I first bothered Scott Wasson when I lived in Kansas City and he had the privilege of then getting his hands on one of the first Shuttle XPCs with an AGP slot or something (I don’t remember exactly. I just remembered that I wanted to touch it). It made sense to me that Scott, as the editor of one of my favorite PC hardware nerd sites Tech Report, would be happy to have some random punk travel to his house and look at a computer. And to his credit he said “Come on over,” (I never did, I was just testing him because I’m an awful person) and he was just as accommodating when we asked him, “What’s in your gadget bag?”
I’m a PC guy, so most of my gadgetry focuses on functionality rather than fanciness. The fact that I sit in front of a PC all day long, working from a home office, puts a damper on any impulses I might have to buy something really cool, like a sweet, sweet Treo 600. (Well, that and the fact I’m really cheap.)
Let’s start with my main PC, since it’s the coolest piece of gear I have, although it’s far from mobile. I use this puppy for working, gaming, surfing, serving files, playing music, and everything else in between. I haven’t really given in to the urge to split up roles between different systems, as many power users have. I like having one main box that does almost everything. The system’s vital specs are: Athlon 64 FX-53 processor, Asus SK8N motherboard, GeForce 6800 GT graphics card, M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card, 2GB of DDR RAM, three 7200-RPM hard drives totaling 320GB of storage, a Sony DVD RW combo drive, Logitech Z-560 speakers, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, and a Logitech MX 510 optical mouse. The PC is housed in a shiny black Antec Sonata enclosure. For displays, I have a pair of Trinitron monitors, one 19″ and one 21″. (Once you go dual, you never go back.)
The only discontent I have with the system is the Asus SK8N, which is a little slow for an AMD64 motherboard and lacks some key features, including a second processor socket. I’m contemplating moving to a dual Opteron board with a pair of Western Digital Raptors in RAID 0 as the boot volume, because I enjoy the creamy smoothness of a multiprocessor system. That may sound excessive, but when you spend over ten hours per day in front of the same system, work or play, it begins to make some sense.
I do have two special-purpose PCs in the house. In the kitchen, we have the fantastic Kitchen PC, based on a Shuttle Zen XPC ST62K small form factor box. I built this system in order to convince my wife to give me my laptop back; she had commandeered it for use on the kitchen countertop. This little cube-like system features 802.11g wireless networking and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. Any remaining wires are tucked away between the counter and the refrigerator to keep counter-top clutter to a minimum. Otherwise, the specs aren’t anything too fancy: a Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 20GB hard drive, 512MB RAM, built-in Radeon 9100 IGP graphics, and a DVD-ROM drive. I’ve paired it up with a 17″ LCD monitor with integrated speakers, so it can do almost anything a regular PC would. Mainly, it acts as a Remote Desktop Connection terminal. The kids play games on it occasionally, and we sometimes watch TV in the kitchen via this PC.
Speaking of which, my other special-purpose PC is a digital media server that sits quietly in one corner of Damage Labs tuning television, recording shows, and streaming video to other PCs in the house. This box is a pearly white Shuttle XPC SB75S with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and an NVIDIA Personal Cinema card. I use SnapStream’s BeyondTV software to provide all of this system’s TiVo-like functionality, but I haven’t found a software package yet that can equal a TiVo for ease of setup and use. As a result, a real TiVO still rules our living room.
The rest of my gadgets are mobile gear, but they are still very PC-centric, for a couple of reasons. One, I use my laptop in place of a PDA, MP3 player, audio recording device, or anything else of that sort. Two, my laptop’s number-one job is to act as a thin client, usually via Wi-Fi, whether I’m out on the back porch writing or reporting from a trade show. Even when I spent a couple of weeks in Taiwan and China recently, I checked mail and did most of my work via a remote desktop connection back to the main PC in my office.
The laptop is a Compaq X1000 series Centrino-based system with a Pentium M 1.4GHz processor, 768MB of RAM, Radeon 9200 graphics, and all the basics, including Wi-Fi. I got it last December in a cataclysmic rebate deal for $850, all told. It won’t play the latest games, but it does everything I need, and it’s fairly slim and light. The wide-aspect screen is gorgeous, too, although it’s only 1280×800 resolution, and I’d kill for a high-density LCD.
The pictured array of other stuff is constituted mostly of accessories for the laptop. Starting from the top left and moving across, we have:
• A portable optical mouse that AMD was giving away as schwag. This is one of the few “mini-mice” for laptops I’ve ever seen with enough spacing between the left and right buttons for a truly usable mouse wheel.
• A universal power adapter for international travel.
• A 256MB USB thumb drive, used to carry benchmarks to, and benchmark results from, perilously unattended trade show display systems.
• An extra USB Wi-Fi adapter, just in case.
• A cheap pair of earbud headphones.
• A few packets of Splenda, so I don’t have to endure the torture of coffee with NutraSweet or be thrust into a sugar coma.
• A cheap (sensing a theme yet?) headset for my phone.
• A Samsung A500 phone. Yes, this is also cheap, and it doesn’t do much well beyond basic cell-phone duties. I do use Sprint’s wireless web feature to get news updates sometimes, but not often.
• On the bottom left is a Microsoft 802.11g wireless router. I replaced it at home with a hackable Linksys WRT54G, but this one I’ll take on the road for longer trips, so I can go wireless inside my hotel room. A router also helps for sharing a single hotel broadband connection among multiple TR staffers, as we did at Quakecon this year.
• A home-made crossover cable, just in case.
• Spooled up Ethernet and phone cables.
• A cheap mic for interviews.
• The last few items are accessories for my camera, a Canon PowerShot G3 that’s not pictured for should-be-obvious reasons. We have a lens cleaning pen, mini-tripod, remote control, and a USB cable.
The G3 is a fantastic 4-megapixel camera that’s much more portable than the digital SLRs. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself when the upgrade temptation strikes. Truth is, the G3 is more camera than I am photographer; it has manual settings for everything and lots of nice touches, like a built-in neutral-density filter that allows one to combine the use of a flash with macro mode without getting hotspots. I’m still learning to use it well, and given proper encouragement, it takes great pictures. The G3 can also record short video clips that it outputs as AVI files, perfect for posting on the web.
The Tech Report [TechReport]
