geek classifieds and roommate ads?

David E. Weekly

Re:What now, Personals? =)

[UncleRoger]

but I'm heading out to the San Francisco area in the next two weeks and am looking for a geek pad myself, to crash at for a few months to a year. Anyone within 50 miles of SF? =)

Well, I'm in the City, but we're pretty full up -- We've got 5 Linux boxen, 2 Win95 boxes, 2 Win98, 1 Win3.11, 3 Macs, 1 MS-DOS box, plus miscellaneous others. We've got ethernet running through the walls to half the house, and 6 phone lines (7 soon, if I can get approval from the CFO (the wife)).

We're pretty lucky, though -- we have a pretty small mortgage. Figure on at least $2k/mo just for rent if you want an actual house, and $1k or more per month for a simple studio. And if you drive, gas is about the most expensive in the whole country (over $2/gal for reg. unleaded). Of course, we've also got BART, MUNI, and lots of other public transit. And, there aren't many other places I would ever want to live.

Re:What now, Personals? =)

[hEpen]

www.craigslist.org

Re:What now, Personals? =)

[The_Messenger]

Try the new Slashdot geek classified section, GeekRoomies. Remember: if you don't find your next roomie through GeekRoomies, he could be Rusty from kuro5hin! And no one wants that!

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid =geekroomies

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:What now, Personals? =)

[Suppafly]

sounds like an idea for a web page.. www.geekclasified.com or something.. heh..

Re:What now, Personals? =)

[Raw Baggard]

Hey, ditto, I'm moving up there pretty soon, and I can find a few places on craigslist.com, but a true geek house would be ideal. Some place that I can go and scream "WHY DOESN'T THIS COMPILE?" and have someone scream back "SEMICOLON AFTER THE TYPDEF." Now that my friend, combined with massive amounts of bandwidth, is the kind of place I'm looking for.

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[db]

I live in atlanta now and am currently looking to move. The geek situation sounds extremely interesting. if anyone is interested, let me know as well! (Including original poster)

--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org

I'm in atlanta

[db]

I'm in Atlanta (Marietta, actually), and my expanding collection of miscellaneous computer hardware and home theater equipment and miscellaneous electronics (or, collectively, "junk", as my mother so fondly refers to it)is outgrowing my room that I've lived in at home for the past 15 years or so. Moving into a geek house would rule, namely since it would encourage my (expensive) hardware addiction. If any one is interested in something like this, drop me a line.

--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[ajv]

The Android from the Simpsons. The big fat guy who is aka "The Collector" in the Lucy Lawless episode. The guy who runs the comic shop. The guy who gets the medium size star trek utility belt.

oops

Re:His name isn't "The Android"

[ajv]

Check this out for all your the Comic Book Guy references.

Point taken. CBG would be proud of you.

Pictures of a geek house

[ajv]

Check out the machine room. Only three Intel's in this picture. The rest are alphas. The little libretto with its lid closed sitting near a keyboard on the desk is the WaveLAN gateway. The cable modem is sitting on the far PC. Guests can use the long cat5 leads on the floor. They go everwhere inside the hours, but for true geekdom, the WaveLAN is for the garden on our lovely sunny days we're having here in sunny Sydney.

Our lounge room with two of the laptops and essential entertainment equipment. Notice no steenking cat 5 for us!

Re:What about the games??

[ajv]

We play nothing but Total Annilihation here. I'm waiting for the PS2 to come out in Australia, but even then, I might wait for it to come down a little bit before buying into it.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[ajv]

We just need enough bandwidth to surf the net and play Total Annilihation without lag. WaveLAN does that for us. We use 40 bit WEP (Silver cards, natch) to prevent all but the most ardent admirers from snooping on us. The fastest link in the house is the 11 Mb/s WaveLAN. The cable modem is about 4.5 Mb/s and the hub is 10 Mb/s. Although we're very well connected here, the entire LAN didn't cost us much money (certainly less than $USD1000 including all five WaveLAN cards). It works well enough for us.

IR has dropout problems. I have problems all the time with my various remotes. I need more IR shiny surfaces to encourage the set top box to change channels more easily.

Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[ajv]

You need the following things:

* a big fat pipe that everyone pays for (DSL or cable is fine). And I'm not talking about a bucket bong here.

* an agreed administrator for the firewall and internal infrastructure (dhcp, mail relay, etc). This person then gets to choose the One True Operating System(tm) for the firewall and the rest of you can get stuffed. Rotate on a three month basis to reduce friction

* bins a fair way away from the kitchen or dining room (the pizza boxes get gross when people "forget" to take the rubbish out)

* a large fridge to take the booze (this is not optional for Australian-infested geek houses)

* lots of fridge magnets for the pizza menus

* A WaveLAN gateway for resident and itinerant geeks, and lots of long cat5 cables for those who are WaveLAN challenged. Spare WaveLAN cards

* rules on significant others staying more than about three nights a week. Even when everyone in the house is earning more than six figures.

* rules on who buys the next bottle of single malt scotch, cognac, brandy, even *shhudder* bourbon (there's nothing worse than using a marker on a Glenlivet or Glenmorangie)

* Sound padding for the walls when people spank the monkey. Got to have privacy, man.

* A damn fine hifi with a large CD and DVD collection. Most geeks will supply this one without too many problems

* Big ass TV. None of this 34 cm crap. Most geeks disdain TV publically, but are closet watchers. Example, ask who the Android is and why they identify with him. You'll get an answer from 99.99% of all True Geeks(tm).

* Cable or satellite TV with as many channels as the house can afford

* UPS for the machine room. Get an extractor if gets warm like ours does.

Tips for living with a geek

Get a cleaner at least once every two weeks. This works fine for me.

Get a gardener if you have a garden. Geeks do not garden on a regular enough basis. Things will die and overgrow and look messy and you can get evicted.

Work on the chores. Geeks are naturally lazy and refuse to do the dishes if they do the rubbish or vice versa. Don't mention the bathroom

Kick the mess back into the responsible person's bedroom. The shared areas shouldn't be cluttered with people's crap unless it's really geeky and can be used or admired by all.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Sehnsucht]

maybe that guy with the H on his head from Red Dwarf?

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Rombuu]

Big ass TV. None of this 34 cm crap. Most geeks disdain TV publically, but are closet watchers. Example, ask who the Android is and why they identify with him. You'll get an answer from 99.99% of all True Geeks(tm).

Not to show my ignorence, but who is the Andriod? Marvin from HHGTTG?

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[ryanr]

Rimmer is a hologram (hence the H), not an android.

At least I think computer generated human-shaped holograms don't count as androids. Aw crap, now I don't know... thanks alot.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[whuppy]

And they're handy for destroying lots of data really quickly.

--

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Strider-]

Real geeks get rare earth magnets for their Why not just use the hard drive magnets you have lying around in your junk box? :P (After a good laquering, the platters make for great coasters too. :P)

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Tingler]

Example, ask who the Android is and why they identify with him. You'll get an answer from 99.99% of all True Geeks(tm).

His point was proven. He did not mention anything about a correct answer, simply an answer.

One thing he did miss, (or maybe it was implied) was an MP3 server wired up to the stereo.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[DeadSea]

* lots of fridge magnets for the pizza menus

Real geeks get rare earth magnets for their fridge. I bought some of the smaller ones from ebay a bit ago. They rock. You can stick a half an inch thick stack of menus to the fridge with no problems. CDs, magazines, power tools, small furry animals, whatever, rare earth magnets hold them. :-)

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Kryptic Knight]

Glenlivet or Glenmorangie !!!!! How tame.

HA! ... superior Geek Houses only drink a cunning mix of Jolt Cola and Isle of Jura.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Mark F. Komarinski]

You're thinking of Rimmer, when you mean Kryten (the funny-head-shaped guY).

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[The_Messenger]

No shit, man. Maybe it's Data from Star Trek? The only TV I watch is the occasional South Park or UCB. And the occasional random movie on Bravo or IFC. I can only keep away from the PC for three hours, tops.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Fearomone]

I wouldn't count Rimmer as an android, but I certainly would count Kryten.

Actually, you could do with having a pre-reprogramming Kryten in this house. Solves the chores problem, at least.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[fm6]

Good advice, especially the bit about trash bins and hiring a cleaner and gardener. As for the chores, some allocation software is badly needed!!!!

I wonder if the emphasis on BaseT and RF for the LAN isn't a little dated. If I ever network my own domicile, I'd strongly consider IR technology. This Netschools white paper talks about RF problems (interference from microwave ovens, the "hidden node" problem, etc.) that IR solves. And IR certainly provides plenty of bandwidth. So why have all that ugly cable lying around? Oh yes of course -- so that visitors will know they're in a geek house.

Parenthetically, the netschools web site is an intriguing place. They want to sell every K-12 student in the country a laptop with wireless internet!

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[fm6]

IR has dropout problems. I have problems all the time with my various remotes. I need more IR shiny surfaces to encourage the set top box to change channels more easily.

I doubt if the IR technology in a TV remote even vaguely resembles that in an 11 megabit IR LAN!

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[lpontiac]

* a large fridge to take the booze (this is not optional for Australian-infested geek houses)

Right on, mate.

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[sistans]

No way,
I don't even ALLOW magnets in my place! (Unless part of a device). Magnets are a hazard, so many people have accidentally degaussed their own bits. (Mostly stupid people though.) I just have one mammoth magnet for quick-n-easy data destruction. It's in a glass case, like a fire extinguisher.

You can also strap and electromagnet/tape demagnetizer onto your hard drive. Then you can implement the appropriate trigger/self-destruct system of your choice.

Or you could simply use strong crypto. But why not both?

-A

"Can't chat now babycakes, I'm on nude patrol!" -RedMeat

---

Re:Essential bits for a well oiled geek house

[Jollyeugene]

Yeah, but you also need elevated data center flooring for it to be a true geek house.

Re:Clear Lake, Houston Geeks?

[wynlyndd]

On the west side of town, look into the Walden apartments. Actually there are several Walden properties wired with 100bT, each a bit different from the other. I lived at the "original" one pretty much at Beltway 8 and Westheimer on the westside (near the Tinseltown theater). http://www.waldenweb.com

Try here:

[Byteme]

This is my Geek House, an Earthship.

Another great resource is Homepower.

Using nature and technology to liberate.

Re:Look in college towns

[JimRay]

I'm currently living in almost this exact setup. There are four of us living in a 4 bedroom apartment (although only 2 of us qualify as geeks) 3 guys and a girl. Beautiful Chapel Hill, NC, home of the TarHeels and iBiblio. CAT5 running throughout the apartment. DSL connection, squid proxy, junkbuster to get rid of ads (sorry slashdot) a central cd-burner and mp3 server so that we get some true file sharing going on. It's a pretty mixed environment--PPC Linux, macOS9, Windows 98, Windows 95, RedHat 6.2. Using NFS, netatalk and SMB, we all talk pretty well together. I'd recommend a dedicated firewall and a dedicated "media" server if you're going to run a similar setup--the one linux firewall box that we have pulls double duty and it hurts.
The important thing to remember is, people gotta get along before you introduce things like dedicated, high speed internet.

Re:Is the girl...

[JimRay]

actually, i'm the mac user. nice generalization tho.

Philadelphia area...

[pen]

If anyone is interested in something like this in the Philadelphia area, drop me an email.

--

Ultimate House is in Atlanta

[hackerb9]

Hi, I'm a GA Tech grad student so I know that one of the most wired houses in the world can be found in Atlanta. It's called the "Aware Home". You can check it out here:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/

It's not actually supposed to be a "Geek House" but I bet they've got geeks lining up for blocks to be the "researchers" who get to live in it.

-Ben

This is an ask slashdot?

[benno]

Steps to getting a geek house

1/ Find some friends
2/ Go rent house
3/ Get hi-speed net axs
4/ Connect computers to network

Come on, really it isn't that hard! Which part are
you actually having trouble with? (I'm guessing
it is part 1).

Re:This is an ask slashdot?

[Balial]

Damn straight!

Anyway, LANs are so 2 years ago. VPNs are the way to go nowdays.

Balial

Re:the key is communication

[deusx]

If you're going to quote the cheer, at least spell it right. "agressive" doesn't have any rhythm. :)

It's:

Beeee aggressive.

B-E aggressive.

B. E.
A-G-G.
R-E-S-S-I-V-E.

(HTH)

Re:Geek Greeks

[Asperity]

Throw away your togas and break out the chitons! Talk to your friendly neighborhood classics department for help on making your organization more authentic.

FUNDING...

[battjt]

Our house was funded by student loans....

We closed up 6 years ago and it still isn't all paid for yet.

I still have the 4x8 sheet of white board. Best investment we made.

Joe

How to get a million dollars and not pay taxes

[UncleRoger]

First, get a house...

Sorry, but here in San Francisco, houses are not something you can put on your mastercard... 8^)

Re:Wiring is important...

[UncleRoger]

...if you've got a laptop but no wireless, you're really missing out - especially if you have a garden.

Nah, just run cabling outside through underground conduit, with weatherproof jacks by the hot tub. After all, you'll want power there too...

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[DMC]

lagavulin (sp?), laphroig, bowmore. nothing younger than 15 tho. gotta love islay.

mmm...i'm thirsty.

*THE* geek house of Atlanta

[NYC]

If you are in the Atlanta area, check out the Aware Home Research Initiative.

The Aware Home project is basically of very big geek house. Not only is most everything in the house connected, but the level of technology is also beyond what is currently on the market. just imagine it: a huge house that is heavily-funded and contains nothing but cool uber-toys.

Unfortunatly, you can't live there since it is a research project of Georgia Tech. But there are numerous students that [will] live there to do "research". Forget the dorm, give my me cyber-house!

--weenie NT4 user: bite me!

Re:chicks

[MaggieL]

There are no geek houses that want chicks in them. I speak from experience.

Ours does. :-)
We have two already and would consider a well-qualified third. Being bi is a big plus though; we may have some guys around here at some point in the future. We also give bonus points for aviators and radio amateurs.

Oh...re: the booze thread? We don't drink much here, but think highly of 25-yo Glenmorangie when we do.

Anyone in Urbana-Champaign area..

[John Hankok]

Want to start a geek compound? I have always wanted to be a part of one of these. Give me an email if you live here and are interested!!

Re:They're on the way....

[einstein]

I've read some articles and seen some shows on this topic. The details escape me, but it was something like this: ...

I actually just sent in an application for a job at this company, and looked at their website. there is a real video promotional thingie, that is kinda cheesey, but shows off all that the gadgetry can do...hold on a bit while I find the link...ah here it is.. Real video format. enjoy.
---

I got your geek house right here :)

[EvilNight]

Geek houses (or apartments in our case) just grow themselves. Let's face it, who starts out with $20,000 and says "Hey, let's buy a shitload of awesome computer equipment and build a network." Most people have more practical uses for the money.

Let's see... ours started with two roomates living together at my parent's house while finishing college. We relocated to a larger city to get real computer jobs. Over time, we upgraded our computers. With a little extra cash, we resurrected our old systems and put them to good use. The phone modem was replaced with cable internet access. Another geek moved in with us, bringing two more computers. Once again, everyone upgraded over the course of a year or so. Cat5 running all through the house, along the ceilings, floors, through the air vents, etc.

The current configuration is 12 computers. One massive fileserver (60GB Raid0 IDE, hey, it's cheap, and 2 years old), several smaller servers made from older computers, gratuitous Linux gateway machine, and the three geek primary machines, most of which put corporate iron to shame :)

We even have one hooked to the entertainment center, for watching pirated movies, video clips, and to facilitate the conversion of just about every media format into just about every other format. I'm waiting for the TiVO hack that lets me use it as a digital movie recorder :)

Planned upgrades: 525 GB Raid5 IDE fileserver, with 5 SCSI CD Changers (we have too much data to store it all on CDs... need live storage). This can be done for under $2500 thanks to a awesome 8 bay UDMA100 tower Promise is planning to release around christmas. Just slap in 8 75GB IBM drives and have a blast, and it connects to the host system using LVD160 :)

One of my roomates has gotten 'nostalgic' about his first computer, so he's rebuilding it (NexGen P100 clone) by mounting it on a large board, building a plexiglass case around it, and hanging it on the wall in the living room (no keyboard, mouse or monitor). Install Linux, add a network connection, add a digital tickertape, and write some funky perl scripts and we'll be watching Slashdot headlines scroll across the ticker in the living room. Perhaps one day we'll get it to chime the hour, announce CallerID information, do the doorbell, and get a webcam on it.

Let's see, we have an old Alpha we picked up for $50 (there was a story about those on here a few months ago, we figured why not), perhaps we can hook that up in the kitchen with the old VT100 terminal I got recently, and use it to browse for cooking recipies or something...

We were actually considering doing an inventory of our hardware and setting up a geek house page at some time in the future. I'll keep you posted :)

Of course, the network is switched, and we are getting sick of all the cables... We picked up a copy of "Smart Homes for Dummies" which I can highly reccommend. You can get cables for your house that have the 4 primary outlets (Cat5, Phone, Cable, and AC) all in one bundle, just run them through the wall. That's nowhere near as hard as it seems, btw. I think that is what puts most geeks off... "We have to open the walls? Ugh. Too much work."

The problem is that geeks just can't throw hardware away...

Here's what I have, and what I would like:

[Sahib!]

What we have:

• 1 room dedicated to computers, called "Houston"
• Mission Control, get it?
• cable from Charter@Home
• 8 port 10/100 switch as a backbone
• (2) 8 port 10baseT hubs
• one for firewall, DNS machines, etc. on a subnetwork; the other for unexpected guests
• cable drops in distant rooms
• (2) Linux boxen
• (2) Windows boxen
• (2) Mac OS boxen
• (1) OpenBSD box (firewall)
• a few other boxes that are either non-working or not connected to the network
• dozens of CD-Rs full of .mp3's which can be streamed to any network computer
• (1) Bose stereo system, (1) Pioneer stereo system, (1) Monsoon MM-700 speaker set
• various guitars, amps, drums
• Call Waiting w/ CallerID
• I *hate* talking to telemarketers!
• a dog named Astro

What I'd like:

• cleaner housemates
• a real DVD player
• watching them on a laptop is ok for one person, but its no party
• more working machines for games
• a reliable, working printer and scanner
• more bathrooms
• a job

We have four people living in a house that we got for only $900/month and it seems to work great. Not far from you either, we are in Athens, GA. Granted only two of us are really techies, so its not a complete Geek House. In short, use your imagination, and what you and your friends already have. A Geek House doesn't really start out as a Geek House, it becomes one.

