Today’s featured workspaces is that of the famous blogger Chris Pirillo. He has a webcam pointing at this desk 24/7, so you can always check up to see if he’s working. He’ll often have interesting things to say to the camera, so it’s worth the watch.
His workspace features quite a bit for a geek to lust over. The first thing one notices are the 2 enormous 30″ Dell displays that provide him with ample screen real estate. His dual monitors are powered by a mac pro. This photo above is out of date, as it still shows Chris running Vista. Above his desk, there are a bunch of flashing coloured lights that actually do serve a purpose. They are 6 TIX LEDs clocks.
Although Chris is not the first person in the world to use 30″ displays in a dual monitor setup, he was one of the first to popularize it, and make them seem non-excessive to the non-geeks.
Check back tomorrow for #4, and check out Chris’s Live Stream now.
I have always been envious of many of the elaborate work spaces that I come across online. The likes of Gizmodo and Lifehacker have been highlighting many work spaces over the last few months, and I have been bookmarking the best of these.
I have compiled a list of what I think are the top 5 work spaces on the internet. Each day this week, I will be highlighting one of these, starting with number 5 on Monday, and counting down to number 1 this Friday.
My ideal workspace is still a work-in progress. I am going to work as a treeplanter this summer, and I will be putting some of my money earned to doing an overhaul of my workspace at the end of this summer.
Pictured above is the the V1 Chair, which would be in my room right now if it didn’t have a $2000 price tag.
Check back here tomorrow for number 5.
That’s right, after my next hardware upgrade, I am going to be ditching hard drives. Seriously, why does my computer still have gears and motors in it? It’s not a freaking adding machine from Babbage’s lab. My transition away from hard drives will most likely happen in the next desktop that I build. I am going to be switching to solid state drives. There will still be a place for HDDs in a backup roll for me, but not as a device that my OS runs on.
Solid state drives (SSD) are rapidly falling in price, making them a reasonable cost for the performance gains. Most SSDs can achieve about 200 MB/s access speed. In a desktop, this can be dramatically increased by putting a few SSDs in RAID 0. I posted a video a few weeks about a guy that put 24 SSDs together in RAID 0, who got insane access speeds of about 2 GB/s. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to afford 24 SSDs (unless someone donated some to me
), but I can see buying about 4 being practical in the near future.
Below is the results for an HD Tach test that I just ran on my laptop. My current 5400 rpm hard drive had just of 70MB/s peak access speed. I just can’t deal with these number anymore. Hard drives are by far the bottleneck in today’s computers with fast processor and memory. It is time to start ditching hard drives.
If you’re not convinced yet, check out this insanely quick boot accomplished by putting two OCZ SSDs in RAID 0. It’s not as impressive as the last video that I posted, but it is still pretty darn quick.
Last week, when I booted my computer up in the morning, there was a java update waiting for me. I entered auto-pilot mode and when the installer window popped up, I quickly accepted the EULA, and pressed next, next, next, until the install began. During the Java update, I was lucky that my quick reflexes were able to stop me from installing the yahoo toolbar, which is put into one of the steps pretty cheekily.
Why, Sun, do you check the yahoo toolbar option by default? Ok, I know the reason: money. Come on Sun, this is as low as prostitution. I am not even a big fan of Java in the first place. If it was up to me, everything should be written in each computer’s native architecture. But that is another issue.
So, Sun, would you please remove the yahoo toolbar from your java updates.
thanks,
Adrian