Following on from the article on this site and Dave F, I thought I’d do a response on my thoughts on working from home.

I work from home on a one day a week basis, and so does my partner.   We both commute to London or a more local office the rest of the week (generally London for her, and a 50/50 mix of London/local for me).    One thing we have learnt is that we should not work  at home on the same day…. it presents problems as we only have one office, so the other person ends up st in the living room.    This results in no place to go for downtime, and no clear home/work divide.

On a normal day from home, I’ll go into office at 8am, venturing downstairs only for teas and coffees from the Coffee machine during morning while on the phone - have a distinct 30 min Lunch at 12:30 (watching working lunch!), and finish around 5.     This represents a longer day than I would do in the office, and I do as it represents part of the travel time in the car or train I save by not driving/taking train in.

Communication - A combination of internal Instant Messaging via VPN and phone is used to stay in touch with the office, and meetings..    Also most teams I work with are not in UK - and WebEx/other online meetings are used to demonstrate applications and processes, so we’re already in an online world, as the company I work for can’t send me to a far flung region of the world every week or no actual work would be completed.

Reliability - The biggest issue has proven to be the power locally - this year so far in 7 months we have had 3 days where the power at home has been out for extended periods of time.     This was fixed by placing the DSL router on a UPS which lasts for 3-4 hours after the first experience.      This is sufficent to continue working for at least half the day using the office laptop.    Beyond this our employers have been happy as theres not much that can be done without power.

Overall for me and my partner the experience is positive, but neither of us would be prepared to work 100% from home.    We both realise the benefits of the office and meetings with colleagues.   We both would prefer to be at home 2 or 3 days rather than the current one.

Do you work at home with your partner?   Do you have 2 offices to deal with this if you both work for different companies, or do you get along fine?

Hardly a year goes by without something seeminly going wrong with my PC.

Last week the graphics card died a death - nice corrupted graphics on the bios screen a sure fire sign.    It worked fine when cool, but 2 mins after booting, corruption occurred.    It wasn’t cooling as the fans were running fine..    So bye bye Nvidia 8800GTS to the graphics card maker in the sky (it was 2 months out of warranty typically!).

Now without a main  graphics card - it left me with research to do - I used tomshardware.com to look at which card would be best for the money, in combination with the 3 online component retailers in the UK that I trusted.    I ended up ordering a Zoltan Nvidia GTX 260 with 896Mb of graphics memory- for£135 including delivery charges.    I chose Nvidia over ATI due to previous bad experiences with ATI cards and drivers prior to me having the 8800 card from Nvidia - and overall being happier with the Nvidia 8800 than any previous graphics card.

When the card arrived, I was frankly amazed - it was a bigger physical footprint than the old 8800 - in fact it took difficultie and alignment to actually get it in the slot (I think I have 2mm clearance!).    I  also needed 2 PCI X addtional power connectors compared to the one before - this is the hurt fingers incident.     For PC builders thinking of using stanley knifes to cut cable ties, experience and a bandaged up thumb now tells me snips are the way to go.

Overall, I’m totally happy with the new graphics card - its a bit quieter than the old 8800 - and a lot more powerful - gaming using it is quicker.     And it cost considerably less than the 8800 did at the time I purchased it as always.

I’m lucky this credit-crunch hitting year in I have funds available for a holiday… holidays are one luxury I’d hate to be without…

This is great as late last year one of my close friends announced her wedding this year would be in Las Vegas.   Due to the distance, and hotel prices,  Las Vegas isn’t a cheap holiday for UK residents right now (dollar rate at 1.4 instead of the 2.0 it was last year).   I also didn’t have a chance to combine the holiday with a work trip, so thus myself and my girlfriend decided we would have to book a package holiday to join the 10 other friends who are taking a holiday for the occasion.

This brings me to one of my 1st IT gripes for 2009.     Virgin Holidays.    Using Virgin as thats who the entire party is traveling with.   Virgin have a *great* website, which I can price a holiday up on, and book.   However I get maximum discount not by booking online, but telephone to their call centre..
This is because Virgin offer frequent flyers of Virgin Atlantic 10% discount, not 5% for a period until late Feb.    And to get said discount, I need to go through everything I’ve already priced up online again on the phone - to an agent.    At least the Agent was in England, and not an offshore call centre (or if they were it was good enough I didn’t notice).     This is a gripe, as surely its simple to make a website recognise a frequent flyer code and price accordingly, and NOT require a phonecall.

I admit it’s not the most annoying thing of the year to some, but it’s a minor gripe to me, and surely the cheapest prices sold shouldn’t be via the phone (as the costs MUST be higher!).?

Any vendors that do similar that I should avoid?