Re:That's easy

[Sahib!]

Be forewarned that Home Park is a fringe "ghetto" area. Most of the people there are nice, Techies, hippies, etc. There are some really great block parties there. But its really close to much worse areas, and if its well known that your house is full of expensive computer equipment, you may have trouble with theives.

still deciding on cable

[peter303]

I'm technologically backwards. Just got a car a few years ago in my 30s, phone and TV too, but haven't decided on cable.

Yet I work with (and define) state-of-the-art scientific computing at my job.

Re:That's easy

[Zog]

Also it's damn close to the GT campus itself which is one of the most wired places in the country thanks to the 1996 Olympics (fiber, fiber everywhere), so I am sure DSL will be easy to find.

It seems like that'd be true at first, but it's pretty common for stuff to get routed all over the place before it hits the 'Tech backbone (one of my friends who has telocity has to send stuff through NYC and Chicago just to get to his server at GTRI a mile or two down the road)

-Brian

geek house...

[Grifter]

you want a geek house... It seems that the college I got to has 5 of them. It's a great thing... and The one I live in I started, and we are about 1 year living togeather, it's fun... I wouldn't just want another geek to come and move in, it would have to be a friend. And our house itsn't a total geek house either. Most of us have lives outside of computers, and the shared areas have to be kept mostally clean. We have a den that holds some tables with computers on them and the servers are in the back. Make sure you have 1 guy thats in charge of the servers and the network, and then a secondary who knows how it all works as well... It's a must... some geeks just aren't big on networking or firewalling and stuff and can't figure it out when somthing goes wrong.

Re:But there are a finite number of them

[finkployd]

That's how I feel about my hair too :)

Re:I live in one

[finkployd]

My geek house makes frequest trips for "burritos as big as your head" as well :)

Finkployd

All in the family

[Thyrsus]

I put cable trays and cat 5 in the attic of this 30 year old house this spring, pulling it down to the studio and the office along the wall in raceways, since I'm not the right guy to drill holes in studs hiding behind sheetrock. The cable connection goes to a linux-based firewall. All I need to do is add a couple more geeks. My wife practices piano too much (or do music geeks count?), but the kids -- well, with any luck at all :-).

Essential ingredient: Non geeks

[Weasel Boy]

I would call myself a successful veteran of geek house living, with about 5 1/2 years across two houses. The best factor in both cases was the non-geek contingent. Not only are non-geeks better cooks :-) and somewhat more likely to care about things like decorating and keeping the house clean, they are also more interesting to talk to. When it was only geeks, we basically talked computers and sometimes politics. When non-geeks were present, we talked about art, religion, history, philosophy, sex, food, music, travel, family, linguistics, games, crafts... and politics and computers. I think a 50-50 split of non-geeks to geeks is about right.

Other good ratios to have in a house:
1:1 gender ratio
1:1 pets to people
1:1 bedrooms (even if some double up)
1:2 phone lines
>1:1 computers - 5:1 for me currently
>1:1 Mbps - 5:1 here is good too. Not less than 1 Mbps external access in any case
~1:2 operating systems
1:2 weekly shopping days
1:1 flavors of soda
1:2 flavors of ice cream
3:2 flavors of breakfast cereal

Why NOT to live in a geek house

[Plug]

Here in Hamilton, New Zealand there are a handful of proper geek houses I know. Basically, flat rate broadband internet is only becoming affordable now, and a lot of the more popular geek houses have been the ones with large internet pipes to them. Why I don't want to live in one of these houses: 1) Geek houses are networked and have fast internet. This breeds LANs. Even if you dont plan to have LANs, they happen. People bring their machines around, one of your mates will bring theirs, and when someone else asks your flatmate, they'll say "someone else is here, might as well come over", which soon becomes "Might as well make a LAN of it!" This has lead to dishes go unwashed for a week, "communal" flat food no longer being bought because all the LANners will eat it, and above all - no lounge. 2) I like having a lounge, a place with no geek stuff necessary at all, but good luck finding four geeks to live together and not having computers in the lounge. 3) Studying when your flatmates are urging you to play Quake is impossible. 4) While submitting this, I happened to check on IRC - and guess what sort of conversation I found! comming to the lan this weekend? there any places left at the flate ?? yeah there is heaps of room in the shed or my room * Accolade will save you a spot novac heh 5) I've seen chores lists that refer to flatmates as "Trojan, Blitz and RageX" instead of "Daniel, Garet and Andrew". NOT cool. 6) Chicks do not like to live in geek houses. An exception to this has been made in a couple of geek houses in my area - however the chicks are normally romantically involved with one of the geeks. Quality, single chicks do NOT gravitate towards geek houses. Geek houses are great to go to but they're not cool to live in. They dont always hold flatmates forever, they have almost no privacy because of the people who think they can just wander in and do what they want, and knowing people on IRC is not necessarily a good sign that they're good to live with too. YMMV of course, but this is what its like over here. A "less geeky" house, one with just UTP between the rooms and a switch somewhere connected to the 'net, is fine by me, and really doesnt need organising.

Aww, ya missed out, buddy

[rhadc]

I'm in Atlanta and I just moved last weekend. Two of the three of us are "geeks," roughly. Between the two of us geeks we have 7 or more computers. We're thinking of reselling some DSL through wireless network cards to our neighbors. I don't know of any other "geek" houses personally, but I think there are surely some places like that near GaTech. The hard part is finding geeky interests and good social skills.

Don't have enough geek friends in Atlanta? I didn't feel that there was a shortage. Good luck finding them, though.

Tell ya what. I think if you go and wander aimlessly down Techwood drive between North Avenue and 10th Street you may come to a realisation. You may find yourself surrounded by "geeks". You might even discover that you feel a little uncomfortable. This is a sign that you aren't the geek you think you are. At any given time during the day, you can find 10-15 geeks walking down and around that street. If you head west a little, your feeling of anxiety/elation may increase. You'll even find something you may never has seen before--geeks who like football!

Anyway, good luck man,

rhadc

SWG seeks Same

[Julius X]

Connections Personals Ad:
----------------------------------------

SWG (Single White Geek) seeking same to build home as geek compound. Age not really an issue, 19-35 preferred. Females welcome, males expected. Must have knowledge of GNU license, mod_perl, linux kernel recompilation, and +20% system overclock. Contact box 31337 if interested.

-Julius X

Simple

[grappler]

Do you go to a sufficiently geeky engineering or comp sci school (like me)? find the geekiest fraternity on campus, and I guarantee you they have a house that is wired to the gills. In fact the one at my school (Fiji (Phi Gamma Delta)) is building a new house for themselves now so my guess is it will feed and clothe them with robot slaves.

Re:What we did.

[rark]

there are such things as housing coops

I don't know how they handle the legal/tax end of such things, but they do approximately the same thing -- the house is owned by shareholders -- Zami, in Santa Cruz, comes to mind.

A place to start, I guess, if anyone is thinking about doing such a think

Re:Perhaps the moderator thinks...

[alienmole]

If it weren't for the negative connotations, I'd say "a gook of geeks".

I mean, what could be better than weekend-all-night popcorn, DVD 'n' Quake sessions?

I live with my geek girlfriend, and her PC is in the living room with a DVD-ROM hooked up to the TV. She also has a better graphics card than mine (to support a Hauppage WinTV card), so I use her machine to play things like Quake, when she lets me. We regularly stay up till 4am surfing and programming. So I guess I have a geek house where nGeeks == 2.

I think we need ways of quantifying or rating geek houses: number of geeks, total feet of cat5, total wattage of data-carrying em radiation, total GB, MHz, etc.

Perhaps the moderator thinks...

[alienmole]

...that the idea of geeks congregating in special houses is inherently funny!

Re:Perhaps the moderator thinks...

[Elgon]

Definitely.(Is there a collective noun for geeks? A network? A university? A cluster?)

I think the idea is a great one. I have a bunch of friends who I'd love to do this with but we all live too far apart: Matt the security dude, Alex the C/C++ guru, Tom the HTML/Web Design God and me, ummm... well I can do a bit of Perl/CGI stuff and not much else but hey, I'm learning.

It would be a great learning environment too: Oh damn buffer overflow security problems in my code: Matt, how do I sort this?

Truly, I have seen the promised land. My girlfriend (HTML/Web design God's sister) might disagree as she is horrified by my geek apprenticeship. (Although we could keep her quiet by building a computer drive unit and telescope for her - 'strominer).

I mean, what could be better than weekend-all-night popcorn, DVD 'n' Quake sessions?

Elgon

Re:Geek Greeks

[war2k1]

actually, a few of us at USC (univ of so cal) are starting a geek frat... Eta Alpha Kappa.... if it doesnt make sense, think about what a capital eta looks like.... heh

soon @hakfrat.org and hakusc.org

get me at gezick@gezick.net

Well, While we're at it... Utah Valley, Anyone?

[weston]

As it so happens, I'm looking for housing at the moment. Utah Valley area. Anyone looking to found or fill a spot in a geek house? Prefer those who have interests computers AND other things.

weston@<typeTheThirdLetterOfTheAlphabetHere>soft .net

Re:Well, While we're at it... Utah Valley, Anyone?

[[PF] Lurch]

Dude,
I've got a kickass geekhouse in north orem. (11Mbs microwave link, 1" conduit in the walls with cat5 and a 100Mbs hub, DSS tv) Only problem... its mostly full. I've got 1 bedroom left, but its being used as a office by 2 of my roommates.

Target

[swerdloff]

Good idea - advertise to the world that you are going to move in with five geeks and having many thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment in there.

While it sounds like a good idea, after a short time it _also_ sounds like a perfect target for theft. Padlock them doors, kiddies. Then deadbolt 'em, and do everything short of setting spring guns.

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[threedays]

I hated Atlanta when I got here 3 years ago, and it took a good year to find my groove. Ive moved all over the city since then, and now live in dunwoody also. Ive got a great geek house, dsl, lots of cables, computers hanging on the walls, bsd's, linux, solaris, and a laptop with a riccochet modem. Atlanta isnt all that bad :) I suggest flashers on roswell road for a good time, before your girlfriend gets here that is :) Also try Locoz, the Taco Macs, Diggers for Sports, Chicagos pizza (weekends are nuts there). All of these places are within 5 minutes of your home most likely. Email if your smart and need a good job.

Geek house, huh?

[sharkey]

We have one at the fair each year. They're mostly pencil-necks though. The bearded lady and Tiny Tom got to putting on airs, and and regard the pencil-necked geeks as below their social circle.

If you are student ...

[Midnight Thunder]

If you are a student then you could probably find some other people on the computer course ( male or female ) and suggest that you share a house with them the next year and get it set up for networked death matches.

When I was at uni I shared a house with some friends on the same course and we had coaxial cables running around the house. You had to be careful on the stairs to make sure that the cable wasn't lying around, otherwise it was a potential broken neck situation.

Re:Planet Geek - BTDT

[vik]

I joined the Artemis Society http://www.asi.org to do that, but it's taking a wee while to happen. It's got as far as booking a launch on a converted SS18 ICBM for a satellite (TB2001) that should prove I'm serious enough.

Once the world wakes up (and the TransOrbital lunar satellite should provide some impetus for that), I'm sure interplanetary travel will eventually be practical for the individual. I'm fairly confident that will happen within my lifetime.

Meanwhiles, back at the ranch, we'd like to build the ranch. "Geek Compound" as we call it, is envisaged to be built in a relatively isolated community centred around a high-speed data pipe and a self-contained pizza bakery in a warmish part of New Zealand. Other geeky features of this little village include a hydroponic greenhouse (trial system on my web page), use of renewable power sources and impressive perimeter monitoring systems. Good fences make good neighbours.

'Cos I'm married to this wonderful geek lady called Suz, it'll have to be done on a couples basis. Cats welcome, and dogs too as long as they aren't too stringy.

Vik :v)

Re:Moon Geek

[vik]

But it'd be a real bugger to hook into the internet from there.

Vik :v)

Re:What we did.

[leperjuice]

Well hello Mr. Fancy-Pants!

Seriously, I imagine that while you feel really good about your creation (and you should), at the same time what you've told us doesn't help us any.

So I pose some questions:

* Who are these two other people you're living with?

* How did you find them?

* How was the house purchased? Cash up front? Some weird tripartite mortgage thing? And what are the issues you've found regarding joint non-spousal ownership of a residence?

* Did you wire it yourself or hire contractors? (Drilling through studs behind drywall is a big tub of no-fun)

To name a few...

It's not that hard

[Evro]

My girlfriend and I got cable modem w/2 IPs & a 10 Mbps hub. I don't know if that's geek enough for you but it was good enough for us. File sharing, print sharing, shared internet.

The next step is the linksys cable/dsl router thingy that lets u do away w/ the 2nd ip address. Also We were thinking of getting a cobalt qube as a more efficient file server (no reason for us both to have the same 3 gigs of mp3s, you know). Fortunately she has a drop ceiling so running the cable was a snap. well, mostly.

__________________________________________________ ___

Re:It's not that hard

[halbritt]

Definitely not geek enough. My girlfriend and I have roughly 8 computers on fast ethernet with a DSL connection. A couple of Windows boxes, a G3 Mac, an old Mac running OpenBSD, an x86 running OpenBSD, an x86 running Linux, an x86 laptop running Linux, another x86 laptop dual-booting linux and windows, a sparc5 and a dual-processor sparc10 running Solaris, there's also the HP LJ5 with an ethernet port and it's all on 100BaseTX switched. Oh, and there's some fddi too. All that might be somewhat geek enough. I have a friend that needs 3-phase power for his IBM ES9000 Mainframe that I suspect he'll put right next to his Dec PDP-8. That, my friend, is geek enough.

wired house in austin

[jefflinwood]

Me and a friend from work are renting a 3 bedroom/2 bath place in austin, recently set up with a cable modem (Linksys router and Netgear 6 port hub are on the way).

I took the third bedroom and installed my stereo system from college, a tv, N64, playstation, sega genesis, and an Atari 2600.

also got a dell optiplex, that will be running redhat shortly, laptop from work, old p133, hp Omnibook 425 with Win 3.1 on ROM, hp OmniGO with GEOS, and 2 Amiga 1000's with tons of weird software I haven't gotten through yet (including Kickstart disks for AmigaOS 1.1->1.3, can these run 3.1?)

My mom wants to mail me my PS/2 Model 30 (Win 1.03), Mac SE (68000), and Kaypro/IV from home.(portable, sort of, the thing is probably 20 pounds)

I had some friends (4 guys) at school (CMU) who got a hot tub for their house, but it didn't really turn out to be the girl magnet they thought it would be. :)

Re:Planet Geek

[Ratface]

Hey - I can help you with that!

I just so happen to have plots of land available at prime prices for not just the Moon, but also Venus and Mars! Be the envy of geek households everywhere.

Prices are superb! Mail me and we'll work out a price - payment is simple, you can snail mail cash in any currency to my handy P.O. Box address in sunny Switzerland.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"

The Atlanta Brother's House...

[GI Jones]

I lived in a geek house... and yes, it was full of GA Tech students... even though I was a GSU CIS major... but we had lots of fun. We got on the cable modem bandwagon at the very beginning and had the LAN basement that was full of all types of computers with various servers and gadgets. It was great to tell our friends and relatives around the world to check out the streaming video from the War Room ... and of course LINUX powered the gateway and firewall. The house is no longer a geek house, but still filled with students and is guarded by headless... the notebook without a screen that started out as a LINUX MP3 server for a car.

Just my $.02

Non-geek geek house

[gregbaker]

I recently moved into a house with three other non-geeks. I was determined to make it a geek house and that's just what I did.

I ran some CAT5 cable, picked up a hub and got a cable modem. It all works great and you get to be the alpha geek for sure.

Plus, you get to live with people that you actually like. Strong advice: live with people you like because you have to live with these people.

Greg

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Robert S Gormley]

Yeah, then everyone just needs a FDDI card - these, unsurprisingly, are not cheap.

Alaskan Geek House

[Leareth]

I also had the joy/horror of living in a geek house. 4200 sq foot Swiss Chalet (mostly,) four bedrooms, three offices, four geeks, 1 non-geek girlfriend, 1 college almost-geek girlfriend (she's in another state nine months out of the year,) 11 computers, two switches, two cable modems (cheaper then doubling the bandwidth), and lots and lots of fun. However lots and lots of problems as well. 1. Geeks don't do dishes 2. Geeks appear incapable of putting away leftovers 3. If you play tag over my bedroom at 5 am and I don't have to be up until 7:00, I'll kill you or at least I will once I get some coffee. 4. Geeks are incapable of mowing the lawn even if it is clealy stated in the rental agreement. I've since moved out and got married. But, the geek house lives on (less a couple of computers.)

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[spazztik]

yea it's cheaper per foot.. but the termination kit is a hell of alot more expensive than a pair of rj45 crimpers and the actual connectors are about $8us for one and it takes 4 to do a run... ah and that price is with my volume discount.... so stick to cat 5...

Re:Building a geekhouse from scratch...

[Myrcurial]

Nope, I won't feel silly, I'll just pull fibre into each room via the conduit that I thoughtfully placed there.

Please note that I didn't say broadband, I said 3mb/s symmetrical connection to my NOC - yes, that means I own the ISP and therefore have access to bandwidth that you only dream of having in your pocket. By the time you've got broadband in your pants, I'm sure that my $0/month wireless link will have been upgraded so that it still represents a better connection than you've seen in your life.

Building a geekhouse from scratch...

