My So Called Digital Life Pt 1 – The Environment
So begins my series on my digital life. I realized that after six months working at WBR, and after near 23 years in the computing universe, I have settled on a routine that is maybe helpful for others. Certainly, my method of work is not as seamless or as downright entertaining as Merlin’s and nor is it as quantifiable. Instead, I have managed to arrange my digital existence in a way that keeps my information overloading without it being overbearing.
That being said, it can use some work. However, I think it has reached the balance to where I am accessible everywhere, gather information all the time and yet manage to be No Place at any moment (more on the No Place concept later).
To begin this series, I want to first outline the environment. This is both my computing environment, as well as my social/work environment. We’ll start at home.
Home (Pasadena, CA)
The evolution of my home computing environment is inversely proportional to my relationship status. This means that now that I’m married my computing environment has gone from this..
to this
At home, I have a G5 with dual 23″ screens. My machine at home is primarily used for working from home, working on side projects, my wife’s computing (we fight over it) and as a music server for our home audio system. As well, it does the customary daemon type things like BitTorrent. The system has half a terrabyte of disc storage, with another 250 gigs of external storage.
Non-common essential apps (apps that only this machine runs) are: Azureus, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Quicken 2006, Toon Boom Studio, Aperture, Eclipse IDE and X-Plane.
Work (Warner Bros Records, Burbank, CA)
My job title at WBR is Director of Technology. What this basically means is that I manage the web-development team, work with the creative director and for the company and such. I’m the visionary driving our usage of technology in all aspects. That includes marketing a record, doing band websites, how we do fanclubs and merchandise, as well as keeping on top of technological trends. Half my day is spent doing research, and the other half spent keeping the machines working and deals flowing.
Being that my job is a lot of research, my work computer doesn’t have as much coding duties. The machine is a dual core G5, a 20″ cinema display and about 500 gigs of hard drive space. As well, I have a Lacie 250gb external. The PC is a Toshiba Centrino-type laptop which is used only for cross-platform QA.
Non-common apps include: Studiometry for managing the department (we’re testing it), a lot of transcoding tools for video (Cinematize, etc), Flash decompilers and P2P apps.
Laptop
My laptop is a 12″ Powerbook, running at 1.25ghz. It is primarily used for mobile usage, and maintains a mirror of essential applications common to both systems (the next article). The laptop is also used at home by my wife or I in exchange for the G5, so it hooks into the network for storage most of the time.
Mobile Devices
My cell phone and mobile device is a PPC-6700. I just got this phone about two weeks ago as a replacement to my broken PPC-6600. The device has 1gig of MiniSD storage, and has been heavily modified to include: an RSS reader, Agile Messenger for mobile IM, TCPMP for usage as a video device, Virtual Earth and Google Local Mobile.
I also have a 1 gigabyte thumb drive, that was a Christmas present from Total Assault Marketing. Thanks guys. This has many uses.
Servers
I have one primary server that I run, down from 8 that used to run in my closet in Santa Barbara. The server is located at The Planet web hosting, and is a dedicated box. The server is a dual XEON 2.8ghz with hyper-threading enabled. It has 4 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage. The server primarily runs Murmurs.com, as well as Pink is the New Blog. Besides that, it runs all e-mail for its domains including 50 @murmurs.com accounts. The server also has WEB_DAV enabled.
Other Devices
14″ iBook G3 used as a music jukebox in the living room.
Airport Express used to extend our wireless network and provide optical-out audio in the living room
60 gig 5G ipod used for “My Life in My Car” emergency data storage, updated weekly, just in case.
[tags]lifehacks, apple, how to[/tags]
I have worked my own home stuff down to a smaller level. Used to have a big power sucking box that did nothing but sit there and act as a firewall. That’s been replaced with a Linksys WRT54GS.
I used to have five servers and two desktops in the house. That’s down to one server, another server powered down awaiting disposal, and two desktops on very aggressive power save.
I had moved all of my stuff to a box at rackshack.com, but am now slowly going even more low key, and have moved my DNS to the free DNS at GoDaddy.com that comes with my domain registrations. My mail I’m moving to godaddy’s forwarding service as well, since most of them are just forwards to gmail and yahoo. As soon as I find a good (free) reliable (free) php/mysql-able (free) solution for web, the box at rackshack will go away.
[...] Ethan Kaplan’s digital life Ethan of blackrimglasses has posted about his digital life [via] I have managed to arrange my d [...]
The phone’s a HTC Typhoon, right?
I recently got a HTC Wizard (O2 XDA Mini S).
Nice keyboard. Not really getting on with Windows Mobile too well and awaiting the upgrades of the third-party Mac sync software to 5.0 compatibility. Bad camera. Shocked last night to discover no Bluetooth modem inside, apparently.
HTC Apache/UTStarcom 6700 is the model. I love phone
I use 4smartphone for my e-mail push sync and it handles my calendar as well. I’m doing a post about that tomorrow (pt 2)! Mine does bluetooth fine with tethering as a modem.
So glad you shared your home/work setup as I am a web developer/ systems administrator who also loves a mix of unix server with mac workstations/ laptops. Can you tell us more about your cell phone synching and how you use the system between work/home? I would love a good bluetooth phone that can synch my datebook/contacts and such but hate dropping $$ just to test a phone.
I’m going to do a very large post on how my cell phone fits in in about three days.
A preview is that I use 4smartphone as a hosted exchange account, which does over-the-air syncing to my phone. I use GroupCal to keep iCal in sync with Exchange, use Exchange through Apple Mail and Address Book as well. With all this, the phone never actually needs to hook into any computer, and neither do my computers need to use .mac to sync.
I spent four days straight setting this phone up though, so it is more detailed than that
[...] n a daily summary (and the sidebar), but they’re way more exciting than that. So: Part 1 – The environment Part 2a – The Application [...]
What’s your backup scheme for all that disk space? I use an old Powerbook for my iTunes jukebox, but my music collection will soon outgrow the hard drive, and I don’t know what to do once it needs to spill onto external disks that I would normally use for backup.
I backup to an external hard drive, although I need to get another one soon (thanks for reminding me!)
hehe. toys indeed. i have a few myself
maybe i will bringem out to play.
Nice write-up, Ethan. I didn’t know you were behind Murmurs.com. Very nice work on the relaunch.
[...] It is funny then that his “My So Called Digital Life” post so closely resembles mine, you know, plus a few dozen billion dollars. [...]
[...] Its been a bit since my last series on My So Called Digital Life, so I think I’m going to do another one. A lot has changed in that time, namely, I now live closer to work, I switched hardware and software around a bit, and I am trying to get a better handle on my paper/home existence now as well. [...]
[...] In the time that has passed since the last series I wrote on this, I have had a lot of things happen: [...]
[...] This blog took off, so to speak, because Merlin Mann linked to it in relation to a discussion of My So Called Digital Life. That being: my life as it transpires between the eyes and the screen. Information, communication and work essentially. This of course negates the other part of my life, that which transpires off the screen. [...]
[...] idea of “My Digital Life” is heavily influenced by a series of posts made by Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com as well as the content of 43 Folders and [...]
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