Battlestation

Here’s my current battlestation…  since the office and guest bedroom are shared I recently migrated from a desktop to a Dell Latitude E5450 with a docking station so I could use the room as an office most of the time but undock when guests are staying the night.

Starting with the Lackracks…

• 2U server running VMware and FreeNAS
• Samsung ML-2850ND Laserjet printer
• On the top table networking stuff behind some videos
• A Tivoli Model One table-top radio which I use for my computer speaker (stereo gives me a headache so it’s a mono-speaker)
• Dell Docking station
• Dell Latitude E5450 with Nvidia GeForce 840M.  I looked at a few options and came to this model because I wanted NBD support, a robust docking solution, and a GPU for the occasional game.  Getting upgrades from Dell is pricey so I bought from Amazon another 8GB memory module to bring it up to 16GB and a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD.
• Portable blue-ray drive so we can watch movies
• A couple of ASUS monitors
• Orochi Razer mouse.  This is the only mouse I’ve gotten to work well since it can reverse the buttons in the mouse firmware instead of relying on the OS which doesn’t always produce consistent results–you left handers know what I mean.
• Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard
• On the far right a ScanSnap S1300–About 6 or 7 years ago I got an IRS audit with an accusation that I owed much more.  I am honest on my taxes but they don’t take a Quicken report as evidence.  So I had to prove it by digging through boxes of papers to find all the supporting documents on my return.  It was then that I decided to go paperless.  I now scan and OCR every document that comes across my desk per What Happens When You Send Me A Letter   We are now entirely paperless except for one small desk drawer where I file a few important papers.
• Speaking of important papers, in front of the laptop is a stamp I use to mark documents as scanned when I want to keep the physical copy–every once in awhile I run across a document I don’t want to shred such as my vehicle title.  The stamp prevents me from accidentally scanning the same papers multiple times if I’m not sure that I’ve scanned it in yet.