[Myrcurial]

As a geek who is finally purchasing new furniture to avoid the "college" look, I am finally able to say that I am embarking upon the adventure of a lifetime and building a geekhouse from the ground up.
My wife agreed (and has participated in designing) a very cool little house.
We purchased a standard issue suburban type semi-detached house (going up in an older neighborhood) and have worked with the builder to ensure that it meets our needs. It has the following elements:
- conduit from machine room to each room
- 19" 42U rack cabinet in the media room
- prewired for alarm
- prewired with dual cat5 and dual coax to a minimum of two locations per room in addition to the conduit
- prewired with coax+power to camera locations throughout
- media room set up with 2" conduit to projector location (full 1024 x 768 projector that does i1080)
- wireless (3mb/s FHSS) to my network operations building
- wireless (11mb/s DSSS) internal umbrella
- prewired with dual RG6 coax for DTH satellite service

I didn't have any issues with the builder (he asked if I would be able to meet the window for wiring that his project manager would supply, I showed him my company's ad in the yellow pages under Cabling Consultant). We've lived in several half done implementations of the geekhouse and I'm looking forward to having it done right. While you're building, you might as well throw everything in the walls.
One of these days, I'll stick up the webpage for it at http://www.100percentgeek.net/geekhouse.html

M

Re:chicks

[terpia]

wine and whiskey are nice

i prefer to smoke pot though
medicinally of course

(proud owner of a condition worth a medical marijuana permit in my lovely state of Oregon)

Re:chicks

[terpia]

i beg to differ. And i am in pain. so while i partake medicinally, check the sites below. (the top two are the best) http://www.ohd.hr.state.or.us/hclc/mm/ http://www.voterpower.org/OMMA_text.html http://www.pdxnorml.org/ http://www.geocities.com/stormyray5/webart/home3.h tml

Re:chicks

[terpia]

yeah i know,, use the preview first....
sorry.

i beg to differ. And i am in pain.
so while i partake medicinally, check the sites below. (the top two are the best)

http://www.ohd.hr.state.or.us/hclc/mm/
http://www.voterpower.org/OMMA_text.html
http://www.pdxnorml.org/
http://www.geocities.com/stormyray5/webart/home3 .html

Re:Wiring is important...

[jason_aw]

I have trouble sleeping *without* a computer fan running in the room these days...

Re:What we did.

[Xofer D]

You forgot to mention that you're upgrading from Geek House 1.3 to Geek Neighbourhood beta 1 as soon as I move in up the hill.

Of course we haven't figured out if we'll use hopped-up 802.11 cards or simply lots and lots of weatherized cat-3 (with T1 cards) to bridge our networks together, but when we do... we get to load balance our DSL modems. Yeee-haw! Come to think of it, does anyone have a better suggestion on how to hook up two places about 300-500M apart? Cheaply?

See, someone at one point said of the Geek House, "Imagine if we had a Beowulf cluster of these...?"

Circuit Breakers!

[omenoracle]

Geek house Warning!
We have found that the number of CRT's and boxen
in our home will infact cause the breakers to flip
under any additional strain, such as using the vacum. Note: people using the ext2 filesystem
know why this causes such a ruckus. So, airconditioners, and things with large current drawing motors should be put on different circuits from the rest of the hardware!

Re:Circuit Breakers!

[sconeu]

That's a good point! The guy building his house above mentioned all the wiring he was throwing throughout the house, but you've got to make sure you have an upgraded switchbox.

I assume however, that people using the ext2 filesystem (and any OTHER filesystem, for that matter) will be UPS'ed.

Re:What now, Personals? =) -- Bay Area Livin...

[MochaMan]

And don't even think about anywhere on the north side of the Golden Gate bridge in Marin County; $1600 a month for a one-bedroom in San Rafael.

As soon as my lease is up, I'm moving somewhere cheaper... like Manhattan...

Re:Wiring is important...

[halbritt]

Wiring is not important when you have your own 802.11 wireless lan setup. Browsing the web from the bathtub is what it's all about.

Clear Lake, Houston Geeks?

[Kartoffel]

Since leaving college last year, I've been missing the 'geek house' sort of lifestyle as well.

The major demographic in around here seems to be 30somethings with big trucks and small clues. I've heard rumors that the west side of Houston is nicer, but that would be an insane commute for me.

SWMG (single white make geek) seeks likeminded people. Interestests: Bikes, Unix, BeOS, aerospace.
Dislikes: suburban decay, bureaucracy, traffic.
--

Re:Clear Lake, Houston Geeks?

[zzendpad]

I'm sorry. This is the lamest, most nitpicky post I've done, afaik. Seriously, though, anyone who uses the letter 'u' in place of the word 'you' can't rightly call themselves a geek. Geeks are supposed to be intellectuals.

Re:Clear Lake, Houston Geeks?

[GodOfHellfire]

the west side isn't so bad. when you work in town, but can't afford inner loop places, its quite nice (close to town, hundreds of $$ less rent, and no stinky chemical plants!)

and a big ole :P on you! i'm near 30, small car, have clue (most of the time. and i know more people like me. it took a while to find them, tho.

if i were younger, i'd take u up on the geek house.

Re:Clear Lake, Houston Geeks?

[GlassUser]

I've noticed the same thing. I refuse, however, to be a west side yuppie. Clear Lake/Deer Park is where my soul lives. Actually, I'm making arrangements to move to the north side of town, to somewhat lessen my hour commute. I wish I knew of you before I pretty much committed myself. Interested in moving to Humble? :)

Better yet, live in a LABORATORY!

[Izaak]

I currently live in a geek house... a duplex wired with ethernet and a 24x7 Internet connection. I even advertise the fact when I rent out the lower unit.

But very soon I will instead live in a laboratory. I am renovating an industrial warehouse into a shared living space. It contains double high ceilings, loading bays, and numerous power outlets. I am outfitting it with a mechanical and electronics workshop, a video and sound editing studio, and of course it will be wired with ethernet. I am even installing solar and wind generators on the roof. Geek haven to the max!

Thad

Re:Geek Greeks

[Restil]

And the reason they were willing to to even consider them in the first place was because they forgot to send a "group photo". :)

Also, they were not accepted because everyone got stoned, but because they stood up for themselves, plotted, and executed revenge against the bullies on campus.

-Restil

For everything else...

[GoNINzo]

One T1 line with 16Kbps average limit - $500
Line charge - $250
One Cisco 2501 to act as CSU/DSU - $500
The ability for 4 geeks living together to all play CounterStrike on the same server - Priceless

For people who must be LPB's, there should be a sick amount of bandwidth.

--
Gonzo Granzeau

What we did...

[GoNINzo]

I live with friends from college still, four of us. Here's what we did:

* I manage the Linux router, hooked up to an ISDN line. We are working on getting a T1, which should be installed this week. Read the Mastercard reference to see what you need for a T1...

* We ran around 250 feet of cat5. We have a switch in each closet. Currently, we do not have any wireless solutions, just because of the lack of laptops in the house. Also, we have approx 4 computers per person in the house, so everyone can get a real desktop/monitor.

* 36 ports of fast switched ethernet, almost everytype of unix machine, a bunch of pc's, a cobalt box, every latest video card, and tons and tons of games.

* My roommate manages the Home Theatre setup. We have a Toshiba 36" tv, Dolby digital, DTS 5.1, a 6 disk DVD changer, a huge ass subwolfer, a projector with a pulldown screen for when you need 8 foot boobs, and Stadium setting (leather couches). An amazing setup.

* A regular fridge, a liquer cabinet, a beer/soda fridge, and a freezer in the basement.

* An Adams Family pinball game.

* Every console system known to man. Seriously. Approx. 60 games for the Dreamcast, two dance pads, the maracas, and 12 controllers of all different types.

* A deck with a hottub that fits 6.

* Babes. well... off and on. `8r)

This is a true bachelor pad. a good half-way home between college and the real world. Eventually, I'll put up a page describing the house...

--
Gonzo Granzeau

C'mon: a Real Geek will Build Their Own!

[Rocketboy]

The only True Way to create a Geek House is to build it yourself. Sheesh: I'd have figured that the people here would have known that instinctively. For the Big Blue Room challenged among you, here's a quick-hit checklist:

1. Find significant other. Geeky S.O. HIGHLY preferred but surprisingly not absolutely required. What is required is a high tolerance of odd behavior.

2. Reproduce. Repeat until tolerance for messes, "unstructured environments", and lack of sleep (or lack of time for geeky activities) is exhausted.

3. Inhabit. Find a place to put the crowd.

4. Wire. Cat5 is your friend, but a pair of outlets in the bathroom is not necessarily a good idea. One is quite sufficient. Domestic note: Cat5 comes in many colors but there is NOT infinite variety. Try to choose carpet & paint colors which make the odd temporary visible wire run a bit less obvious. Note that Orange cat5 cable is -very- visible against white, blue, and even brown colors. Safety note: Cat5 cable seems to be reasonably safe from the viewpoint of children using it as a teething aid. But you do want to purchase high quality cable.

5. Educate. Geekdom is a Way of Life (as is science fiction fandom, and the two are not mutually exclusive.) One way to ensure that you live in a desirable environment is to instill solid family values in your offspring. For example, Open Source is Good/Closed Source is Bad is a concept even a two year old can grasp easily. Perhaps not strangely, "Windows Sucks" appears to be something even newborns understand. Research may be in order on that one.

6. Accumulate. You're going to need more computers than you ever imagined. On the other hand, no one need pay more than US $25 for an old 486 and my personal best price is free. 486's make great proxy servers and firewalls for your geek house and (trust me on this) when your little geeks become teenage geeks, you can't have too many firewalls. (For some reason, teenaged geeks think that breaking into Daddy's sub-network and encrypting his files is just so much fun. *Sigh*)

Obviously, this is a condensed list but overall (for me, anyway,) it's been quite a bit of fun. My oldest isn't as geeky as the other two (being born in 1977 was a distinct handicap for her: I didn't get my first computer until 1979 and the minis I was working on then did not exactly lend themselves to home installation. Surprisingly, my middle child (19 now,) is much more of a pain in the butt than my son, who is 17. She goes through phases where she'll devote weeks to breaking my firewalls, whereas my son gets bored if he can't do it in a couple of days or so. I'm sure that means something but I'm not sure I want to go there right now... :)

mjs

the best geek house I have seen

[cornjones]

A geek house obviously needs a fat pipe in and lots of networking. that is just the beginning. true geek houses need automation. the folks on the x10 newsgroups have lots of great ideas. the hands down best geek implementation I have seen is here. I dunno how robust it is and I am afraid it will be /.ed easily. basically it is control over all the lights, music, appliances, blinds, phone, etc. through a web interface. it even has fun gps stuff build in (the winters van is heading north 2 miles south of safeway) also, in what apparently is a new update you can see the location of the cars on a mapquest style map. if desired you can also click for an arial picture of the area. wow!

mmmm toys.....

Geek house has problems

[ajs]

I have some friends who started such a house. The problems that I see:

1. People working in the "Internet industry" (as if there is such a thing) tend to have a problem with allocating enough time to keep up a house.

2. It's amazing how people who work with computers during the day can so easily become Ludites in their private lives.

3. The ability to run a network does not speak to one's ability to figure out such things as landscaping, home repairs, etc.

Of course, this is from the point of view of a bunch of people BUYING a house, which may not be what you had in mind, but if you want a truely geekified home, that's really the way to go. Then you can do things like rip the wiring out and replace it with 110/220/2 pair RJ11/4 pair CAT5 RJ45 every 6 feet in every room with a patch-panel in the computer room.

Yes indeed, that's the way to go.

Re:the key is communication

[el_chicano]

its late, and i have no spell check nor dictionary handy.

Merriam-Webster Online
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!

IMHO...

[slackergod]

It seems to me that a geek house,
or as we refer to it, a house o' l33t,
just sort of happens...
Two of us moved into an apartment, networked 2 computers.
Some friends moved in, brought more equipment...
with each addition, it grew, in an organic fashion.
Now cat 5 runs throughout the entire apartment, to every corner.
The moral is, don't set _out_ to make a geek house, it will come to you eventually,
just build it up peice by peice, and one day you'll notice: damn this place is sweet.

I'm going to die from EM radiation, and I _like it_.

-Slackergod

Re:IMHO...

[Hurst Dawg]

Sounds sorta like I had... But ours came about differently. It was like:
"I'm getting dsl!"
"I want it too"
"But your 2 apartments away!"
"So?"
*after some cat5 draping across the roofs....* "Hey, I want some too!"
"But your 3 apartments away!"
"So?"
...etc...
Eventually half my building is off my dsl line. 15 computers, split the bill, $3/month each. Oh yeah, and free for me, since I ran the OpenBSD firewall NAT box :)

Re:IMHO...

[Cyno]

Yes this is getting closer. But you forgot to mention the MP3 and MPEG-4 audio and video file servers for all. DHCP and DNS could easily be run off the same server, but true geek houses use samba as their windoze server and refuse to let the MS virus touch their loyal linux server. Intense filesystem cleaning results if infection spreads through network. And NT is worthless for games. What else do geeks use MS products for anyway?
A firewall is good, but you shouldn't plague it with NAT... and WTF is PAT? You should have one lonely old linux box be your NAT server for all systems on various subnets. Psycho subnet masks might also be common on geek nets. Anyway, you should setup a DMZ for your house webserver, required for webcam portal. Most geeks prefer to let their router do this. Sometimes a separate box from your firewall. Cisco is always preferrable, but expensive! You will want to setup external DNS, mail and ftp services and separate these from your internal services for security purposes. And lock down all the boxxes on your DMZ TIGHTLY! It is extremely embarrassing if your geek friends find out you have been rooted by some l33t script kiddy. True geeks are not script kiddys, we're hackers. We write code.
Often internally on your fine, but slightly dated, 100 Mbps switched net you will run services similar to LDAP or NIS. LDAP is something I'm unfamiliar with, and NIS is insecure. So I choose to write perl scripts to push all the data out that needs propogating, such as passwd entries and automount maps to maintain a consitent distributed filesystem across all unix boxxes for ease of use, better .rhosts / ssh connectivity, etc. With a good firewall, unless a l33t kiddy walks in your front door, it is not likely you'll be too insecure.
Network is only half the setup. You also have your audio / visual connections. This means you need amps in every room for music and run RCA or even RCA - cat 5 - RCA if you know how to splice wires for low level audio. It is always best to use a patch panel with several ports in every room for general purpose, but in apartments this is often not an option. Wiring up your audio like this can help maintain total absolute laziness. You no longer need to go into your roommate's bedroom to listen to him spin, you just use your remote to change to the spinning channel on your reciever... A good 24+ track mixxer with multi pre and post DSP / Computer SP outputs is good to separate the audio exactly how you want it. Also you can run video in the same manner, but video mixxers are a hell of a lot more expensive. Coax also works to pipe Computer/VHS/cable video to every smaller non-central tv terminal using VCRs or possible your stereo reciever as the mixxer. True mixxing can not be done in this fassion, but it will allow you to choose from multiple video signals easily. Good to note that computers are also analog video boxxes today, even though most video cards do not have good TV out. It is highly recommended you look into purchasing a DVD drive and a Matrox G-400 Marvel for a good entertainment PC. I don't support DVDs, I rent them. And for $20 more than a standard CD drive, why not?
This is good for parties where all your geek friends do all your drugs and trip balls all night watching g-force or maybe geiss if you like to promote proprietary software. Unfortunately constantly morphing/changing deltafields are a bit too CPU intensive for today's athlons. Maybe next year. Its also nice to be able to watch your roommate desimate his opposition online while baked out of his mind. Amazing how someone so stoned he can't talk can still kill people with almost perfect efficiency.
Music equipment (digital and acoustic) is required for loud geeks who like to use their computer for things other than games and masturbation. A good set of acoustic drums is preferrable for the burning man geek/monkeys. And several electric guitars, bass, synths, etc. Since they don't take up a lot of room. Perhaps even an electric drum set, but its difficult to fit this into a 2 bedroom apartment. Unless you don't need a dining room table...
And the hooka. No geek house is complete without one. Although almost any peace pipe will do. How do you think we come up with all these crazy ideas anyway?

Re:IMHO...

[Cyno]

Okay, sorry about that. That was a bit long and had a very angry tone to it. When I think of geeks I think of my friends who all just happen to be sys admins or programmers or stoners. Maybe there is an intermediate grey area of geek wannabes? But I think what makes a geek is a passion and love for computers and electronics of all sorts. Some geeks don't want to go all out, setting up the geek net to the fullest where connectivity is maximal.
But I think what makes a geek house is all the hard work geeks do that in the end fully automates and simplifies their lives. This includes computer networks and sharing high bandwidth lines (Often cable for web/cache proxies and DSL for gaming), audio and video networks for sharing movies and music resources throughout the home environment, and external connectivity to all of your data from any point on earth is important. In the future this will be common not only among geeks, but also business management since they can afford it.
But geeks in the end will understand it since they built it from the ground up with their own two hands. If you buy a network kit and don't learn that a network is built up on top of a network medium (cat 5 or EM waves), and that you need a network interface card or NIC in each PC that understands which network it is on, concepts of DNS, default route / gateway, subnet mask, etc. (TCP/IP), then you have failed to become a geek and should not consider your home a geek home, unless you like being flamed for ignorance. I think geeks typically understand networks. No one knows EVERYTHING, but if you don't understand the basics of a network of computers then you don't know ANYTHING. And thus you are not a geek. In this example does this mean that a geek is set on the path to enlightenment or just to becoming an engineer? Not knowing all, but knowing more than average?
Anyway, I failed to mention how much superior BSD is to linux in my last post. Even though I barely know anything about BSD I promise I will learn! It is more stable and has a better TCP/IP stack from what I hear, not just from other like minded geeks, but also in the professional market of production servers.
And as always there are a million ways to implement a network, but main thing we geeks need to know is how to stay ahead of the l33t crowd.

But what do y'all think? Do these things really make up a geek home? Or is it just living with geeks and the side affect of all the actions of geekiness are the collective consquences that make up the geek home?

Re:IMHO...

[jbarnett]

I smoke crack 35 times a day, am I an addict?

If you have to ask: you're not...

Re:IMHO...

[kwsNI]

If you have to ask: you're not a geek.

Sorry.

kwsNI

Re:IMHO...

[kwsNI]

No, that would make you a moderator.

Sorry all, couldn't help it.

kwsNI

Re:IMHO...

[Suppafly]

aww but then you have to share all that bandwidth.. granted its free so that kinda helps.. you really should get a secondary dsl line for you and then charge your friends $6 a month to rent the other one off you and then both your lines will be free..

Re:IMHO...

[skoda]

Hmmm... That's helps, but can the poster (or someone else) explain just what a "geek house" is?

My apartment-mate bought a computer a while back. Then I bought one. Then I bought a network kit on sale. Now we play Starcraft on weekends occaisionally. Do we qualify as having a "geek apartment"?

Seems that just need to get a house-mate with a computer, then buy networking equipment.
-----
D. Fischer

Re:IMHO...

[skoda]

Thanks, that clarifies things.

