Slashdot Mirror
On Decorating Your Computer Room?
jaxle asks: "I wanted to ask the Slashdot crowd what they have in their computer rooms to make it less... dreary. I love having windows, but like me, for many of us I don't think that is an option. I have most of my computer stuff in the basement, and I find that my eyes usually get sore and I can't stand being down there any longer. So far I have a fish tank that I got recently which adds a nice ambiance to the room. I am planning on buying some plants too in the near future. Any body else have ideas or tell us how you decorate your computer room. Also, what kind of lighting most represents real sunlight?"
The time when I was most productive, was when I had my main workstation in a basement room with a fireplace.
The flickering light of the fire mixing with the glow of the screen was very relaxing, and I was able to work long hours, getting a lot done and still feel relaxed.
Plus, when I got stuck, I could poke the fire, throw another log on it, or go split some wood, taking my mind off of the problem for a while.
these things are nifty
t ml
http://www.skylights-of-hawaii.com/news/page4.h
No electricity required, about as "natural" as you can get for lighting. Obviously only useful during the daylight hours, but a good way to get that natural light that humans absolutely need for both good physical health and psychological health. And you can grow plants then as well down there without using additional electricity or artificial light. And here's a tip, once when all I had was an apartment, I wanted a garden, a veggie garden. So I just went for it, instead of "normal" house plants I grew like 6 foot tall staked tomatoes, etc inside. People always liked it when they came over, and it actually provided some nice fresh salad action. I had tomatoes and pole beans and peas and cukes, etc all growing inside in front of windows. Was really neat! The coolest one was a large rose bush, quite the nice odor inside a small room.
Googling will find you more sources for these and different lighting ideas. All of them more or less use a periscope type action with just ultra shiny pipes to move the light around, and there is a japanese company I have forgotten the name of now though that uses fiber optics to pipe sunlight around to various places inside office buildings.
We have a spare bedroom upstairs that's the full "geek room" for the house. It's just decorated with white walls, curtains (provided by my wife), a pair of daylight fluorescent bulbs in a wall fixture, and a couple of framed photos of the Vineyard. For furniture, there's two desks, one with my Windows gaming box, and one with my Powerbook. I also have a nice wooden bookcase, a magazine basket, and a relatively ugly metal shelving unit that holds my server, network switch, and a couple of other computers that all share a monitor and setups via a KVM switch. The closet used to keep a lot of tech junk, but was renovated by me into a clothing closet last year.
Then down in the cellar we have my workshop and a rec room. It's a big open layout that's kinda subdivided into three rooms by painting different colors and themes. One third is just pretty much open space, with a closet and some storage items. One third is my workbench, along with my tools storage, another PC setup (a simple, but nice-looking PC workstation unit and a comfy leather chair), along with our exercise gear (a weight machine and bike). I can work out, build stuff, or geek in peace.
Then there's the third "room", which is a pseudo-living room. There's a small area rug, an old sofa and loveseat with slipcovers, our old 27" TV with an old DVD player, and we use a lobster trap as a coffee table. The walls around that portion were painted by a friend of my wife's - she painted an underwater themed mural on the two walls that enclose the area, with a blue paint and rocks, seaweed, and fish painted in. It looks really cool and separates the section. Lighting is a mix of stuff - there's lamps around for individual use but overhead shop fluorescents throughout if needed.
Basically, paint is the key, I think. You can do some really neat stuff with paint that can dress up a room or change it's mood entirely. Good quality furniture is a must, too - it should be unobtrusive and not cheap-looking. Hide as many wires as you can, also.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
- A room without carpeting, so our rolling chairs would roll
- A door with a lock so we could not be bothered
- Incadesent lighting with a DIMMER so that we could set the appropriate level
- An interior office so there would be no windows
- A stereo system so that we could play our favorite music
We tended to leave the lights to almost off, very very dim, the music up high, and the door locked. We could easily go to each team members station merely by kicking and scooting around in our rolling chairs. It was a fantastic environment.These days, however, I live in Hawaii. My workplace has greatly changed. Since I work out of my house I can design just about anything I wish. My lab is currently on the 2nd floor of my house and has huge windows on two sides that face North and West (I'm on the east side of the Big Island so this avoids morning sunlight problems). I look out over my landscaping which is full of fruit and flowers.
Of course, some things don't change... I still have the rolling chairs... I still have the stereo... I still prefer to get up at 4:00 AM and work awhile in the dark... but when the sun comes up, and the rainbows come out... and the exotic scents and birds arrive... it is a very nice programmiing experience.
