home office technology setup

[iowaguy]

Anyone willing to share what you use for a home office setup? Do you use a laptop which you can then also use at your lab? Do you have a separate desktop unit at home with dual monitors that you do your number crunching on? Do you find an iPad indispensable? In general, does your lab give you a license for software that you can also use at home? i.e. if your research involves using SPSS, ArcGIS, etc (expensive software), can you only access these files on-campus or do you access them at home as well?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated as I start to plan for my upcoming technology investment…

[TakeruK]

I use a laptop for my "home office". During my MSc, my laptop was a Windows machine and the work computer was a Mac. Now, my laptop is a Mac and the work computer is Linux. But I've found a way to make it all work out nicely, even though the operating systems don't match!

On Windows, I used PuTTY and VPN clients to access my mac work computer from home when necessary. Mac has a built in terminal so that makes my life even easier now.

To synchronize files, I use Dropbox. I currently have ~12GB of space due to the "Space Race" promotion (most of this will go away in 2 years though). I find it really helpful to save all assignments/coursework here so that I can easily work on assignments seamlessly from either work or home computer. Same with any writing that I am/was doing (e.g. thesis). For papers, I use Mendeley to synchronize files and automatically generate bibliography (I use BiBTeX but they can do a lot of formats). I don't print out very many papers since I don't want to have to drag a stack/binder full of papers around. Mendeley gives you about 2GB of free storage, and this is a LOT of space when you just have PDFs of papers.

For expensive software (e.g. MATLAB, IDL), my school gives me a license to install and use this software on my home laptop. There are sometimes more restrictions for certain software. For example, one software requires that I'm logged into the campus VPN (e.g. same deal as if I wanted to use my school's library's subscription to access papers off-campus).

For other software, I find it really handy to use the same software on all your machines. For example, I use Google Chrome as my web browser and this allows any changes I make (e.g. bookmarking a useful website / paper / conference info etc.) to automatically propagate through all machines. In addition, I use platform-independent software such as OpenOffice instead of MS Office or the Mac software (except for Keynote since I really like how that works) so that I can open any file on any computer. I try to save things in PDF when possible.

With all this, despite different OS, I feel I can have almost seamless flow from one machine to the next! It really works for me

[Eigen]

I try really, really hard not to work at home. It helps keep me balanced, and stop my work from creeping into all aspects of my life.

So I've got an office at school, with my computer and everything I need.

I do have a laptop and an iPad for working while traveling, and occasional work at home (it's not always avoidable) but I prefer not to plan on it.

[ktel]

I use my boyfriend's desktop at home and it has a huge screen. I really don't like using a laptop, I much prefer desktops. We also have a tablet that I like to use for reading papers. I also try to avoid working at home but if I need to do some serious reading I just can't get it done in my office