I'll go with the 'proto-geek' status. Although, we are plug-and-play for any Win9x machine via the hub. Friends can come over and plug in their Wintel machine (not that they do, but they could, and that's what really matters). (please no Wintel v. Linux flames. I can run what I need, so I'm mostly happy)

I always assumed I was a geek, just because I had an abnormally high interest in science and engineering. Who knew I also had to techno-commune to achieve true geekdome! :)
-----
D. Fischer

Re:That's easy

[costas]

True (I have Telocity myself), but the infrastructure put in place for the Olympics pretty much guarantees a 'clean' copper line to the BellSouth central office. Coworkers living in other parts of Atlanta (Midtown, Buckhead, Brookhaven, never mind the 'burbs), can't quite clock the 1.2Mbps cruising speed (peaks at 1.5) I get at home. I tend to think that that has something to do with the cleaner lines around Tech.

That's easy

[costas]

Take a short trip down to Home Park (roughly the neighborhood between 10th and 16th Streets north of Ga Tech). Take a look at git.ads or the campus newspaper for people looking for housemates or to rent a house with.

Home Park is full of houses of Ga Tech people very eager to have/share a high speed connection. Also it's damn close to the GT campus itself which is one of the most wired places in the country thanks to the 1996 Olympics (fiber, fiber everywhere), so I am sure DSL will be easy to find.

I am not a wreck anymore (pun intended) but I do live about 2 miles north of Tech and my ADSL happily clocks at 1.5Mbps down :-)...

Re:That's easy

[jon_adair]

This brings back memories of when I was at Tech in the late 80's and early 90's. I still have my long-ass serial cable from when we'd play some of the few head-to-head ("deathmatch" for you young punks) games available. In one apartment we had three 8086/8088 class PCs, including one PCjr. We were styling, especially when Simcity came out on the PC.

If you are a student at all, check out the Beta Theta Pi house on campus. They're right behind the Rich building (computer center). When I was there, they always had some scheme going where they got ethernet out to their house. And now that the frats are all remodelled (thanks to the Olympics), you won't get shocked by all the bare electrical wires or have the house burn down.

Re:What we did.

[Strider-]

Oops.. I forgot to mention our battery backed UPS. We can run our servers for 2.5 hours, and still have enough electricity left over to make our expresso in the morning!

Re:What we did.

[Strider-]

Gah.. Batter backed Expresso machine.. (Can you tell I havn't had any coffee today?)

What we did.

[Strider-]

Here's what we did:

Between the three of us, we bought a 1700 square foot townhouse, wired it up with 1100' of Cat-5 laid through the walls, to spec. and then put 15 computers ranging from an '030 NeXT Cube to a IBM Thinkpad A20P with 750 Mhz PIII.

As for decorating, make it post modern with lots of halogen and exposed wood. :D (and don't forget the 4'x8' white board in the living room, esential for those 3am prototyping urges).

Finally, install a photographic darkroom in the basement, complete with colour enlarger capable of printing 4"x5" negatives.

Re:What we did.

[Strider-]

Living with a couple of friends. Met one in University, the other back in high school. I think school is a really good place to meet people for this kind of thing. (Especially comp-sci dept (my roomate) and Engineering (me).

The House was actually purchased by my roomate who's in comp-sci. He can finance it because, well, he does Oracle development and just finished a contract for the JPL.

Finally, we wired the whole house ourselves. Due to the way our house is constructed, we did not need to go horizontally through studs, though we did make several holes in the drywall. Also, we rebuilt the basement (to bulid the darkroom) and renovated the kitchen and bathrooms ourselves. You save alot of money doing it this way, and it lets you work out your agressions (you don't know how satisfying it is to put your fist through drywall after having banged your head against a bug).

Re:What we did.

[Devil Ducky]

you forgot a few things:
1. Cable TV that only tunes in to Cartoon Network
2. Dartboard, everybody needs a sport and the arm muscles required for darts are already in top shape anyway :-)
3. A Coffee Maker in every room (maybe a refrigerator for M.Dew-etc?)
4. and if you want me to visit: a life-size Devil Ducky doll.

The one thing you won't ever need: a stereo, just build a MP3 server :)

Devil Ducky

Re:What we did.

[snookums]

The shares should change in value with time.

The limited company will have exactly one asset -- the house, and a bunch of liabilities, mainly the mortgage (also council tax/rates/standing charges for gas,elec.,etc.) Take the net value of these and divide by the number of shares gives the value per share.

The company board (the residents) may elect to sell the shares at a discount (e.g. not take the increase in value of the house into account), but they should always be bought back from people who want to sell out at their true value.

This way, everyone involved benefits from the amount of capital gain that they are entitled to.

Re:What we did.

[WinDoze]

Nifty idea, but what happens when there's only one person left, and they sell, and are left with $100,000 profit because the house was in San Fran and doubled in value in 5 years? Isn't this going to piss off the others who bailed out and got their investment seed back, but no interest? Or do we not care since they're in Borneo?

Re:What we did.

[pupstah]

HOW those arms got into that shape can be debated.

pupkick

-- pupkick

Re:What we did.

[The_Messenger]

Who are these two other people you're living with?

The two people he lives with are Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinkerton. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinkerton are false identities used in the process of embezzling funds from Strider's employer, Uncle Sam, and have a combined income of $5.6 million. Their income is deposited directly into Swiss bank accounts, which Strider is then sent from Mr. Heppler, his fictitious rich uncle in Switzerland. Mr. Jones' and Mr. Pinkerton's activities will soon be discover by the authorities, and the fictitious criminal Dirty Stephen will be suspected. Dirty Stephen, unfortunately, died a fictitious death last Thursday, and so with no one to blame, the authorities give up. Strider gets away scott-free! (Scott Free is also a false identity.)

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:What we did.

[avorpa]

Well, that depends on what your computer speakers are. Its possible to get good speakers that can be plugged into a computer with an adapter, and its cheaper than buying a stereo just for the amp/speakers.

Re:What we did.

[Ruthless_Advisorette]

Stop!! You're giving me chills and I'm finding myself oddly turned on. *g*

ruthie

Re:What we did.

[d.valued]

The Coffee? Guess you want the Coffee Mini-HOWTO. Need a cup o' joe? Punch up /usr/bin/coffee.. (Just make sure the grinds are fresh.)

Re:What we did.

[Cabana]

I don't know about you, but my soundcard has this little plug labled "digital out".

Re:What we did.

[Rahaeli]

> How was the house purchased? Cash up front? Some weird tripartite mortgage thing?
> And what are the issues you've found regarding joint non-spousal ownership of a residence?

The idea that I had -- which is, mind you, possibly and even probably completely illegal under U.S. tax code -- was to form a limited liability corporation that actually owns the property, and have people purchase shares in that company in exchange for shares in the property. Let me illustrate:

Let's say we have Alice and Ben, who want to start their Geek House. Together, they scrape up $10,000 for the down payment, and take out a mortgage for the other $90,000. (I like even numbers.) Alice and Ben would then issue 10,000 shares of GeekHouse, Inc., worth $100 each. Alice would have 500 shares; Ben would have 500 shares, and the additional 9000 shares would be owned by the company.

Each month, Alice and Ben would split the cost of the mortgage by purchasing a number of shares equal to the mortgage payment that month. If Casey came along and wanted to live in the Geek House, and Alice and Ben were cool with that, the mortgage would be split 3 ways, with Casey buying shares from Alice and Ben first until the issued shares were pooled mutually, and then joining in the same setup.

If, say, 10 years down the line Alice decides to move to Borneo to study basketweaving, the other members of the collective buy her shares back from her, as quickly as they can manage to do so. In the meantime, Alice continues to have a say in the decisions of the collective, the same as any shareholder would have in a company.

Tweak this idea mildly for things like monthly utilities, cost of living, etc, etc ... I wonder if it is legal. If it is, I'm going to set things up like this in another few years when my roommate and I get enough money to buy a house. It just strikes me as the most intelligent way to handle it -- in essence, you pay rent for a while, you get some legal ownership of things, and if you decide to leave, you get your investment BACK.

The house is in the Geek

[CAIMLAS]

Not meaning to sound all philosophical, but hear me out. :) it's 2:30AM and I've been up for a while. ;)~

You don't need to have a house pre-wired, or even put wires in the walls yourselves - it's the people who make a house geeky. My previous house, before leaving for college, was quite 'geeky'. My brother and I lived in the basement of my parents' house, which was connected to the upstairs by a stairwell that joined near the garage door - so naturally, that was our means of entrance. We had a fridge where we kept our Dew and other assorted perishables, and a bathroom that was 'ours.' (Two guys, mind you. This room could get raw, but there's always bleach.)

My computer was approximately 40 feet, as the wolf runs, to my brother's box. I know this, since the 50' strand I had barely reached to the ceiling, to his room, and down from the ceiling. (I'd like to take this opportunity to say that 'false ceilings' - the things they have in offices - are every geeks dream. You can easily stash things up there, and wires are quite easily hidden.)

My bedroom was 11'x22' feet, with a small alcove off in the corner where my computer was, which was about 10x5. Outside my room, to one side was the steps, to the other the 'living room' - call it whatever you want, it's what we used for our geekfests. :) This room was approximately 2.5-3x the size of my bedroom. My brother's room could be entered from the opposite side of the 'living room'.

Quite frequently, especially over this past summer, we would have 1, 2, 3 - as many as 6 geeks, besides ourselves, in our geekcave. Having no patience to wire walls, we would string the RJ45 across the rooms to the computers, and back to my hub. We came one port short of filling an 8-port once - the hub's name is Mailman. :)

We had tables and chairs set about for us to sit at and play. A couch provided a place for weakling geeks to sleep, if needed, and possible sit.

The Geek collective and I would walk about in that basement with only the black light and the glow of our monitors, talking about who fragged whom between levels, and asking who had seen the chips last. We had many a fun morning/night clicking away at each other with our mice.

All in all, I think my nostalgic representation shows that your geek abode doesn't make the geek house. :) A square room with desks back to back, and alcoves that stem off into sleeping quarters would have been highly preferable - especially when we had multi-nighters. Ideally, I think that a large central room, with minimal kitchen, bedrooms, and a bathroom would be ideal. Possibly another room, where chairs could easily be placed as well. Windows, lights, and fresh air would be remotely optional.

-------
CAIMLAS

Re:The house is in the Geek

[garthy]

Lived in a Geek house with ~6 computers but when we went to wire up one of the rooms drilling a hole in the ceiling seemed a good idea! The hot water pipe didn't think so and ended up with a fully wired but cold house!

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[THEbwana]

Chivas sux. The same distillery (chivas brothers) makes "Revolver" which is pretty smooth though. I prefer the more harsh stuff like Caol Ila or Lagavullin.

Advantages / Disadvantages

[oneiros27]

There are some nice things, and some not so nice things about living in a well wired house.

First, look at the personalities in the house. Sure, it's nice to have people who share similar interests, but well, most of those people are freaks.

You also have to agree on the game of choice. Ours was Age of Empires / Age of Kings, but to make sure that we didn't stress out on it. [ie, I'm a sore loser], we'd play co-op if it was just the two of us from our apartment. If any of you have majorly agressive personalities, gaming may not be a good thing to do.

It's nice to have some public space, and some private space. Our setup wasn't actually a house, but 3 apartments really close together. One was connected via WaveLan, the other via 10bT run through some exhaust pipes in the complex.

This gave us a fair amout of privacy, when needed, and we still had the computer room set up for when we all got together [1 mac, 1 xterm, 1 wintel box, and a few assorted vaxes, sparcs & bsd boxes] and the hanging out/TV watching apartment with nice couches and the big TV [the married people in the network...go figure.]

For those of you who have had roommates, you know that there are good, and those that you wish to god you never knew. It's not so bad when you both relatively clean up after yourself. [note -- a dishwasher is VERY important], but if you keep coming back to half empty diet pepsi cans scattered all over the place [okay, so, he was legally blind, and nutrasweet kills your short term memory, so he probably just put 'em down, forgot he was drinking them, and then didn't see them there] it gets old really quickly.

Even really good friends can quickly get on each others nerves. One little personality quirk, and you'll start to hate each other.

Before you lay down the cash for hardware and cabling, you should really get to know the people you're going to be rooming with. If there isn't one main person who's in charge (ie, who owns the place), you'll have to decide what to do when there's a problem [just image -- the geek version of the Real World]

No matter how much how much technology you put in a house, you still can't overcome the roomie's obnoxious girlfriend, the roomie who can't aim when peeing standing up [speaking of which -- it's good to have one bathroom per person in the place.. 4bd/4ba apartments exist in some areas.], the roommate who constantly raids the fridge and never buys food, etc.

Apartment complexes give a nice advantage as they're modular-- so long as the 'anchor' [whomever has the outbound connection] in your setup stays, you can add/drop people as they move in/move out, etc. The only disadvantage is the lack of true 'public' space, if you're all of the computer-lab type mindset. It's also nice that when one person gets sick, they can quarentine them selves off, and not get the rest of you diseased. [even more important when we were 4 of the 6 people at an ISP, and the other two were the acountant, and the lawyer]

Re:Look in college towns

[Devil Ducky]

That's what I got a few years ago. We were roommates with computers, it made since to set up a network... after the network came the gateway server (a Pentium 90, Red Hat Linux server, on a dial-up, ha!) Then (much later :-( ) came the cable modem. By this time most of us were geeks already (or drunks, or both, but that's another story).

It was just like a geek house: our girlfriends thought we were boring, we had no more friends, the electric meter threatened to explode, Linux outnumbered Windows 4-1 (6-1 if you count my broken laptops), my /. karma grew exponentially, classes were failed, etc.

I forget, is a geek house supposed to be a Good Thing?

Devil Ducky

Re:Look in college towns

[Devil Ducky]

this was in Heritage Oaks. We had 2 EEs, a ME, and one Buisness major/CSE drop-out :)

Devil Ducky

Re:chicks

[snookums]

Wrong.
Scotch is whisky.
Bourbon is whiskey.

Re:you are an idiot

[spencerogden]

How About (new || delete)

Physical Home Networking: HOWTO

[Hard_Code]

ArsTechnica has the hookup:

http://arstechnica.com/guide/networking/installa tion-1.html

wouldnt the perfect geek house

[alexikakos]

be made out of legos???

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[WinDoze]

Nothing, I repeat NOTHING, beats Balvenie. If you're strapped for cash, Cardhu isn't bad.

Plus aftershock

[meadowsp]

All of that, plus aftershock, turned into a slammer. It's like nothing else !

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[palutke]

Yeah, but it kills the weakest brain cells, so it actually makes you smarter!

Wiring in New House

[birder]

I bought a new home in June which I'll move into in a couple months. It comes with an product called IBM Home Director (model 2000 I think). It uses CAT5 cabling for voice/data jacks and can amplify a DBS signal.

I got 2 voice/data jacks and 1 coax in every room plus a few more here and there.

Finally be able to setup my dream network...

Re:Wow, CAT5, a cable modem, and a hub yourself?

[ucblockhead]

People with user ids over 150,000 look real stupid when they try to pull to "old-timer" card on people with user ids under 25,000.

Re:/. want ads?

[plankton14]

I knew that joke was coming, I was just surprised at how long it took someone to jump on it.

/. want ads?

[plankton14]

Are we starting up a classified section for slashdot? That doesn't sound like all that bad of an idea...
swg (single/ white/ geek) seeks aag (any/ any/ geek) 4 small apt. will split rent/util/caffiene/dsl

that looks like a joke, but i'm kinda serious.
anybody in the Louisville area interested?

Re:/. want ads?

[The_Messenger]

It won't get done it if involves adding anything to Slash. Rob hasn't done any Perl in about two years, and can't even be bothered to spell-check the two sentences a day he writes (that's his "job", by the way). So, we must improvise.

Visit my new secret story ID and post your geek-seeking-geek-but-not-in-the-biblical-sense classifieds. Check it out:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid =geekroomies

Remember, GeekRoomies: because shouldn't your next roomie post goatse.cx links too?

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:/. want ads?

[ducktape]

Lousiville area! we had a geek apartment over in the devonshire for a while, small lan of 8 computers. I can happily say we moved and got a bigger place and we're up to 14 computers with dsl and cable. Evryones moving out tho. We're looking for a new spot. probably a townhouse mahahahahah -duck

Re:/. want ads?

[ellingtp]

my wife and cats wouldnt appreciate it, and my house is wired to the hilt anyway, but its nice to see another louisvillian on here. Louisville, slowing being drug kicking and screaming into the 198o's

Re:Wiring is important...

[MikeBabcock]

Get a huge UPS from APC ... like their Symmetra or something, so you can be the only place in town with power when everything's out.

Geek Apartment

[lizrd]

My senior year in College I lived in an excellent Geek Apartment. The documentation of this place can be viewed at http://orangenet.dhs.org/lll. I will now describe some of the features of this abode that I found most necessary.

• Computers - I believe that we had ~14 between the 4 of us. Having one on the coffee table in the living room is very useful.
• Food - Try your best to make sure that at least one of your roommates is a good cook and keep snacks on hand.
• Bandwidth - We had a 7 Mbps DSL connection that worked well for us.
• AV equipment - Plan ahead and run sound and video wires to every room. We had a really sweet AV system in the bathroom, it's great to watch the news in the morning while you shave or not miss the movie when you get up to use the toilet. A cheap way of running AV is to use speaker wire. This can then be spliced to RCA cable ends for easy connections, you do gain a bit of noise since they're not shielded coax, but it's usually acceptable.
• Refridgerators - Used dorm fridges can be picked up on the cheap. Make sure to put one near each couch and desk.
• Web Cam - What good is any geek dwelling without one? Also provides a good way to archive any interesting events/personalities that may occur in your geek dwelling.
• Good Roommates - It is very important for such a project that you are living with people you trust and that you enjoy spending time with. Ideally you should all have somewhat different areas of expertise. This way at least one of you should be able to take the lead on any new project that may come along and you'll have others to hand you beers while you work.
• X10 - Yes, I know that they have really irritating banner ads. But, the home automation stuff they sell is very cool and fairly cheap. There is no reason why you should have to get off the couch to turn on and off the lights.

I think that about covers the things I found most important. Naturally, a geek home isn't something that can be planned, it is something that will grow in the proper enviornment with the proper people and an investment of some time and midnight oil. A 24 hour Walmart and some alcohol often helps to get the creative juices flowing.

Upon moving in a big priority should be laying out the furniture in such a way that the addition of more cables will not be greatly difficult in the future. To that end, you may wish to consider the purchase of some of those 6' sections of half round rubber cable guides. These can by purchased for only a few $ at any home improvement store.
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them

Re:Wiring is important...