Aloha
My "computer room" is actually a "bump-out" in my (finished) basement (10'x12') area that serves as my recording studio (I have tons o' recording gear) and computer room.
:)
Basically, I spent like $200 on a decent desk from Ikea, put down a area rug (asian-knock-off type) and use small halogen lamps placed here and there. I also built a floor-standing 3-pannel screen to separate the studio area with the living/home theater area.
I think the trick is to make the space light and airy and NOT cluttered (yes, this is tough for most geeks... but with just a little disciplin you can do it!). One of the best inventions I have found for keeping an uncluttered space is a waste-paper basket... and of course the WILL to throw stuff out.
I once read something that if you touch a piece of paper only once or twice... throw it away!
I have a storage room closed off to the rest of the basement where I store all the books (I like bookcases... but computer books -- which I have hundreds -- tend to create clutter). I don't mind having to get up, find my book, take it back to my desk... then get back up and put it back in its place. Its good to get up and move around
sad robot making broken music
The difference between full spectrum and regular
florsecent lights are minimal. What really makes a difference is the fixture (the thing you snap the tube in - hope thats the word) The device in older lamps are just copper-reels. So they flicker with 50/60Hz.
New ones are electronic - high frequency devices. Those things produce better output for the tube. Take a high quality Osram (or any other vendor) tube with colors 21 (Coldwhite int the office) or 31 (Warmwhite for all other rooms) and you have a state of the art lightning solution without spending a lot of money for 3%-better fullspectrum-better-chi-thingy...
Changing colors (blue in the morning, red in the evening) works also very well for me...
There are presently 16 computers in my 1000 square foot apartment, inculding a fullsized rack, external hotswap RAID cabinet and a Catalyst 5005. Most of that is crammed into one room, and the REALLY loud and ugly stuff is in a closet in that room, but of course the whole apartment had air conditioning running until just last month.
:(
A number of issues present themselves.
1.) Exposed cabling - I went hardcore and rewired my apartment with cat5, in-wall, replacing the ancient 4-prong block connectors for phone, and adding four ethernet ports everywhere I found a jack. That helped things a lot.
Because the electrical demands of my apartment are slightly, well, extreme, I put waist-high bookcases everywhere, and ran bundled extension cords and power cables behind them. I found a bunch of cheap but not unappealing ones at Kmart for $5 apiece.
The bookcases are incredibly imposing, if I do say so myself. They're all full, either of books or CDs.
2.) Noise. *HUGE* problem. A lot of my PCs are simply enclosed somehow, either in closets, my rack or in computer desks. The RAID array and Catalyst are the biggest offenders, but my solution to that issue was to put them and the rest of their rack in an unused closet that I lined with carpet scraps. I went from being able to hear all those Barracudas while I was in the shower to having to open closet doors to make sure everything was running.
For the rest of my apartment, I've chosen various tapestries and other cloth wall-hangings to deaden noise. This is quite effective but it DOES make speaker placement for my various home theater equipment more difficult.
The final part of my noise-deadening and asthetic strategy is fake plants. I hit Lowe's, Sam's Club and Michael's for a selection of fake trees, branches and shrubs. I went out and hunted up some interesting-looking rocks to put around their bases. Fake plants do a great job absorbing noise. It's not that hard to wind cords through all those rocks, either, which helps with speaker and power cables.
My apartment is fucking gorgeous, if I do say so myself. Mission-style oak furniture (O'Sullivan even makes decent oak-finish mission-style computer furniture, and it's inexpensive), the trees and bookcases... it's a wonderful asthetic arrangement, and I was able to hide my computers well enough that those who visit, only able to see a couple of computer monitors and a pair of speakers, ask where the rest of my stuff is.
The only down side? I have to do quite a bit of dusting.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
You could set up a rock garden waterfall that doubles as a water cooling solution. The water falling over the rocks can be used as a radiator for your PC. The water falling over the rocks will create a soothing sound and look very nice while at the same time cooling the water and getting rid of that horrible PC hum.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
I had full spectrum flourescent bulbs in my house and in the lab at work. They were great for about a year until I found plastic items that were under these lights became brittle. My shelves, my carpet protector, etc, all suffered from UV damage. Not to mention the potential damage to your skin these lights should only be used for plants.
I do not use full spectrum lights in my house any longer.
Yes, I agree about the chair, and will add "the keyboard"
I tell people the most import parts of a PC are
1)The Monitor
2)The Keyboad
3)The Chair
4)The Mouse/trackball
Spend your money on these, and THEN on the rest - I'll go with a slower PC, smaller HD, Less ram, in order to improve the above 4 items. The GOOD thing is that a good keyboard and chair will last years
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso