I miss the telecommute. Could do with a proper setup instead of a and old surplus steelcase type desk in the basement though.
I’ve been considering using a drafting table as a standing desk and this looks perfect. Would you have a model number or rough vintage on this particular Hamilton drafting table? Thanks for that and for a look at your nifty office.
The one item that surprised me (even with the sponsorship) was the printer, just because I don’t really know anyone with one at home anymore, even telecommuters.
What is other people’s experience? Still worth it? What do you use it for?
I got rid of my old inkjet when I realised I spent more time unclogging it than printing with it. I print 2-3 times a year at the nearest courier shop.
Miasm wonders aloud if Jason would be willing to do a tour of his office ala Doctorow. Miasm supposes that Jason could even linger for a few moments on the HP MFP M477.
I believe she is a 461G Listed Utility Table.
Thank you so much. We share a lot of the same office set-up issues as well as the addiction to dead-tree books, and I agree with your approach about only buying them for specific collections and leaving the rest with e-books (or library books). If not for that I’d be buried under books by now.
Mrs TobinL likes hardcopy. We do print out the friday and saturday crosswords to work on together.
We currently have an Epson small office inkjet with HUUUUUGE inktanks. It has been quite nice so far. Also good for scanning things to pdf on occasion as well.
These days I rarely print out anything except legal documents and forms I have to sign and scan. While I have a small-footprint scanner, even a cheap printer isn’t worth the price in cartridges and space for me, so I usually print at the library, a client’s office or a friend’s place.
A home printer is probably still a requirement for most people with school age kids, though. Same for home offices of people who work in fields involving visual creativity for proofing purposes. I’m sure there are many other cases where a small business printer like this makes a lot of sense.
I suppose it really depends on what you do. I think maybe it would be useful for some of the more graphic arts oriented. They stopped being economical for me about 25 years ago. (Full disclosure: I did tech support for a long time with a company that had a rather large print infrastructure.)
That and on sale they are not much more than a standard home/consumer printer.
I do graphic design, and even though my little color laser isn’t good for color matching, proofing my own stuff is easier on paper. And, I see @gracchus already mentioned this.
Maybe I spent too many years at a printing company to feel like I can get by without a printer. But, fuck inkjet, laser all the way.
We live more than 15 miles from the nearest commercial business that will print hard copies. In our neighborhood, different folks have different printers working competently at different times. If ours is down, we go to a neighbor’s house. Some of our neighbors come to our house to print when their printers are down. It’s the whole “borrow a cup of sugar/stick of butter/piece of fresh ginger root” neighborly thing, just nowadays it’s USB sticks or emailed attachments, sometimes late at night, in desperation, last minute.
We got a hand-me-down Brother black-print only laser last year that is an absolute beast. No wireless connectivity, no scanning or faxing. Just printing. Useful for legal documents that need a wet signature, and one neighbor up the road is a public notary, which is pretty nice when time is tight.
We run our web hosting/ISP etc. service from our house. I wrote our end-user agreement for our LAN and I have every subscriber read, initial every page of our 11-page contract. The agreement is scanned and I send the end-user/signatory the PDF; we keep the original inked stapled contract on file in case we need to fire him or her for breaching the agreement.
(We’re about to get out of the ISP business very soon, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s not just all the viruses that show up in our “clean” pool on our side of the router, it’s all the legal exposure ISPs have now, and the 24/7 service calls wherein a neighbor demands you fix his connectivity issue at 7am on a Sunday. Goodbye to 20% of our revenue. But goodbye to the archived paper contracts in our 4-drawer file cabinet too!)
Printers have their place. When you need a paper copy, there’s just no substitute. If I had my way, I’d pay to keep a decent all-in-one laser printer at a neighbor’s house, paying him/her to house it, including a fee for ink/toner and paper. We are nearly doing that already around here. Then quite a few of us in much smaller homes could ditch our funny little ink jet printers. Last time I had a brilliant group-owned or shared material object, it was a tragedy of the commons problem because no one was doing maintenance on it, apart from me and my DH.
Printers. A tyranny? Maybe. Better than engraving, etching, hot lead type, woodblock, etc. The residual income printer manufacturers make on toners and cartridges is Ye Standard Revenue Model. I’d like to see how this HP stacks up to a comparable Brother AIO machine.
Jason didn’t speak on his chair, despite the illuminating thoughts about his MFP HRT BBR QoT. What is that chair and may I have it?
If I have to sit for long periods of time, this chair allows it. There are not many others. The Corbusier LC4 and the Contour Lounge Chair are my two others.
+1 on the Herman Miller Embody. They even come in tall sizes so I don’t feel like my knees are constantly bent at a funky angle like chairs built for the average short person.
I have the last one of those at my Burbank office – gonna get one of those desk-top stand-up thingies that I think @frauenfelder has posted about a couple times. I had sent it to a few folks here and our HR group got one for an office that they share.
OMG! Land of the Lost!
This reminds me to clean my own…
I print a fair amount, because I like to be able to have a copy of my paper to mark up away from the computer, so I can then go back and edit. We got an old HP workhorse cheap on ebay, a laserjet, and it’s been great for the amount I have to print.