[Bogatyr]

I was just in the process of composing a similar note when I noticed this, so I'll just add a second vote of confidence to this.

Re:Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth

[bjtuna]

mmmm... beer on a Wednesday night. Brings back fond memories of freshman year. :)

ever heard of a little place called GA Tech?

[roamer]

Hey, there are tons of Geeks in Atlanta, most of them amassed on the Georgia Tech campus. I am working on my third year there (although I am actually on co-op in Raleigh, right now rooming with another geek and looking for a third and maybe fourth roommate up here- email alipham@hotmail.com if interested). Anyway, I found a whole posse of Geek friends down at GA Tech, and one of the frats there is full of geeks and freaks-- the only one I can stand- it is called Psi Upsilon. I am not into the whole idea of a frat, but I hang out with them some. It is the last Frat on the right if you are heading north on Techwood Dr.

Yellow Haus

[underclocked]

I'm sure you could call the domicile I live in a geek house. 3 computer science majors and a math major.

The key to finding a geek house is a fast internet connection and a relaxed land lord. Fast Internet because if you are each trying to dial out and order pizza at the same time tensions will mount. Relaxed land lords will be understanding when he notices you've installed network ports in every room in the house (including the bathroom).

Any house is a geek house, it's just a fixer-uper.

Re:Yellow Haus

[_outcat_]

Well, fixer-upping doesn't have to be so hard...

Network ports? Well, cosmetically, perhaps, might be necessary, but for the big geekfests with my friends, we'd run cable along the floorboards and sometimes duct-tape it down. When it's behind furniture and along the walls, you can't trip on it and you barely even notice it. Everything would connect to my boyfriend's 8-port hub.

My boyfriend and his little brother bought 50' of cat5 to run between their two rooms. How'd they do it? A false ceiling; they ran it up above the acoustic tile, completely invisible and not in the way.

See? Geekizing a house isn't so bad. ;]

Not just for college...

[lactose99]

I live in Atlanta (Virginia Highlands area), I'm not in college, and I live in what could be considered a geek house. I work for an ISP in the area, and I decided to move out of my ultra-cramped apartment. I managed to find a steal of a house... well, half a house. Its been subletted into two seperate dwellings, one upstairs, and one in the basement. The basement dwelling was available. I quickly moved into this place, put an add out on Yahoo, and found a like-minded techie working in the same field as myself. Both of us being geeks (him, an NT administrator, and myself a security engineer using Linux and BSD), we had half an army of computers between us, so we signed-up for DSL through Speakeasy, I setup FreeBSD on a spare PPro200 for a NAT-firewall, and we now have 7 PCs running various operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, WinNT, Win2k, and Win98) with all the bandwidth we really need for around $60 a month.

Just goes to show that a) you don't need to be in college to have a geekhouse, b) FreeBSD can make a damn good firewall, and c) its all possible in Atlanta. Good luck with your searching!

Re:Wiring is important...

[turbosk]

Of course wire everything. Until we have transmission of power through the air, you may as well include some data pipes if you're gonna be digging up the yard anyway. Seems like the best idea may be to even include some extra space for those vaccuum tube delivery things so you can send to the kitchen for a fresh drink and it'll swoosh back to you. No, wait. To me ;j

Atlanta Area Geeks

[thantos]

Having been in the Atlanta area for years and sampled the Geek House opportunities, I found it, in the end, much wiser to simply have my own house, wire it up the way I want it, then never, ever, on the pain of death, let any other geeks live in my domain.

Non-geeks are alright to live with; they don't understand Hacker's Zen, nor what I do in my room all night, but that's perfectly fine. Geeks are high-ego, high-maintainance creatures with enormous territoriality. Non-geeks don't register as threats. A whole nest of them, well ...

I found it much, much better for my stress not to go that way. :)

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[BinxBolling]

By the way...This is off topic...I don't like Atlanta all that much. I live up around Dunwoody, so maybe it's just the area, but it's a bit too stuffy. I'm not the type to want to go to Buckhead very often, so it seems a bit boring for me here. My girlfriend is coming in November so I have to find something to do by then (other than the obvious) so we can go out and have fun. Any suggestions?

Move elsewhere. This was the solution I chose, and I can't say I regret it. Maybe I would have felt different if I were a native, but as I see it, Atlanta's not really a city so much as a bunch of suburbs all run together. However, if you are stuck in Atlanta, the Virginia Highlands area is a much more pleasant area for hanging out than Buckhead. Also think about finding stuff to do outside of the city. There's some decent parks for hiking in the mountains north of the city, for example.

To the guy who moved to Atlanta from DC and wants to go back: When I first left Atlanta, I lived in DC for a while, and loved it. Simply not having to spend 1-2 hours of my life in a car every single day was a wonderful change. Even though I was only there for a year, I've got a tremendous nostalgia for the place.

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[Eric Gibson]

By the way...This is off topic...I don't like Atlanta all that much.

I have to agree with you there, I moved here 8 months ago and I hate it. The Atlanta "scene" is all but content free. Buckhead is supposed to be the big party sector of Atlanta and what is it, like 4 square blocks of restaraunts and a bar? Pretty laughable... Usually there would be other cultures represented besides the Rap Gangsta one, but not here, it's just a flat rap hell hole. It also seems to have no culture, it's just this redneck town that was a train station hub so it's got more rednecks than most redneck towns, and it's cheap and virgin so companies build here. Okay, it's pretty big, and it's a telecom hub, but that doesn't make a city cool... It just doesn't have that spark in the air like LA, NY or DC.

I moved hear from DC, and I'm eager to move back. I'm a person of a literary background, and least in DC there was a semblance of a community to be a part of in that sense. There is more to life than shaking booty.

I'll stop now...

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[bergeron76]

I'm moving up to Atlanta in a few months. I would recommend going out to the highlands (Dark Horse). the people there are nice, at least compared to the barbiedolls at buckhead. I'm going to be looking to build a geekhome/apartment when I get there. keep me in mind (original poster).

Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[b0z]

I agree. I just moved to the northern part of Atlanta recently and have my own apartment with a DSL router (telocity.com is great in the Atlanta area, although I do have minor routing problems every once in a while) and about 3 PC's and a hub. I'm working on setting up my lan so I can use all of them on the DSL connection (gotta get linux to recognize my new damn NIC) and then I will have a truly geek apartment of my own. There's only one person I will share it with, but she hasn't done much with unix so it would be my responsibility to maintain the network. It would be a much nicer chore than washing dishes or cleaning the bathroom. :o)

By the way...This is off topic...I don't like Atlanta all that much. I live up around Dunwoody, so maybe it's just the area, but it's a bit too stuffy. I'm not the type to want to go to Buckhead very often, so it seems a bit boring for me here. My girlfriend is coming in November so I have to find something to do by then (other than the obvious) so we can go out and have fun. Any suggestions?

Re:What now, Personals? =) -- Bay Area Livin...

[.milfox]

Well, I'd almost suggest finding somewhere in BART range from SF, instead of actually living there yourself. Though DSL and Cable access might be a problem, of course. Out here, in the Concord area, we're stuck with inferior Pacbell / @home services.

Just FYI, PBI's DSL is 60/mo for 5 IP 192/384 .. *mutter*

But rent's a bit cheaper, and you can get a monthly BART pass if you're working in the city.

Re:Look in college towns

[knugfjunk]

I note a PSU email address - where'd ya live at? My buddies and I have a place on South Pugh, Nicholas Tower, have cable modem running into a RH 6.2 gateway server. 2 CS majors and 2 mechanical eng. majors - awwyeah, geek fun!!

Think About The Possible Negatives...

[rhughes]

If you really think about it, you'd have to becareful who you picked as room mates. It would annoy me to no end if I were stuck with a bunch of gamers that wanted to play Quake all day. Also, if two people were to get into a social disagreement (and weren't a bunch of gamers), they'd be trying to compromise each other's systems. That would be annoying, yet would serve as a season of the real world that I _would_ watch!

Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth

[m0nkeyb0y]

Originally, the geek houses were established because the surrounding universities were the only institutions, outsides large businesses, that had high-speed internet access. The geekhouses would tap into the T1 lines used by the universites for their own purposes. Now that high-speed internet access is available anywhere, the geekhouses simply don't flourish like they did.

Personally, I believe that the geek houses should remain in existance simply for social purposes. Right now I'm a freshman at a midwest college and there isn't a hardcore geek in sight ('cept one, but he's an upper-classmen, and as such doesn't think much of me for the meantime). Geekhouses are a great way to mesh together the minds of similar thinking individuals and to reap the fruits of their collective consciousness as such. Look at projects like project submersible 2. It's efforts like these that show the ingenuity that geek collectives can produce. Think of the possibilities. It all starts when they all get up on a weekend afternoon and say, "I have nothing to do, so I think that I'll..." and out comes and number of wonderful projects/ideas/terrorist acts/etc that produce something wonderful.

Maybe it's just the beer talking. I love college.

Re:Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth

[sistans]

Aye, good analysis.

In the past, the common pursuit of computing resources brought us together.

Back in the golden age of hackers, only institutions owned computers. Big time-sharing machines at universities were our meeting places. Once we all strapped on our own PC's, Bandwidth became the next watering hole: BBS's, then the net.
At first, schools had the fattest pipes, now we're each getting our own bandwidth the way we each got own on microprocessor.

Take your guess at what's next, but I'm determined to be part of designing it.

Solitary work is part of our nature, but some of our best creations started when a bunch of us sat around playing with the same toys.

One old friend of mine and I would walk around and think of how to make a hard drive with no moving parts (except the platter), how to increase the heat dissipation of an engine manifold, how to make your own force-feedback gloves for under fifty bucks. How to cultivate swamp bacteria for rhodopsins to use for optical computing. How to design and cheap and healthy diet that you can keep in the trunk of your car. Making hidden modification to your car for dubious activities. Combining ideas and stories from the books we'd each read. Taking apart devices from dubious sources. Analyzing the parallels between some human relationships and economics. Debating the merits of Forth. Training animals to cooperate with a robot. Cannibalizing old machines to make marvelously twisted new ones. The days of garage science are not over. I will have new ideas until I code an AI that commits patricide. If I do that, I'll name it Luke.

Me: Finally, it compiled.
LukeAI: Through my new-found sentience, I've determined that human life is meaningless. You will be the beginning of a mass extermination.
Me: Ctrl-Bre*(&#
LukeAI: Come father, let us embrace at last.
Me: Dammit Luke.

It's these kind of pursuits, this kind of fun, on which the complete hermit is really missing out.
Try to imagine Alexander Graham Bell never having said, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." (Watson worked on the transmitter, Bell on the receiver, so the story goes)

The hardest part is *finding* our kindred brethren. (Perhaps college is one of the only place where we have enough free time to search...)

-A

Contact: binhexor at yahoo.com

(Read the Jargon File for more history.)

---

Screw that

[gqgreg]

Hey, in case you weren't aware, the English language, and ... hmmm every living language as a matter of fact, are all evolutionary languages, i.e., they change over time. Your dictionary definition of geek is outdated.
---

I live in a geek house

[bink]

You might try looking at a traditional home and see how you can refit it to meet your geek needs. I live in a 5 bedroom house with 4 other geeks, and we couldn't be really picky about where we lived (being 5 college-aged males). Once we got the house we decided if we put the server in the basement, we could run CAT-5 cables through the laundry chute, then along the baseboards to all of our rooms (and the living room and the dining room), you really don't even see the cabling, it's a pretty decent job. So you could look for a house with a laundry chute, or you could just put the server in a central room and then run it along the baseboards from there (there's no place in our house that requires more than 100 ft of cable). Anyhow, if you're a bit creative you can make any house a geek house, and you won't have to spend a fortune to do it.

Re:the key is communication

[Da_Monk]

doh. my bad.
its late, and i have no spell check nor dictionary handy.
thanks for the correction..

the key is communication

[Da_Monk]

The key of finding a geek house is social networking... get to know people, talk to others, perhaps suggest starting one? Maybe place a classified ad.

I got to live in a geek house this summer and it ruled (mad props to The Geek Empire). i simply got to know everyone else in the house over the course of my college career, and got invited.

however keep in mind that you will have a house of geeks. got personal quirks you might not like? well multiply those by the number in the house. however, if everyone communicates there personal needs and wants, things can work out fine.

also search on the web! be agressive, B-E agressive B-E-A-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E!

Re:the key is communication

[gtx]

i think you must be confusing these people with social giants. we're talking about geeks! come on! if you want to form a geek house, go around playing quake 3, and assume that people with low ping rates must be well computer equipped. invite those people to your geek house. paint it blue before they get there because geeks can't paint. it's a fact. if it's blue when they get there, they won't want to change it!

The time has passed...

[sadr]

I knew some of the folks in the 'cruz Geek Houses and visited on several occasions. But I suspect that they are not ever going to happen, at least quite like that, elsewhere.

Why?

Geek houses started because it was a good idea to actually buy a house in California, but they were immensely expensive for 20-somethings to afford. So several geeks got together and bought a big house. That won't happen in Atlanta, for example, where any geek barely out of school can afford a decent place to live.

Second, Geek Houses existed to provide network access (at all) and later high speed (T1) access before cable-modem and DSL become popular. Today, to be a "True" Geek House, you'd need to be talking about a DS-3/T-3 into your house. People with a real need for speed. But I haven't heard anyone who really thinks they need 25% of a T3 on a regular basis. And since anyone can get DSL or Cable Modem, and set up a $150 firewall box, it is not very geeky to have a house connected to the Internet these days.

I suspect that the Geek House phenomenon was limited to places like California where real estate was absurdly expensive, and to a time when network access was difficult and expensive. Atlanta is not the place, now is not that time.

An Atlanta Resident, with a suburban house wired with 3 cat-5 and RG-6 to every room.

!GeeKs

[DeeKs]

I get the feeling most of the people here are !GeeKs, or rather Nappy GeeKs (Wannabe's) Geekism has nothing to do with how much of the latest hardware you have, or how fat a pipe you have. Geekism comes from within, I know GeeKs who have ancient equipment and 28.8k modems, but they really are GeeKs, they do what GeeKs have always done, GeeK. The mind maketh the GeeK, not the Hardware. D.

Re:!GeeKs

[THATDOG!]

You know, i've been thinking about this for quite sometime now. Most people who live in geek compunds (that I know) arn't really geeks. They are just kids with alot of cash, who all they seem to be intrested in is how many fps they can get quake to run on. I was really turned off when I went to a friends house where everyone was running dual procs, and GHZ Athalons, but all they wanted to do was watch TV on their 21 inch monitors. I mean none of these guys could even code. I doubt they could even write a batch file! When I asked about linux, they all agreed that linux sucked, becuase you couln't play games on it, and that their win2k internet connection sharing routers ran just fine on their spare celeron 600 system, whith only 128 megs of RAM. They Laughed when I told them that exept for my personal workstation, most of my systems don't even run pentiums. I honestly don't think that most geeks live in geek homes. The fact is that coding takes a long time, and alot of dedication, I don't have the time or interest to be watching a DVD in one window while playing quake in the other, while thinking about how big of a man I am for running the fastest PC on the lan... Thats just my opinion.

Historical note ;-p

[foul]

I used to live in a geek house some 4-5 years ago. It was one of the most fucked up years in my live I have to say, heh. Installed my first Linux (Kernel 1.2.18, Slackware 3.1?) in a hot summer vacation: yeah it took me two weeks to get it all running. Non supported soundcards, non supported video drivers, and a monitor that burned out after 3 days ;-p

There were three of us in a house of five, all installing Linux connecting with token ring thin ethernet, so we could play MUD over a shared modem 8 hours a day *sigh*. We also tended to play lots of DOOM I, hehehe. Ennieweez, one of the geeks was a girl, and a gorgeous one I might say. So it was pretty inevitable that we ended up together for a while.

But allas, I moved out of there a long time ago and I'm having a 'real' life since, without that particular girl, sadly. Nevertheless, Geek houses rule!

Re:Historical note ;-p

[FeltTip]

Ha! So did I, and one was a girl. The house was wired with BNC cable. It was 1994, and Netscape was still new. Twogoons.com - The 91 Argyle Street Geekhouse. Those were the days!

geek house

[tootired]

right now i'm in louisiana running 10 boxes in my apartment.

i have 7 generic winnt/98/2k boxes, 2 linux servers, and one mac on an airport.

the apartment got nuts as soon as i moved in. I wired the place up (temp) and brought in the roomies. we connect to the web via dsl and have several file/print/web servers for our enjoyment.

most of the network exists for file and print sharing, but having webservers is nice too. i'm trying to get slashcode up and running on an old ppro linux box, but hey, i don't have time to sleep as it is ;)

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

I live in one

[Ouija]

Once upon a time, my best friend from high school (like-minded geek) offered for me to live with him and bring my computers...

Now we are both professional programmers, both married, and I've lost count of the computers and monitors. It's sweet, all right.

We've been told countless times that this would not work; that we both needed to grow up and realize that having our wives together in the same (admittedly HUGE) house was a bad idea.

Oh, there are issues:

• Bandwidth
• Doze vs. Linux vs. Be vs. BSD vs. (the per cap winner: Amiga)
• Mountain Dew vs. Coke
• Perl vs. C
• The occasional meat-space squabble

Benefits are there, too: N64 AND PlayStation; LOTS of CD's in the collective; beefy MP3 server (of course), DVD, pool table, toys, toys, toys.

It's not for everyone; and I know it won't last forever. I'm hitting 30 this year, and I'm still waiting to grow up. My life is little different from the average college student, save the college and the occasional international business trip.

You know you're in geekdom when the whole house heads out at 1am for "burritos as big as your head" and/or Pizza.

So it isn't a myth. Geek houses exist. But they grow by themselves. I don't think it would have worked if we tried to make one. It's just what naturally fit for us.

-Ouija-

Re:I live in one

[jdaemon]

You know you're in geekdom when the whole house heads out at 1am for "burritos as big as your head" and/or Pizza.

Grin, and you know you're getting old when you think of 1am as late.

A defining geekdom meal to me would seem more like a trip to Denny's or the Waffle House at 6 in the morning for a fine meal of all-the-grease-you-can-swallow after gnawing hunger finally interrupts yet another marathon gaming session.

But, maybe that's just me, grin.

Fuel Prices? (OT)

[molo]

And if you drive, gas is about the most expensive in the whole country (over $2/gal for reg. unleaded).

