My first post about technology in this site was in August 2009, and I wrote a bit about my home office and how I use technology to improve my productivity. Since then, technology evolved a lot and the office has to keep up with it, as I strongly believe that productivity, in part, is tightly associated with the best tools money can buy.
The first thing that changed is the desktop. It’s the same Intel Core2Quad 2.4GHz, 1.5TB of HDD, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum and Gainward GTS 250 video card, but the RAM was upgraded from 4GB to 8GB, as the memory demand of my Virtual Machines (VMs), Photoshop and games increased in the past months. Now I can run a VM with 2GB of RAM, which is fast enough for all my software experiments. The operating system also changed: Windows XP goes out and Windows 7 comes in. More speed and reliability to the desktop means less waste of time on reboots or waiting for programs to load/finish their tasks.
Another change is my mobile devices. I sold the Dell PDA and the BlackBerry and replaced them with an iPhone 3GS. The iPhone is faster and better in every way when compared to the previous devices. Plus, with my MobileMe subscription, I don’t need to use sync cables anymore to keep all my machines and devices synchronized. It just happens automatically over the internet. And that goes beyond calendar events, contacts and e-mail. Tasks organization/project management using OmniFocus and notes using Evernote are also synchronized through the cloud, so now I don’t lose any time on synchronizing devices and I have everything I need everywhere I want. The iPhone is now the main telephone as well. The landline is used only for backup. This change gives me full mobility.
The MacBook was also upgraded. Now it has 4GB of RAM instead of just 2GB. This made the laptop run faster, as it was spending too much time on disk swaps. I also bought a Magic Mouse, since the touchpad is uncomfortable for some tasks. Now I have a proper Mac workstation. The OS was updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard as well.
Another update was OS on the ThinkPad T60. Gentoo is off since it was a burden to keep it up-to-date and many laptop-desirable features weren’t working properly (like projectors and hibernation). So I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it and that’s the laptop I carry to company events.
Network infrastructure also changed. Now I have a dedicated router for the office, and another one for the rest of the house. All laptops and desktop are connected to this router using cables. This improves security and network speed. Plus, it takes the load off my main router, which was crashing a lot due to the excess throughput. Now network is running flawlessly and I probably won’t need another update so soon.
The rest is the same. I still don’t use much paper, have the whiteboard for brainstorming and a lot of books in my bookshelf.