Due to living in the country and having slightly dodgy power I’ve always had a UPS system installed at home (actually 2 currently).     Currently I have a APC Smart-UPS 1500VA, and a Eaton Powerware 9120-700.

A lot of people underestimate the value of these, and think of them as non-essential items - but for me they are invaluable when you consider I lose power for around 5-12 hours a month as a raw average.   At one point earlier this year the power lines in the field behind the house took the power company over 2 weeks to repair (luckily they got my neighbourhood power back in around 24 hours with a emergency generator).

How do I use my UPS:

• The Eaton runs my DSL router and DECT phone basestation- and runs it for around 5 hours.   This means in most circumstances I can continue to work from home for the duration of my laptop battery as most power outages don’t outlast this & the laptop.   Most useful.
• The APC runs both my main server (blogged about at the start of this year - but looks truncated now) and desktop.    This lasts for an hour and a half of use of the monitor/server, and about 10 mins if the desktop is on (desktop is a monster gaming PC).   Basically this is to allow the server to run if I’m out for the short outages, and if I’m in playing games - to allow me to shutdown cleanly on the desktop.  The server shuts down automatically when 5 minutes of power remain in the battery.

Prior to having the above 2 UPS’s I had a single 1200VA Belkin.    It died about 2 weeks after its 3 year warrenty had expired.    The Belkin died completely and it was not just a battery replacement job sadly.    As I work in IT and had experience of both APC and Eaton products, I realised buying a main-vendor full sine-wave UPS with long life and user-replacable batteries may have advantages, hence managed to source one of the above UPS’s from a 2nd hand dealer, and the other I was given as a gift from a friend (as his firm was needing more capacity than 1500 VA).   Very nice indeed - and cost me less than a new Belkin in total (I paid £80 for the Eaton)!

The UPS’s don’t just cover me from the usual full outages, they also keep my approx £2500 of PC equipment safe from surges/spikes and short brownouts.

Time running on UPS due to power-cut this month according to apcupsd statistics on my Debian server:    71 minutes and 4 seconds - with 4 power outages total (one 60 mins, 3 of 2-3 minute length).

I would reccomend “smart-ups” and sine wave models over non smart basic models, as they can accurately model their battery time remaining as they run allowing accurate battery information over the years.    Also cheap UPS’s with stepped output are from my personal experiences not as reliable as major vendors sine-wave smarter models.

With internet-additiction being common - I wonder how many other addicts will start purchasing UPS’s to enable them to not suffer in awkward loss of power situations…

Do you have a UPS  ?

Quick post:

I updated last night to the new 2.0.1 iphone software… and it fixes a few of the bugs in 2.0.0 - namely the browser/other apps crashing regularly and randomly (this isn’t a huge issue in browser as it restarts and usually goes back to page you are looking at) - but since installation, this morning, I had zero crashes in one hour of surfing on the train to work.

So overall, I’d say if you have an iPhone, you want to install 2.0.1 asap.

This is in reply to the recent excellent blog post from Matthew Sparkes at PC Pro.

I too own a big camera (Nikon D80) + some long lenses (well a stablised 18-200mm + a 70-300mm depending on the occasion, + some fast smaller fixed lenses - the 200-400 is sadly just a dream).

Not that I’m a pap or a professional photographer, I just enjoy photography.

I was advised by a Friend about the ElonexOne last week - its like the EEE, small, (well smaller), web surfing - but is a tablet/laptop hybrid instead of a pure Laptop like the EEE.

Well, I have decided to build my own NAS with raid-1, as the chassis on the market just plain don’t do what I want for the price I want.

I want:

• min of 2 drive bays
• User installable disks

Looking online that left me with 3 options, a Dlink, a Qnap and a Linksys. All were resonably expensive when disks were added, and none really could recover from a lost disk with grace.. Also if the mainboard went I realised I’d be screwed if I couldn’t get an exact same controller in 3-4 years time (no mean feat).

Soo….

I’m building one. I’ve worked out prices for a system (including disks) are rough equivalent to a box without - if using a mini-itx box.. with 1.5 Ghz processor and 512Mb of ram, I can get case, cabling, mainboard, and memory + 2x 250 Gb disks for ~

I don’t know if its me, but all these Christmas sales are just not interesting me right now…

Mostly the items are “B” stock, or stock thats not been out pre Christmas at all..

Worst however is the technical goods in which I like - yes there are a small number of genuine bargains to be had if you queue outside Currys at 7am Boxing day - but myself - I can wait.

In my opinion at least I think the real bargains will come ~ 20 Jan- 15 Feb when the current Furore has died down and companies want to sell goods to a nation who have just spent all their money in the sales.

I’m in a dilema on whether to buy a Macbook or Asus eee PC - or both.