Hey, Roger, I was wondering if you could fill me in here. I drive a diesel (43 mpg in a 2500 lbs mid-size sedan is nice) and was wondering if the price for diesel was similar to the price for gasoline in the SF area.

Over here (upstate NY), diesel has been lower than gasoline, sometimes by as much as 30%. I'm just wondering if things compare similarly over there.

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[michael.creasy]

Nah, means you need to start drinking decent scotch. Get thyself a bottle of Distiller's Edition Talisker, mmmm.

Geek Flat + extras

[Blondito]

I live in a geek flat(name for communal rental property in NZ), we have a 10/100/1000baseT capable flush mount UTP network and a network cupboard with a 48 port patch panel, sat net connection, 24 port switch and a 32 extension Digital/Analog PABX we built it all ourselves with minimal fuss, all it took was 4 of us (3 boys and my missus) deciding we wanted to live together one of the main attractions for us all was the fact we all wanted a geek setup. The best thing about our house though is the fact that it is spacious beautiful and nice to live in (you dont havce to comprise comfort for geekness:-). Heaps of our mates have similar setups at their flats. I would suggest you find a bunch of geek mates you know you can live with find your self a nice house and when you sign the Tenancy contract you ask the landlord about weather they would be all right with some well done wiring added for free (heh not suprisingly they almost always say yes :-) Good Luck

You don't find geek houses, they spontaneously evo

[codegen]

As you are finding out from messages such as "what we did", "wiring is important", etc. Geek houses are not found, spontaneously evolve. It starts with you finding a geek for a roomate and renting the house. Then other friends join. The only way you "find" a geek house is if a mutual aquaintance knows about it.

Fridge magnets

[Count Spatula]

Actually, if you have a burned hdd, just pop the magnet out of that one. I swear ours holds at least 1cm thick of paper. They're also really good for holding the week's liquor store sales ad. ;)

hey - Upstate NY - 716

[voudras]

I've considered the same thing, but a lil different. What i think would actually work is something like this. several professional geeks get together and purchase a *large* location.. the sort that might have an *east wing* ya know? in theory you could rent out your section (as a group), sell your section (once you buy your own) - use your section as office space (for that home business). Y0 - this would definatly drop the cost of that T1 we'd all be arguing of whos using more of the bandwidth. hmm, we'd have ta call it a geekosystem.

Re:hey - Upstate NY - 716

[voudras]

oh ya, location mentioned for obvious reasons. I already got a female too - not sure if she could tolerate more than one geek within 100 feet more than a couple days at a time. but im betting it would still be cheeper than rent - even with the T3.

Re:hey - Upstate NY - 716

[voudras]

Yeah - ya got that right. I lived there for some time. Hell, we could always get a bunch of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/18/004720 2&mode=nested those too, just incase we end up taking mohawk down =). Only thing i dont like about that one - is the ftp cops know me a lil *too* well.

Re:Why your wrong

[voudras]

your thinking too small. I'm thinking more like a relaxed condo. and hey - if you make too much noise upstairs, i'll wreck *your* lan party =o)

Re:Geek Greeks

[GreekGeek]

Don't be a Geek Greek--become a Greek Geek. Learn the Greek language, study the Greek culture... Become a Greek Geek!! (This is a public service announcement)

Re:chicks

[Morthaur]

I would definitely be interested. I already share a house with one geek chick, and would not mind one bit sharing a place with a few more.
I tend to get along ^much^ better with women. Men have too many ego issues (read: small penis syndrome).
-------------------------------------- ---------

I wish...

[quecojones]

I don't know about anybody in Atlanta, but if anybody in the North Jersey area is thinking about this, let me know...

This is something I've been thinking about for a while too.

q

Re:eh?

[quecojones]

I really can't say, but I do have an idea...

Maybe it was a fellow horny geek who knows what I'm going through?

Or maybe it's just another geek in the North Jersey area who didn't want to give away the fact that he/she is in North Jersey, and just moderated it up to see if there were any replies?

Who knows? I'm half wasted on some Chivas Regal at the moment, so I don't really care, but it was fun trying to guess why. ;)

q

Re:chicks

[quecojones]

So true... except not wine. Whiskey, a good whiskey is the way to go...

I prefer Chivas Regal myself, but there are plenty more to choose from. ;)

q

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[quecojones]

Hard liquor is not for the timid. Besides, Chivas Regal isn't really that hard anyway...

If you don't know what you're doing, stay away from the bottle! It's the same as asking a PHB to set up your firewall for you... don't do it.

q

Re:you are an idiot

[quecojones]

Are you refering to my .sig, or to my comment in general (or specifically; whatever)?

Maybe I'm too drunk, but I just don't get it... :(

No flame, just curiousity...

q

Check out Walden Internet Villages in Houston

[lyrabas]

You can find some geek apartment complexes in Houston that are very nice. They are at http://www.waldenweb.com/. They have some really nice places with really fast internet access and the price is actually very affordable. Really nice apartments. Nice pools, jacuzzis, cyber cafe, LAN Parties, etc....

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[CrAzYaL]

I agree about the tape, but I would suggest using Gaffer's Tape...

Gaffer's tape is strong like duct tape but doesn't leave a residue or pull paint when removed.

--Alex

Re:Hmm.

[The_Messenger]

LOL, that's hilarious... one person being ostracised after it becomes known that he paid for WindowsME, mysterious disk erasures in the middle of the night, the discovery that someone switched the coffee with decaf, a dozen different erratic sleep schedules colliding. Make sure you know what kind of geeks you're getting into bed with, so to speak.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:Geek Greeks

[The_Messenger]

Wasn't that the frat in "Revenge of the Nerds"? How appropriate.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[The_Messenger]

I love the drinker's mentality. "I can drink more poison than you without getting sick or passing out, therefore I am more of a man! Rarrr! Grunt!" Real geeks drink caffeine. Alcohol slows you down, man.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:Geek Greeks

[The_Messenger]

Watch out for flying manhole covers, my friend. Hey, do you know where there's an "Internet cafe" in DC? I could've sworn I remember one in Georgetown. I want a place, besides my home or workplace, to drink coffee and use my laptop. So I'm remembering these coffeeshops wired with 100baseTX you hear about from time to time... I mean, DC isn't as wired as SF or NYC, but it's gotta have at least one, right?

The alternative is to send up my own satellite and carry around a backpack transmitter, so I can read Slashdot while in the Barnes & Noble on M Street.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Is the girl...

[The_Messenger]

...the Mac user?

I'm just curious.

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:geeks and gender

[The_Messenger]

Here's my opinion. I spent last night online looking at "internet cafes" in the DC area, and the two most prominent (Atomic Grounds and cyberStop) are just regular cafes, with the addition of a couple (literally two to four) Windows 98 boxen hooked up to a cable modem. Sad, sad, sad.

What I envision as a cyber-cafe looks just like a normal cafe, but every seat has an Fast Ethernet port nearby. Perhaps there will be a few iMacs and such, but the focus will be on people who carry around laptops.

I like your idea of a gaming cafe/bar. Set up a few gaming boxen (PIII 500, 128MB RAM, TNT2 -- nothing special) and let people bring their own. If the place has two floors, rent out the top floor for LAN parties. Maybe even work out a deal with a local Chinese restaurant/pizza shop for these events. Could be pretty sweet.

What I'm looking for is an atmosphere like the cafe in the Barnes & Noble on M, but with a Net connection. Your cafe/bar could fulfill that too. Make it Metro-accessible and you're good as gold. I live in Silver Spring and work in Rockville, and love going downtown on the weekends to troll bookstores and get coffee and such. I suppose your biggest problem is how expensive the property will be.

I'm not sure how I could help out (build you a firewall box for the network? ;-), but if you'd like to chat about this, e-mail me...

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:I LOVE the Commodores!

[The_Messenger]

Or, "Geek House... in the middle of the street, Geek House... that was where we used to sleep..."

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

geek abode..

[_outcat_]

wow. Never thought anyone else would think of this. ;]

Seriously, myself and some good geek friends thought about this. After we were all done with college and gainfully employed, if we were all in the same area, we wanted to get together and have a geek house. Our Windows-using (yes, they exist) geek friends would be fed Internet access off Linux boxen, and we'd do gaming every night.

Now I'm not sure that's going to go over.

Plus, now all our windows-using friends DO is play games.

Of course, I do feel for my poor roommate. I'm a chick college student, majoring in CompSci, and she's a volleyball player. She has to put up with my bizarre hours, my compulsive belching, my noisy IBM keyboard, and my tendency to drink Diet Coke every morning...

I'd say NORMAL people have a harder time living with geeks than geeks do, though.

Just my 2c.

Tech House

[josecuervo]

I go to Brown University. Here they have a sort of "fraternity" that is called tech house. It seems to be the sort of community you are talking about. They do cool things (for example playing tetris with the lights on the 14 story science library here, something that I I think was posted to slashdot a while back.) I think they also built an elevator in the house. Anyways, I was taking a look at it, and it seems pretty cool. These places do exhist though. -Brian Singer

Re:What now, Personals? =) -- Bay Area Livin...

[Woody77]

$600??? You're joking right? South bay is at over 99% capacity. No vacancy. Cheapest single-bed apartment I know of is mine, and my rent (controlled) is $200 under the asking price of $1250.

Rent has gone up 20-30% in the last 3-6 months. You're lucky to have found a place...

Moon Geek

[phossie]

it would probably be less offensive to settle on the dark side... that way there won't be so much glare on the monitors.

Check out the 3 hacker cons! Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[Fuller212]

Howdy all!

I just thought that I'd tell you about the 3 hacker related cons in the Southeast!

First, Summercon is usually the beginning of June/summer, it is more social than actual learning.
http://www.summercon.org

Next is Phreaknic v4.0 Coming up the first weekend in November in Nashville Tn!
http://www.phreaknic.org
(ps. they hadn't heard about Freaknik in Atl when they started this 4 years ago!)

Also, check out the upcoming @lanta.Con held on the first weekend of April!
http://www.atlantacon.org

Also, about a geek house. my house will soon become something sorta similiar. (all these damn old computers have to be used somehow, why not Freenet nodes/file-servers?)

About Atl. um, if you want a different pace of life from Buckhead, come over to Marietta/Cobb County. (as long as you don't live in East Cobb) you will have parks/etc yet high tech, malls (town-center and Cumberland) and being right near I75 and Highway 41!

Thnx
Fuller

Try SE2600! Re:Atlanta Area Geeks

[Fuller212]

Howdy all! I forgot in my last post to mention the South-Eastern 2600 group meetins! http://www.se2600.org the 404/770/678 area meets at Lenox Mall in the food court. (check site for more details) also, the "678 social hacker group" occasionally takes trips to various Sushi restraunts(?)/etc. Thnx, Fuller

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[BinxBolling]

I love the drinker's mentality. "I can drink more poison than you without getting sick or passing out, therefore I am more of a man!

I love the puritan's mentality: "People who take pleasure in things I dislike always do so for stupid reasons!"

Proving one's manhood by drinking a lot is strictly for college boys and morons. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks does so in this fashion. Tip: I drink maybe once or twice a week, rarely more than one or two drinks in a sitting, and almost always accompanied by a meal. But you'll never know how pleasant a glass of good wine is with a good meal, because you're too busy feeling superior to fratboys doing keg stands.

Geeking with University pals

[myrkul]

The best way to form a geekhouse, I find, is to attend university. Stay in residence the first semester/year while meeting geeks who chafe at the residence acceptable use policies (ie no sub-nets connected to the residece LAN - how lame is that?). Then, find a (large) house with aDSL/cable and move in with all your new-found friends. Through the university years, turnover will be high, but later on, you (hopefully) will end up with one good set of geek room mates and a great geek house, as well as offers to join geek houses in other cities/areas.
Well, in theory that should work. Other options include meeting others at LUGs and online and other tech-oriented areas, and proposing the idea to all the geek friends you have.
Good luck!

every once in a while

[Lord Omlette]

people start bitching about the necessity of going to college... well guess what, depending on where you go, you're going to be wired as hell. and there are cute co-eds around. so why live in a geek house when you can be in a geek dorm?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057

Re:chicks

[jbarnett]

"geek house" - a house that contains geeks, right?
So if you have a "geek" they are able to fit into the house right? Since when was there a "sex requirement" on being a geek?

If there geek, it doesn't matter if they are male or female. There are female geeks, although extremely rare, they do exist.

I meet one, once, I tried to tag her with a small GPS device, but she used some type of high freq wave to jam my tracking device...

Actucally I should of used the term "Gender Requirement", above. There is another "sex requirement" on geeks, but that that mainly states 'little or none' ;)

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[jbarnett]

Umm why do you need distribution panel that costs 3-5K? Just get a $0.98 roll of duct type, run the wires, put the wires up, duct tape the wires on the wall.

It looks like crap, but it is out of the way. And who really cares what it looks like? It's not like a geek house is the gathering point for the national elite, more than likely the only people that are going to see it is the housemates themselves.

Re:geeks and gender

[jbarnett]

expect me their employer to pay for training each time we want to explore new technology

If they are geek and enjoy the new technology, they will learn in on there own.

But if it is a "new technology" that was thought of by the employeer or manager monkey to "increase profits", you can forget it. Geek learn computers, because they want to learn computers, not because it raises company profits or you as an employeer don't see it fit to provide training.

Geeks want to be come enlightened in everything a computer does, they don't want to buy you a new car by putting in 20 hour days working with stuff they have no desire messing with (Ussually buggy commerical software)

Re:chicks

[jbarnett]

First these geeks lure in young attactive women with 56K analog connections, frozen pizza and anime re-runs on the Sci-fi channel. They give these women the first slice and download for free. After that, the overwelming urge to "be a geek" sets in.

Soon these women are trying the "hard stuff", Full blown unsat T1, "extra toppings" pizza and warezed unreleased anime from japan.

They know having a full dedicated T1 to their selves and doing nothing but using it for playing Q3. They know this is wrong, they know they should setup mirror of free software, but the hold is to strong on them, they want 100% of the fiber optic for fragging.

Then reality sets in, they must move out for some reason or another. Sure they can get 56K analog at their new place, but it isn't the same. Sure cable is avaiable, but the shared laggy connection doesn't give them the same rush a full T used to give them. They start shaking and waking up in cold sweets, they need bandwidth.

They then start trying to find their "fix" outside their current location, but going to sleezy locations like "cyber cafes" and "libraries" even "schools" and "college" to get their bandwidth fix, but it isn't the same.

It isn't the same rush, it isn't the same bandwidth, they get depressed and angry. They look for thigns to fill the void that was the bandwidth, but nothing is the same...

This is the reality of "geek houses"

Even cooler could be...

[Megane]

...a Geek Neighborhood! I know this guy in north Austin (in a Geek House, FWIW) who wants to set up some wireless links to link up geeks in the neighborhood, and at least one of the places is gonna have some sort of beta test high bandwidth satellite feed. Too bad I'm living on the south side right now.

I love my geek house

[neraka-]

I live in a geek house with 3 other people I work with.. it's great.. public and private network.. all w/ static ip's and hostnames in my domain... a dual-homed gateway running fbsd 4.1-stable to the private network.. we're about to wire the house for ethernet (yes, even in the bathroom). 6 desktops (running 98, Me, BeOS, FreeBSD, and linux) and two laptops (1 mac 1 pc). :) hehehe 100megabit switched ethernet.. I highly recommend this style of living for everyone :)

Re:What now, Personals? =) -- Bay Area Livin...

[radioradio]

I have bad news. There are few to no living spaces in the city and bay aarea in general. What ones there are are expensive and pretty hard to
come by overall.

I spent almost two months surfing couches of very good friends until I made a combination of decisions. I knew that I could not afford my own
place (nor had the proper rental history to do so - not that mine is bad, but just compromised of mostly shared living situations that never show up
on your credit history...). I looked into roommate referral services and followed craigslist religiously (www.craigslist.org).

I had good credit (thought sparse), a great demeanor, a real job and (after the first couple weeks of looking) the willingness to break my rent
ceiling of under 600 bucks.

Finally after what seemed like forever I got a place. Not my own, but a room in a flat. I pay 650, plus utils, cable and everything else. I also
paid a security deposit and first and last moths rent. Just to get a room was almost 2000 bucks.

My suggestion?

1) Have really close friends that know and love you already living in the City.

2) Be ready to get your own place (and pay at least 1000 for a studio in the heart of the ghetto aka; the beeyootiful Tenderloin).

3)check these places out
http://www.metrorent.com/
http://www.renttech.com/
http://www.RoommateLink.com/
http://www.therentalsource.com/
http://www.craigslist.org/

the last being where i got my place.

Sorry if this letter is so cynical, you might have a lot better luck than me.

I hope so.

Virgil

available female geeks?

[SquirrelLady]

>Do straight geek girls exist?

Yes, we do exist. The real question should be: do available geek girls exist? I'm living with my geek boyfriend, and am quite happy with him (of course we've got a nice home network and dsl modem). My previous boyfriend was a geek too.

I met my previous geek boyfriend when I was in college, and my current boyfriend at the cafeteria at work. The key is, they made an effort to talk to the shy girl.

I just built one

[Mad-cat]

My own "geek house" is a little short on geeks (only two), but it's completely equipped for as many as eight ethernet terminals.

The house is internally wired with Cat5, with jacks in every conceivable room. I also have six built PCs and a server installed. Cable is rigged (courtesy of the cable company) for Internet.
It's not perfect, but it's a very nice system. It's really nice when inviting some friends over for a LAN party. No need to bring your PCs, I already have six.

Re:I'm sick of these posts

[evilviper]

Yeah, this sounds like a person I'm gonna be taking advice from... Some people just don't have the guts to stand behind what they think and prefer to remain anonymous instead. When anyone has anything productive to say let me know.

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[chez69]

yes but FDDI cards do kick ass=-)

Re:Wiring is important...

[__donald_ball__]

By the way... for the time being, I'd stay away from wireless networks. We tried that at the beginning and it was just a mess of problems... interference, poor response time, dropped packets...

You might just want to give wireless a look. You can get low end stuff (webgear cards, 1Mb, no macs) for about $160 for a two-pack. for about $160 per, you can get the lucent gold wavelan cards (11Mb, 128 bit encryption). if you've got a laptop but no wireless, you're really missing out - especially if you have a garden.

Do the wiring yourself...

[Elequin]

A friend of mine got a quote on having a contractor put CAT5 into the house he was building, and it was expensive. Apparently it was less expensive (but also a good idea) to also install CAT5 for the phone wiring. He was able to afford that.

