Tag: Setup

Privileged

Jeroen

I’ve been privileged, both directly (with financial and material support from family) and indirectly (in that I’ve been able to work to earn some extra cash). I’ve used those resources for the great credo:

Spend your money where you spend your time

And so I’ve spent significant amounts of money on PCs. I find it enjoyable to keep a record of my previous rigs, so here it is. Older entries were constructed from memory, newer ones are more reliable as they’re created from a “paper” trail.

  • 2017: Intel Core i7-7700K + 32GB RAM + GeForce GTX 1080
  • 2013: Intel Core i7-4500U (Laptop – Dell XPS-12)
  • 2012: Intel Core i5-2500K + 16 GB RAM + GeForce GTX 560 Ti
  • 2009: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 + 4GB RAM + Radeon HD 4870
  • 2005: Intel Pentium M740 (Laptop – Acer Aspire 1692)
  • 2001: AMD Athlon XP + ?? RAM + GeForce 2
  • 1998: AMD K6-2 + ?? RAM + 3Dfx Voodoo2
  • 1994: Unknown brand 486 (66 MHz) with co-processor + 16 (?) MB RAM
  • 1990: Tulip 286 (10 MHz) + 1 (?) MB RAM

My most recent (2017) build was actually the trigger for this post: I’m very pleased with how it turned out and how well it works (and I’m hoping it will continue working so well).

If you care about the details of the various builds, and some of the backstories: check out my extended PC List.

And you, dear reader? Do you remember your old rigs too?

So much to do

Jeroen 1 Comment

So much to do, yet so little time.  Three weeks of vacation have come and gone. Two weeks of work have come and gone. One of those work weeks was even a week #OffsiteCoding, where we went to a great (I’d dare even say luxuruous) location with the whole IT team, to work (dedicated) on a new part of our product.

New computer desk at homeAfter those five summer weeks I’m still full of inspiration, and deep into several projects and new hobbies. If I fail to post on my blog, rest easy knowing I’ll be enjoying myself with:

  • Guild Wars 2, also known as World of Warcraft 2.0;
  • The Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft;
  • Our brand new Open Source project Bieb (on CodePlex), which is now public (yay!), but still needs a release (boo!);
  • Studying for my 70-513 exam on WCF;
  • Cranking up my skills with WPF, which I’ll be using at work a bit more the coming months.

Much of my inspiration for new projects comes from finishing other projects. Have a look at the picture for the most recently finished project: a custom (home) made desk for two workplaces at home.

Problem with this approach for getting inspired: every finished project gives me inspiration for two more! Like I said: so much to do, yet so little time. A luxury problem, I suppose.

Eye love you

Jeroen

At work I spend most of my time looking at a computer screen. At home I also spend most of my time looking at a computer screen. Basically: I spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen. Recently I’ve been looking for ways to make this as pleasant as possible. So far I’ve come up with the following:

  • I’ve installed bias lighting after reading this.
  • From the same article I found out Windows 7 has a built-in screen setup procedure in the media center app (it turns out LCD factory settings are on “eye scorching brightness”).
  • Work in progress: getting a new set of hi-res screens at work. See point 9 on The Joel Test.
  • Changing my monospace font to one in this top 10 list. Courier New is apparently almost as bad as Comic Sans.
  • I’m also experimenting with inverted color schemes for my programming tools: C# and JavaScript disguised as Ruby!

In the next few months there will be more changes to my setup, most likely. First up would be a second LCD, although I can’t seem to decide if I want the exact same monitor twice, or perhaps a different one next to my HD one. Either way, so far these changes were more than welcome: can’t imagine how I got along without them.

Interested? Go for it! Show your eyes some love!