The Evolution of my Spaces

Mar 242010

Interaction with technology post

This is an interesting time to ask what my media/TV/internet/gaming setups are. Currently I spend 7 months out of the year traveling for work, 2 months traveling for pleasure, then the remaining 3 staying put. This puts many aspects of my life in disarray, but is also an amazing experience. I’m a very technology focused person, so I cant resist bringing some with me. For work I run audio for bands/festivals.

Probably fitting to start with life on the road.

From LR

Nothing that crazy going on here. 13″ Macbook pro with no mouse. I’ve tried a variety, but they get wrapped up/tangled/lost. I’ve been a PC guy all my life but interface of this laptop was enough to make me switch sides. Multitouch won me over primarily; screen color gamut, battery life, and boot times also factored in. After using it for a week all PC laptops felt cramped and claustrophobic. Multitouch makes a huge difference. I carried a mouse for the first two months but never used it. The only situations where a mouse was desperately needed was computer gaming. The only games that were really playable were keyboard only games. Even strategy games dont work well after 30min of continuous playing, after which sweat/oil makes too much drag on the track pad and affects speed/accuracy. While not expressly prohibitive to play, it makes it so inefficient that I just give up and read a book. Especially disappointing was the lack of multitouch support in Starcraft 2 and Civilization 5.

The device on the left is a headphone amp. It connects over usb or an optical cable and gives me much better sound quality than the (terrible) mac integrated output. It also gives me a (large) physical volume knob. I adjust the volume a good deal while listening to music and I always prefer a real knob to move. I also carry two pairs of headphones, one large, one small. I use this setup for most all audio and video.

My experience of Vegas

From LR

Video media comes from streaming sources or the hard disk. I don’t carry binders of DVDs. I use this while in bed, at tables, and on buses.

While traveling in cars/planes I’ll just connect the headphone amp to an ipod/iphone and skip the whole laptop setup. Both idevices have poor volume adjustment options so the big knob is key. My iphone interface was annoying so I jailbroke just to fix two things.

From LR

My thumb occasionally got physically sore from the swipe to unlock feature. Pulling a finger from one side to the other was far too inefficient for me so I added tap to unlock, which, to this day, is my number one reason to jailbreak. The second reason was sbsettings.

From LR

I simply wanted all the settings at the touch of one gesture, rather than three, as the standard ios requires.

In terms of being stationary, I havent been on one place for long.

In the freshmen dorms I ran a 17″ laptop and wireless mouse.

From LR

There’s a wireless keyboard too, under the desk. The home stereo was connected to the laptop and positioned for volume and equalization adjustments on my immediate left.

By my senior year in Santa Barbara this had expanded considerably.

From LR

A desktop computer (win7 RC at the time) replaced the laptop as my main machine. The laptop was wiped and repurposed solely for mobile sound recording with a firewire soundcard. Again all sound adjustments are within arms reach and can be made with physical knobs. There is a master sound mixer on the left with a large volume knob. A subwoofer was added, with separate knobs for sub and mains (subs on an aux!).

Living in Los Angeles I tossed the home stereo for some studio monitors.

From LR

And now we arrive at present day.

From LR

This is my bare-bones set up for a month of visiting the parents. Same desktop computer with a few hardware changes. Same firewire soundcard and monitors. Attempted to switch to a RAT mouse, but ended up with an ikari mouse. The wireless mouse problems were starting to appear in all aspects of computer use: gaming, soundediting, and photoediting. Wired is just faster and smoother. The expansion to an eight button mouse made a considerable difference as well.

The key to the setup is a sit reclined in an office chair with my mouse arm completely at rest.

From LR

This key aspect I’ve kept constant throughout all my spaces.

I watch TV from an office chair, sometimes multitasking online. I watch movies from the bed behind the chair. I listen to music right in the sweet spot between the speakers. There is a living room system that’s connected to a kitchen computer, I use the remote app on my iphone to control the kitchen itunes that’s streaming my media library. I play guitar though a multi-effects pedal routed into the firewire soundcard. I gave up my guitar amp years ago. I do all my gaming here with a mouse, I have a strong distaste for game system controllers (mouse>joystick). I do most internet here, occasionally doing some reading in bed with the laptop.

And that’s it for home.

At work I listen to music a bit differently. Midas Vernoa