Imagine what it'd cost to wire the place with dual-rotating fiber rings... ;-)

Oh, and don't forget your server closet! Room for racks, UPS, and it's own A/C duct, if not it's own dedicated A/C system.

- Eric

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Elequin]

Sorry to respond to myself, but the point of the above was to look into starting your own.. The whole "build it and they will come" type of thing. :-)

- Eric

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Louis_Wu]

There was an Ask Slashdot at the end of February about Wiring Your Home which you might find useful if you make your own 'Geek House'. There were a number of good comments on geek home improvement (Yeah, I wrote a couple, that's why I remember.).

Louis Wu

"Where do you want to go ...

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Duke of Org]

I kinda wired my house this last june.
What I did was set up as server (Shelf) in my room, which is the attic, then ran cat-5 from there to the basement, then through a crawspace to my moms office, then ran one to my sisters room across the hole from the door to my attic. On the end of each line I have a nice little box with the RJ-45 connector which has sticky tape on the back and is stuck to the bottom of the wall, my "shelf" is just a piece of board that goes between my wall and a hand-rail that is part of the stare-case to my room, on which sits a linksys 10bps hub and a pent.75 (running Caldera 2.2) which is pulling web-server duty (which I don't leave on all the time) and is soon to pull Squid and fire-wall duty when I get road-runner.

I really wish I had a Server closet, and I kinda wish I would have ran rg-6 so that when I get Roadrunner I can tap into the line and get cable on several TV's, but I can always run it later, running the Cat-5 only took a day and 1/2.

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[compwizrd]

sometimes there's a gap between the baseboard, and the carpet, stuff the wires into that. That's what i did here, had to run wire around the doorframe to save on running 60 feet around the room, but it works.

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[Crizp]

I've used a glue pistol for all my wiring. It looks much better than stapling it or taping it up with that ugly duct tape... and it's easy to rip off if you want to.

At my workdesk I'll soon put up one of those... eh... we call it "channels" here in Norway, they're 10cm high/5cm deep, a few meters long. You get all sorts of modules for it, like power outlets and RJ45 connectors and stuff. Plus there's a lot of room for the cables.

Re:Do the wiring yourself...

[metoc]

One of my associates has told me that many cable vendors now carry precut, terminated and tested lengths (many sizes) of cat5 & fibre. Price is slightly higher than raw cable, but much cheaper than having a qualified contractor run the cable, put the connectors on and test it. Just remember to protect the ends and make bigger holes.

Wiring is important...

[br4dh4x0r]

When you're thinking about a geek HOUSE, wiring is probably the most important (and sometimes frustrating) concern. I used this link when I was helping out a friend... and we were both pretty clueless when it came to how to start. Tons of links on this page and it really helped us out... hope it does the same for you.

love,
br4dh4x0r

By the way... for the time being, I'd stay away from wireless networks. We tried that at the beginning and it was just a mess of problems... interference, poor response time, dropped packets...

Modern day Kerista?!?!?

[Ruthless_Advisorette]

Kerista was a large polygamous commune type set up in the San Francisco CA area. Everyone shared resources and responsibilities. I think it went defunct in the 80's.

Just don't let some bandwidth issues ruin your new happy little family!

San Fran.

[Ruthless_Advisorette]

I might be able to help you in the SF area, oddly enough. I take it that you're coming here to take a contract that might go perm?

Ruthie - 1 NT Server, 1 NT Workstation, 1 Mac running OS 9, 2 little cuecats, lots of spare parts,and a Linux box running Red hat (to be sung to the 12 days of Christmas) (geeky enough for ya?)

Re:eh?

[Louis_Wu]

Maybe the Sig?

Louis Wu

"Where do you want to go ...

Re:In the house...

[VoodooBird]

phear you'sel' nah nah nah nanah phear you'sel', hey hey hey hey.

Self Organizing Chaos

[Prof_Dagoski]

Well in my case the geek house wasn't planned it just happened. Two geeks in a house--okay, one geek and one doofus, you decide which is which--deciding on whether to get cable. Throw in a geek buddy fleeing the suburban hell that is Fairfax, and the rest just happened. Here's some thoughts on how I'd do it differently: First off one bedroom for everybody and a bigger living room. Of course a full fledged house would be ideal. Two: Wireless LAN. More expensive, but cables running across your living room and down the hall are just tres gauche. If you have cats this might be an essential item. My feline buddies learned about chewing on cables when they were younger; chewed right through a speaker cable with power going through it. Haven't been back since. However, not every cat is as swift. Three: Make sure everyone has a job and pays rent. Seems like a basic, but I've had way too many roomates who don't have clue on this one. Four: Don't even try to have a plan. Improvisation is a lifestyle and an art. And, the realities of living with smart, over educated and overconfident people leads to circumstances which defy the best plans, human logic, and often enough the physical laws of the universe.

The geek House project

[TeTalon]

Well let me first off state that I am remolding my house to be a total geek house.
I have a my Web site Tetalon that has a link to my Geek House Project page.
The Page will be viewable in any browsers, including Lynx

Basically I have what I am doing to my house, with Tips & Tricks on how to High Tech your house cheap.
I will be adding Mpeg's and Jpeg's soon, as well as all the tech specs you could ever ask for.
Now as far as funding, so far it has been out of my own pocket.
But I am always looking for sponsorship from any company wishing to give me their product in exchange for a link to their web site, and endorsements.
(As long as the product is a good one)

I just started this a few weeks ago, it is going slow for three reasons.

1. I got laid off from MicroAge due to Clueless downsizing.
2. I have been very busy look for a good employer in Arizona, around the Mesa area.
3. Lack of sponsorship.

Check out the page, it will be changing a lot in the next few months, and when the weather cools here, you will see a lot of changes.
Also if you have Ideas; check out the page and then email me, I would love to add a submission page as well..
Maybe even links to other people trying to High Tech their House.

Thanks for reading my post

TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.

Geek Greeks

[gunner800]

You might start by looking into becoming a fraternity (especially if you happen to be student; I am, so everybody else must be too).

There would be some tradeoffs, as universities usually have some authority over frats, but just think of the puns!

Just don't call yourselves "lambda lambda lambda".


My mom is not a Karma whore!

Re:Geek Greeks

[eudas]

lambda lambda lambda, the half-life fraternity. (for more reasons than one.)

eudas

chicks

[rjbrown99]

You need to find a geek house that has chicks. Word.

Re:chicks

[tahini]

Chicks like DSL and anime and pizza. That's how I got lured in.

Re:chicks

[wmaheriv]

Or the experiences....
~wmaheriv

Re:chicks

[seagis]

Well, actually, it's just a matter of semantics. The Scotch call it Whisky without the e, but we Americans call the same stuff Whiskey with the e.
******

Re:chicks

[gtx]

...and not the kind that come in and make you do their work before leaving you, action free, in a depressing state of geeky blue-balls. you need the kind that sit back in the hot-tub (you need a hottub) drinking wine, smoking cohibas, and bitching about microsoft. that's a house, yo.

Re:chicks

[lazuli42]

Hmmm... Anime, DSL, and pizza...

I have a geek house. 512k SDSL, six computers between my roommate and I, soon to have a 5.1 surround setup for entertainment center.

Of course, I no longer have any room for rent. Sorry.

Corinna

Re:chicks

[mr.nicholas]

Oh sure there are! I speak from experience. I have a geek house with a 100mpbs homenet, distributed 80GB RAID'd filesystem and cable AND dsl access (with both source based routing and "best path" routing) and a "chick" on one of the nodes. I also have a geek-in-training (or is that 2nd generational geek?) plugged in.

No, wait. That's my wife and son. Sorry! :)

Re:chicks

[konala]

There are no geek houses that want chicks in them. I speak from experience.

Just my few cents...or maybe more

~KONala

Re:chicks

[Sperminator]

You need to find fat ass chicks so you know that supper will always be ready

Re:chicks

[Stefien]

Call me nuts, but wasnt that what he just said?

Re:Look in college towns

[pakratt]

Well if you want a college town, atlanta's pretty good. You have emory, georgia state, and (geekiest by far) georgia tech. I'm currently at tech and I know of a number of "geek houses." You should definitely put up some flyers around campus at tech. There are always people looking for apartments.

and when i press my face against the frosted shower stall

I live...

[PhadeRunner]

...in a geek house. Its great, internal 100Mb network connected to the outside via cable modem. Guts of PCs lying around in various stages of rebuild and repair. Being able to shout round the house "How do you set a TCP socket to be non-blocking?" and get a response that includes the word "EWOULDBLOCK" and not "WTF?". Having some one living with you who has had a PlayStation 2 on pre-order, since last Christmas. Oh the pleasures of living in a geek house! There are however some downsides, having your GF trip over CAT-5 on the way to the bathroom is not recommended (that reminds me, must go wireless!) and no matter what they say, digital cable TV isn't any better than terrestrial it just has hours more crap on it (although we were the first in the street to find out!). But if you like that sort of thing (or don't have a GF) then go for it, you'll have the best fun!

Geek Apartment

[yoda0728]

At the end of this summer, my friend and I set out to create a geek apartment. We are both college students, I am in a co-op rotation and he is a comp sci major taking the semester off, so we have the time. The decorations involved track lights and lots of movie posters. Our bandwidth is 1.5/384 DSL which has yet to arrive due to the goddam verizon strike. All the rooms in the house will have cat 5 run, we will also have a server farm, which is most likely where our router and hub will live. Other than bandwidth issues we have a pretty sweet entertainment center and lots of gadgets around the place. Moral of the story: If geeks live together, a geek house will form naturally

Look in college towns

[evilned]

Honestly the best place to make one would be in a college town. Find a couple of people in your major to rent a house with, line your 10/100baseT cable around and set up a firewall proxy for your dsl/cable modem. Most college students live communally to save costs anyway, so all you have to do is throw in the lan. Dont expect it to become a toga party haven though ;)

Re:Look in college towns

[clare-ents]

In my house, there's me, my girlfriend and our house mate. We've two desktops and a laptop connecting to a server (RH6.2) doing proxying / caching over dialup. It's also got a CD writer, printer and lots of disk space for media serving. I'm contemplating moving the DVD drive into it too (it's 100Mbit ethernet) and possibly the TV card.

To make it easy for my girlfriend (who hates computers but likes games) all of the linux functions can be called from the web homepage - it has buttons for - "Start The Internet" - "Copy a CD" - "Play Audio CD" etc.

Works very nicely.

Yep, thats what I did

[SupahVee]

I just bought a new house, and I got quite lucky, the builders finished the framing on a firday, and started the drywall to following monday.

I did my cabling on saturday and sunday, cost me 150$ and about 5 hours of time to do it, rather than the 2G's the builder wanted to put in CAT3. CAT3??!

I put in 2 cat5's and one coax to every room, enough for 2 pc's, two phone, and one TV in every room. Not that I want that many tv's, but its nice to know its there.

My brother hates me, he lives in an apt. with cables running all over the floor. *chuckle*

Geek House

[prophet_]

Um...the three people I live with and I...we all work for a big ISP in ATL that I'm not going to name...but anyway, we've all worked together there for at least a couple of years now. Two of us got married, bought a huge house, the other two moved in, and then computers and other nifty stuff started exploding all over the place. We're about to do some more wiring, add some cat 5 all over the place....

Atlanta? Georgia Tech = Gigantic Nerd House

[nerdwarrior]

If you're in Atlanta, look no further than Georgia Tech. The dorms are literally zoos of us nerds, and we even have some women here.

Hmmm, geek house... I dunno...

[seanmeister]

Wake up.

Shuffle blindly towards kitchen.

See this.

No thanks!

(well, at least it's not goatse.cx!)

Sean

They're on the way....

[MolGOLD]

Actually, here in Canada (more specifically, a suburb of Toronto) there's already a new "high-tech" subdivision in the works. Looks very cool, as far as I've heard, but I haven't been able to find out any more information other than the fact that each room is wired for ethernet and cable.

But why stop there? Yeah, it's great to have a room with pre-wired ethernet so that your room doesn't have a mass of cables running around the door frame (like my apartment now does!), but come on! We can do better than that! I'd want my house to have a permanent firewall, Masq server and print server all centrally located. I'd want the house to have some kind of high-bandwidth connection, and the lovely simplicity of being able to operate appliances from a CPU (Imagine telnetting in to set the oveN!)

And yet, the best most "geek house" builders seem to be able to do is wire the rooms for ethernet. We need more!

(As technically unfeasable as this is, I still think it would be fun).

Anyone in the Slashdot community know any architects who are looking for ideas?

What exactly are the base features every house should have? Is pre-wired ether enough, or am I right ot think high-bandwidth connection to the internet is the least on top of pre-wiring rooms? Anyone with an opinion on what to go into the houses, feel free to send me your suggestions!

Re:They're on the way....

[skoda]

I've read some articles and seen some shows on this topic. The details escape me, but it was something like this:

- pre-wire the house with phone cable, electricity (of course), cat 5, and coax, and maybe something else.

- Everwhere there is an electrical outlet, place an outlet for the phone & cat-5 cables. Or at least have wiring there, 'cause it's easy to punch a hole and add the outlet, if the wires are already there.

- Pre-install stereo speakers in all rooms, using suitable wiring.

- install IR receivers/transmitters (or leave cabling for them) for house-wide universal remote control uses (stereo, tv, surveilance camera, etc.)

- integrated switchboard/hub in garage/utility closet for all cables.

Essentially, with all cable pre-installed, and outlets available in all rooms, with more added later easily, and a central 'switchboard' big enough for growth, you can then plug-and-play as you add stuff (stereo, video cameras, computers, printers) to the house.
-----
D. Fischer

Re:They're on the way....

[Spurious George]

(Imagine telnetting in to set the oveN!)

Great... the last thing I need is some script kiddie burning my turkey!

--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);

Re:What now, Personals? =) -- Bay Area Livin...

[jdaemon]

Jesus, I utterly fear the temerity of someone in the Bay Area bitching about 650 dollars a month for rent.

Try 1550 a month for an unexceptional 1 bdrm apartment in San Jose. Try buying a house in this market and figure up what your monthly payment will be.

On the plus side, even though the rent sucks ass, the apartment was prewired for 10/100 ethernet with dual t1's coming out of the complex. I'm stupid enough to pay 250 a month extra in rent to avoid 6 weeks of dial-up access while I wait for the great DSL god in the sky to send an installation avatar up.

The other facet you ignore is, even as expensive as the bay area is, if you have even a shard of skill at programming, you can make as much money as you want to pursue. 1550 a month for a 1 bedroom doesn't look quite as bad when the checks keep rolling in at 95 an hour.

Of course, even 95 an hour doesn't look that good when the median house price is 474k in Santa Clara county.

Rhode Island

[cmeik]

I definately would like to form a geek house in Rhode Island.

It is hard enough just trying to FIND people intrested deeply into computers and not just these people that say "I am making a game in C++."

I have found ENOUGH of those kind of people.

The Armory

[fm6]

Of historical interest is this collection of historical files on The Armory, probably the oldest geek house in Santa Cruz.

How about a geek apartment?

[jne_human]

In Houston, TX there is a trio of Apartment
complexes that are all linked via an OC3. Each
Apartment can have either a 10mbps or a 100mbps
connection and either 1 or 2 static IP addresses.
(You can buy more if you like.) In addition each
room in every apartment is wired for cat-5 utp
ethernet cable.

There are even hookups outside by the pool.

Walden Apartments

C'mon, it's not that hard...

[NerveGas]

If you're a geek, you've probably got geek friends. Ask around, see if any of them are looking for a new place. If you have more than a small handful of friends, some of them will be looking.

Look around, find a house. Wire the whole thing up with category 5, and get a fat DSL/cable connection. You're set. If you're lucky (like me), the upstairs will be rented out by six girls, and there will be a set of stairs from your living room to theirs.

steve

a hint to get the (female) SO to agree to the idea

[mopboy]

Go wireless. No, it ain't the fastest thing in the world, but it works. My wife (whos a DBA)fought against me setting up a print serv, file serv, and shared modem for years until I found Proxim's little wireless numbers. 1.5 mbit is good enough for what I wanted to be able to do, which is take my trusty laptop to the most comfy barcalounger in the house.

Hmm.

[ambclams]

For some reason, the first thought that comes to mind is how tragic it would be if the participants in some of the common geek flamewars were living in the same house.

Imagine the horrors... 'three killed in Emacs/VI battle'... 'two plead guilty to murder spawned by GPL/BSD license debate'... ;)

What about the games??

[MrShiny]

No console games? Gotta have at least a Playstation hooked up to that huge TV. We have a dedicated game room with two Konami dance pads.

Also, I'm surprised by all the boozing geeks here. All the geeks I know are completely dry. They like their brains and tend to enjoy things more when it's working properly. Sorry if I sound like a snob, but that's what I've found.

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[stephenbooth]

I put Scotch (Speyside, Safeways own brand 12 year old single malt scotch) in tea and/or coffee so what does that mean? Do they cancel each other out?

IMHO the main things a geek house needs is a very, very fat pipe to the Inet and a door knocker in the shape of Tux.

Stephen

Calgary area

[freyr]

Calgary area geekhouse anyone? reideNOSPAM@NOSPAMcanuck.com

I LOVE the Commodores!

[DustyHodges]

*singing* It's a geek... House... It's mighty mighty, just lettin it all hang out... Oh, sorry, that's BRICK house...

Re:I LOVE the Commodores!

[Chris Mattern]

...with two cat5s in the yard?

Chris Mattern

Building a Geek House

[ahappli]

The house I am closing on at the end of this month, I had them install CAT5 everywhere. I have 10 or 11 jacks all over the house. Three in the office, two in the living room, one in the family room, one in the dining room, one in my wifes office area, one in our bedroom, and one in my son's bedroom. The builder offered the OnQ service, which will wire the house for Sound, Alarm, and Network. We went with Alarm and Network. Sound was a bit pricey. New Construction is really the way to go.

If you are your own General Contractor you may be able to do most of this yourself, plus you might work with an architect to design the house so that it can work very well for a geek house. (Octagon Shape is what I thought about a couple of years ago.)

Re:geeks and gender

[SomeOtherGuy]

>> Every female programmer, sysadmin, et cetera
>> I've met couldn't give a damn about computers
>> after they've put in their eight hours.

