Decluttering the home office
After moving into our new house, painting, buying furniture, assembling the furniture, painting the furniture, reorganizing, and finally, setting up the rooms, I was anxious to get everything in our new home office set up the way I’ve always wanted it. One of the biggest problems for myself in a home office is the epic amount of tangled cables, computer equipment, and downright crap all over my desk. After some thinking and internet searching, I set off on a project to get all this equipment properly organized.
I found couple of articles on the interwebs about installing cheap pegboard on the bottom or back of a desk to keep cable- and device-clutter to a minimum, so I decided to hack together my own solution inspired by these examples.
Materials:
- Pegboard - 24″ x 48″ section
- Steel eyes - Qty. 4 (for my table, YMMV)
- Wooden dowels (if you need them) - small enough to fit through the eyes
Tools:
- Saw
- Sandpaper
- Drill
- Pliers (if you have a hardwood table)
You could probably get by with less that this, but these are the tools I had and used.
A finished project
I just completed a website for the Davis Island Civic Association (a Tampa Bay-area local organization). Check it out here. I’m pretty happy with it, considering the speed with which I put it together. Leave some feedback for me!
Installing some shelving
This weekend I’m planning on building some simple bookshelves for install into this useless edge of the closet of our master bedroom. The right side of our closet (which is not a very deep one) is completely consumed by ductwork or something in the whole corner. So I’m using that limited depth to build some shelves for my beaucoup novels that I’ve gotta do something with. Here’s the plan (via my mad AutoCAD skillz):
I’ll try to post some pics when the shelves are painted and installed. By the way, has anyone ever had success with Google Sketchup? Every time I try using it, I just get fed up. Nothing seems to work anywhere near as well as the full ACAD suite (it costs thousands, so I understand… I guess).
The Completed Furniture
Last night I put the finishing coat of varnish on my new TV stand-slash-entertainment center and I’ll have to say, I’m quite satisfied with the results… especially given the circumstances under which it was constructed. Because my parents are putting the finishing touches on our old house before selling, nearly all the tools were over in Palm Harbor, yet the table saw I needed to use several times was at the house in Dunedin. Needless to say this made things something of a hassle, considering I don’t live in either town, so I’ve got to drive over from Tampa to work on it at all. After starting the design around Thanksgiving, though it took about 3 months to complete this simple piece of work, it’s finally done and tonight I’m going to get the TV, stereo system, and console systems set up underneath. I’ll take some pictures later and post them.
Entertainment Center
I’m finally almost done building the entertainment center I started about 2 months ago. Well, it’s more of a table/hutch than a real entertainment center, but it should be tons better for our living room. I built it entirely out of red oak, except for the plywood, which is 3/4″ red oak veneer. I think I’m going to get it stained tonight, and maybe take some pictures of it to put up here. It’ll be a welcome replacement for the coffee table we’re currently using as a TV stand.
Setting Up a Jabber Server
At our office we’re in the process of a migration to Exchange Server, which meant the decommissioning of our old mail server running MDaemon. Unfortunately, this meat that I had to come up with a new method for instant messaging, because Exchange no longer provides a way to set up an IM server short of their full Live Communications Server product. As I started searching for alternatives, both proprietary and open-source, I realized my main feature concerns for a new product were low cost, manageability, and server-side controls over the whole system. With Jabber open format, I found exactly what I was looking for.