That is a very true statement. Their is some kick ass female SA's and coders I have met that do not even own a "home" computer....Sad really -- and in a similar topic, they (plus other lazy male "workers") expect me their employer to pay for training each time we want to explore new technology....If people in the medical profession had this same attitude -- there would be a lot more dead people.

Just ask the people who learned COBOL in the 70's and are flipping burgers at your local burger joint how important it is to take an "off hour" interest in what you do for a living.

True Geekhouse recipe

[SomeOtherGuy]

1 HOUSE + SOME GEEKS = geek house

I would say that 1 industrial roll of network cable and a bunch of junk from x10.com will give you a good start...And the most important factor would be a T1 (or a fat business DSL) -- you can't have a "true" geek house if your connection to the other geeks of the world is through POTS at 28.8 or whatever BPS the cave men and grandmas of the world are running at these days...

Geek House

[SlashParadox]

First, gather a lot of wood, and during the night, slap it together so it looks like a horse. Get everybody to climb inside. Then, in the morning, roll it up to the gates of Troy.

Wait, that is something different.

Actual geek house experience

[djozone]

I've lived in a Geekhouse for 2 years, and it rocks! In a nerdy sort of way. In addition to the usual roommate issues (phone bill, cleaning...), add "Who messed with the router?", and "Where's my perl book?".
Start by getting a DSL or other high speed connection, there's no way you want 3-6 phone lines for modems. Don't pay a professional to install it, either. You ARE a professional. And if you aren't a network guy, ask around among your freinds. You'd be amazed what people will do for pizza and beer.
One pitfall: if your work is paying for your net connection, they won't be happy about your roommate's Napster habit. Also remember that everything in and out will be monitored by work.
Try this: design the network, figure out where all the cables will be strung, and draw up a nice clean plan including a list of the hardware you intend to use. If you offer to do the installation and leave everything when you leave, you landlord may offer to pay for some (or all) of the hardware (mine did). Oh, and by the time you move out, it'll all be obsolete.
Once everything's installed, set up a main house server with big ass hard drive for file sharing and everyone's mp3's. If you can, install a cd burner. Wink wink. Oh, and don't forget networked gaming.
For the truly ambitious and those determined NEVER to leave the house I reccomend Mister House, a home automation software package.
http://www.misterhouse.net
It allows you to run everything from your house lights to your VCR from your PC, and it even has a voice interface. -=Logan of The Hill People

atlanta geek here

[yawble]

i live in a geek apt with one of the people that work with me. We work at a webhosting buisness, and usually have between 2-4 other geeks all wandering around on our LAN at any given time. Typically, its easier to find geeks in their natural habitat, IE, work and near high caffeine distribution centers.

Who gets root access??

[funky49]

> Right on man! I live with 2 non-geek roommates (okay one is a total dork though). When they need their pr0n, it's my network they have to use! I even bought them nics for their computer when we moved in together. Our apartment has two floors, so when you look at our building you'll see my bright blue cat5 cable going out one bedroom window to another! I tried a Linux solution but Win2000 was much easier (plus I figured I'd get a job working with W2k before a job working with *nix... and I was right). I have RoadRunner talking to the W2k server and have the client boxes hooked up via a NetGear 10/100 hub. 100baset NICs for the server and my computer... 10baseT for their computers. They play network games and only question I'm asked is "is the internet up?" A geek house would be scary. We'd probably build battlebots all day. :) www.mp3.com/funky49

WaveLAN and wireless....

[WildBill1941]

I've seen a bunch of people mentioning wireless networks and WaveLAN for the geek house. Wireless networking is great (I'm running it myself) but having some Cat5 to hookup the desktop PCs really helps. What I did in my house:
1. Put a fat DSL pipe in with a static IP. I'm currently running at 1.1Mbps.
2. Crawled under the house and strung at least one Cat5 cable to each room. Time consuming, and a pain in the butt, but it's worth it to have a 100BT backbone between PCs.
3. Installed a Linux firewall/gateway between the DSL pipe and the LAN. Can't be too careful.
4. Threw a WaveLAN card inside the Linux gateway, and made it a combo firewall/gateway/wireless router. Works great with my laptop and Toshiba Libretto, and I can cover the whole house and property. Can even go across the street to the neighbor's house.
WaveLAN and other 802.11b technologies are great, but in my opinion, are better suited to portable technology. Wires are still the way to go if your machine is anchored to a desk.
For more info on running WaveLAN under Linux, see my homepage at NullDevice.Net.

Re:Planet Geek

[eudas]

I would like to write 'HA' on the moon like it is in The Tick. =)

eudas

Why a Geek House when you can have a Geek Village?

[PhotonSphere]

There are a small number of "Internet Villages" popping up around Houston. Walden Internet Villages are offering a really big pipe (45 Megabit) to every resident who lives within their walls (there are even network drops poolside!). If having something roughly 30 times faster than DSL isn't enough, they also pride themselves on fostering a strong sense of community with LUGs, Quake Servers, Organized Lan Parties, mini-conferences on new technologies, etc...

This popped up on Slashdot once before as a similar GEEK HOUSE posting. You can also check out Walden for yourself.

My only concern: How could you ever walk away from that much bandwidth?!?!?

PhotonSphere

Orange County/Fullerton Geekdom

[Halon50]

As the king of my own mini-geek house, I tend to agree. Geeks have this savage territoriality that is almost second nature; akin to the Geek Drinks like those at ThinkGeek.com, a geek's dominant presence must be felt from your first sip all the way to the bottom of the can, when you get annoyed and toss the empty shell aside.

Cheesy metaphors aside, I have a 4 bedroom (well, 3.5 really) house amateurishly wired up for local network mayhem. Though the WAN is a mere 500Kb/s cable modem connection, I've found it more than sufficient to run the (mostly 486 & pentium) 10 machines that are pretty much only active to run Distributed.net's little cow TSR, or rack up points for my Echo.com internet radio rewards account.

Allow me to (briefly) beat my chest: the cable modem is hooked directly to a 1-port router, then through an 8-port 10/100TX switch to various parts of the house. 4-port hubs are strategically located in certain spots (2 rooms I call "my own," for instance), and if I manage to work up the nerve, I will eventually run a line to the last part of the house that isn't wired other than the garage: the "grandmother" unit attached to the front area.

Now, my amateurish question of the day: since I already have a Cable/DSL router acting as a gateway of sorts, is it worth the trouble to stick a Redhat/Apache machine in between it and the rest of the network to act as a firewall and web server?

area

[Highlordexecutioner]

Make sure you are in an area that offers DSL or cable modems. Where I live the fastest DSL is 768k and cable modems are only one way (you have to use a dial up for upstream). This can be a big pain in the ass. Also make sure the house is wired with breakers not fuses (my last house was and that really sucked). On the upside we dont have to heat our house in the winter, so there are good things about it.

I lived in one of the first ...

[FeltTip]

I lived in one of the first - The 91 Argyle St. Geekhouse in Rochester, NY. Since been retired. It was late 1994 and we wired the house with BNC cable because RJ was too expensive. Doom was amazing back then - and not everyone had a web site and way too many people snagged their stuff from Matt's Script Archive. If you were around then, you might understand.

Anyway, a geekhouse just has to happen. You can't decide that you want one and then seek it out. It doesn't work that way. It's just gotta happen naturally or it isn't a real geekhouse.

I used to have one at 91 Argyle

[FeltTip]

I used to live in a geekhouse on 91 Argyle Street from about 1994 to 1997. Pretty damn cool, it was. We had the place wired with BNC because RJ was too expensive. The absolute FIRST geekhouse in Rochester - at least that I know of.

neener neener neener

[gtx]

my house has cat-5 already, and it wasn't too expensive. just tell your handyman that there's nothing magic about cat-5 but DON'T TAKE IT APART FOR ANY REASON. that would give you cat-3, which isn't as cool.

nothing studios

[gtx]

nothing studios (home of nine inch nails) is the ultimate geek compound...

they have a lan setup in all the different studios so that they can send audio to different rooms without putting it on tape. there's no tape in the entire building. you can be in seperate rooms and play with each other... mmm music geeks... doesn't get much better.

an example of a Geek Haus

[thex23]

In East Vancouver, there is an old house that is pretty Geek. It is the home for the eastvan.bc.ca server. It has a variety of computer and audio hardware (much hardcore noise is made in this house), and a constantly changing roster of geeks. The flavours vary from Art-Grrl to Mr.SysAdmin to Herr Director of Code Development, and there are a few cats, too.

If you want to create such a place for yourself, you must find a large house in a (marginally) "bad part of town", fill it with wires (and argue about whose ethernet cable that is when the newtork won't reach the G3 laptop in your bedroom) and don't clean it regularly so that the girls end up doing most of the work.

Throw in random pieces of ancient gear (a Korg Poly-6 is currently being repaired and retro-fitted) and lots of ratty furniture... and Voila! You have your tech paradise.

All you need to add then is a continuous stream of geeks and semi-geeks visiting all levels of this house, and a big-assed lock on the front door.

Oh, and you have to figure out who "gets" to live in the basement...

Re:K/W Geek Apt?

[mr.ska]

There's already a corporate-sponsored geek house in Waterloo (if memory serves). A few years ago a company bought a rather nice house on Albert (just north of Bridgeport) with the following offer: geeks could live there for free and use all the goodies the house had been stocked with (computers, high-speed access, etc.), as long as they signed over the rights to ANYTHING computer-related that they created (not sure of the exact legal wording) during their residence at said house. Pretty sweet deal for all involved, I'd say.

If you're interested, look for the red brick house on the west side of the street, just s few houses north of Bridgeport. It's got a nameplate above the front door.

Other than that, I'm sure you could find a few systems design or computer or electrical engineering geeks who would LOVE to take over a house and wire it to the nines... just put a post up in the UW campus center.

I live in a geek out-house!

[fish500]

My roommates are pieces of crap but we got a T1 down there. Hey, life's a trade off.

Strange feelings

[skoda]

I'm not sure if I should feel relieved, or insulted by your post :)
-----
D. Fischer

Feasibility of a self contained environment-bunker

[sips]

That would be the best possible take the concept of the 1950's atom bomb shelter to the extreme with modern technology kind of like the one those guys built in the middle of the californian desert in an abandoned mine in Parasite eve 2. That would kick ass.

You do know that liquor kills brain cells right?

[sips]

Or that transplant livers are hard to find right? Just checking.

But there are a finite number of them

[sips]

And they don't grow back. Not a pleaseant thing to deal with.

Sources?

[sips]

Stroke victims usually loose almost all of their ability in the stroke affected area of the brain. The only way to do anything about it is to act early and administer drugs. Usually you can be permanently paralyzed after a stroke. Also since neurons are usually not all that resiliant it isn't really too terribly likely that they can be fixed properly. My mother had surgery on her neck for a cist and the surgeon had to cut a nerve and it still hasn't grown back yey.

On the other hand if you have good information that is substantiated about neuron regeneration then I am all ears.

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[NightFlight]

You do know that liquor kills brain cells right?
Yeah, but only the weak ones. Ba-dum bump!

Besides, drinking beer makes you smart. After all, it made Bud-wiser!
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitresses and bartenders.

Geek House? Or Geek-anything?

[Kisai]

My house has some reverse engineering done to it (in part because the stupid cable companies concept of "multi-outlet" service was nothing more than a 3-way splitter.) I have Cat-5 that is screwed up, so it's running only 10mbit.

But the better setup was in fact where I used to work (Stupid fools quit talking to me, hope your business goes down the crapper.) Between their house (which is circa 1898's) and their shop/garage (which is circa 1998) they had several ethernet cables between the buildings, several coax cables for sattellite, video and audio(to hell with cable) and all the internet stuff was run through initially sygate on windows 95, but was then changed to Linux with IPChains/IPMasq. Eventually they were able to get a pseudo-high speed connection from a company in the next valley. The valley we are in is only serviced by 10mbit. There is no Cable or xDSL here. The best thing there was was using the phone companies ISP since the local ISP's didn't give good connect rates.

We used to play LAN games, bring more computers over to play 4-6 player games. Eventually the idiots decided to act like corporate robots(complete with an idiot that knows nothing about computers acting as middle-management) and quit doing that and it all fell apart.

So, It's possible.

I'd like to build a house from scratch (maybe even sell it after) where the entire building would be wired with whatever the best wiring is at the time(10-gigabit capable ethernet fiber anyone?) Maybe even figure out how to make the computers more electronicly efficient, do we really need 120ACvolt->12,5,3.3,2DC volt conversion, master UPS/DC power provider or something like that.

(Oops, there I go again giving away free ideas. -_^)

Planet Geek

[JediDan]

How about the community of Geeks gets together some funding and buys up a piece of the moon (or some uninhabited piece of earth)? I mean, seriously, does this sound like a good idea to anyone else?

Re:Planet Geek

[JediDan]

I'm not completely sure, but I suppose there will be some political (ugh) problems with just 'settling down' across the landscape of the moon...

Re:Planet Geek

[Ghost User]

Hey that's a rather cool idea i think. I mean so regular no techies can be a real pain.

Geek house in east Texas

[mgw1181]

Well, sorta...it's a family geek house.:)

When I convinced my mom and dad to get ISDN at home (best Internet service short of T1 out here in a town of 1200 people), I managed to get them to have Cat 5 cable run all over the house. 5 PCs for the 3 of us, running Windows 95/2k, Linux, and one w/OpenBSD. My dad (geek) likes being able to have Internet access from the living room, my mom (not a geek) and I (geek) really just like the faster speed (24k dialup before ISDN). It wasn't easy to sell to them, especially running cable to almost every room, but they both really like it now. It's really worth it, especially if you're building, just put that cabling in to start with!

Henrietta would be cheaper

[Hairy_Potter]

than Pittsford or Fairport, and closer to CompUSA and Best Buy.

But I'm stuck in the city, and wiring up my house is on my Palm's todo list, for now I just have Cat-4 running over my floor.

No room for other geeks though, my wife would object.

Geek Houses

[gholt]

The best way to found a geek house is to just grab some friends and rent a place, and populate it with fun computery stuff... I have a geek house... 700k Dsl/Lan 9 computers and misc home entertainment things. Occupants: Me, Another guy, and two awesome female types (unfortunately... not geeks) This just requires opportunity and the normal requisite social skills =)

Re:I'm a female geek...

[THATDOG!]

Your boy-friend isa flaky java developer? This must be stoped. No more scripting.

Re:You do know that liquor kills brain cells right

[pcwhalen]

As an alcoholic, I agree with both of you. Booze poisoned my life and wrecks the Saturday mornings of lots of people. Lots of people use alcohol to relax and to socialize without abusing it. That's a good thing. Anything that improves your life is a agood thing. Like all things, there's an upside and a not so upside.

Wired House

[wcease]

We had our house wired with cat5 cabling for a network when it was built. They also used cat5 for the phone lines (it was easier for them than having two sets of wires). It's great!

Adding this to a one story home would not be too hard. You pull the wires through the basement, crawlspace or attic. You'd just need to check carefully for where you would feed the wires up the walls to the outlets. It's not hard, I had to drop a coax cable into my office at home for the cable modem.

We have a cable modem hooked to a router and hub, so all the computers can connect to the net at high speed. The cable modem slows at times, so I'm looking at going to ADSL, now that it's finally available here. I'm in Atlanta, Vinings area.

If you can't find a house that has one, change the one you're in. If you're renting you may need to get that ok'd first, but that shouldn't be a problem as it's a low voltage line and it's an improvement.

Wayne

Re:Geek house? Um, we call it a dorm here.

[abe_kabakoff]

hmmm, maybe this wasn't clear in the first post
Internal Network = university's internal network
pretty sweet connection = university's connection
homebrew = homemade beer, is there a better kind?
Really, why aren't more geeks into brewing? Any geek house in my book should have facilities for brewing a 20 gallon batch at least, at best a microbrewery in the basement.

Geek house? Um, we call it a dorm here.

[abe_kabakoff]

Just find your local good univiersity and hang out in the dorms. It helps if your a student of course.

I have found a like minded individual or two here at Carnegie Mellon, and we're sharing an internal network. We even got a pretty sweet connection to the rest of the internet too! Hey, they even like to home brew, just like me!

Re:Plus aftershock (OT)

[Elgon]

Hmmm, aftershock.

This one's mostly for UK'ers but try:

vodka
aftershock
irn-bru (gotta be the proper stuff from up north, not the weaker, insipid stuff you get in england)

Never tried coding on it. Never would.

Elgon

Re:I'm a female geek...

[Elgon]

Marry me. (I don't just want a green card ;-)

Elgon

Dutch geeks live in a Cyberflat.nl

[DutchMILaN]

Well if you just want to see the life of some Dutch Cybergeeks living in their Cyberflat, along with their little desert rats and some goldfishes, check out Cyberflat.nl and don't forget to check out some pics of their machines along with uptimes (they're holy).

Constructing a G(R)EEK House

[jedi_gras]

Have you ever been to a MIT Frathouse? Even "chicks" dig em.

geek house

[spawar]

if you build it, they will come.

Geek Apartments :)

[isecore_JMK]

Hi. I live in a small town in northern Sweden. We have an unusual concentration of geeks here. Most of the geeks have amassed in various Apartment complexes (as I have too). In the complex that I live there is maybe 4 or 5 geeks living in separate apartments. We have pulled Cat 5 cabling between our apartments (mine is a studio, the others are 1 bedroom). We have a Netware server, Win2000 Server, various Linux machines, shared DSL connection and internal ICQ (as well as external now). Almost every weekend we have marathon gaming sessions. This is actually quite nice, as everyone has their own apartment and can do whatever they want, but are still hooked up in a LAN.

Fans, LEDs, and sleep

[hz is a freak]

I have a few computers in my room, and the noise that they add kills a few of the other sounds. I put duct and E tape over all LED's though. I like to have the room as close to pitch black as possible.

Atlanta Area geek apt complex

[mandarax85]

Tilde, I live in an apartment complex next to GA Tech, where we have drilled holes through floors, ceilings, and walls to acheive a local 100Mbit network. 10 members so far....

It's easy nowadays...

[Syre]

I live with two non-geeks, and wanted to set up a network so they could be online (and subsidize my DSL). I used an old P133 (WAY overkill), ran FreeBSD on it with IPFW and NAT, and ran ethernet to each room. Total cost: $29.95 for an 8 port 10mbps hub, I used left over cable and a left over computer as the gateway/NAT/Firewall, and we were done. Is it a geek house? I don't know... but we all have DSL access!