The best thing about working from home is that you are at home. The worst thing about working from home is… well…you are at home, and that is especially true during the school holidays. With my wife also working at a school it means the house, which is normally empty and peaceful is suddenly filled with the noise of battle as two teenagers, a pre-teen and a frazzled mother “debate” the important issues of the day; like who’s turn it is to walk the dogs or do the dishes.
Luckily, because I’m an evangelist, I travel a lot and so I have amassed a collection of good mobile tools, which means that I can work anywhere, allowing me to seek the relative peace and tranquillity of the local Borders bookstore, the library or indeed, downtown Baghdad. Anywhere quieter than here. So I thought in this issue of “Outside the DXperience”, I’d give you a run down of what’s in my mobile toolbox.
First there’s the netbook, small enough to fit in my handbag, if I had one, but powerful enough to get the job done. I use an Acer Aspire One AOA150-1447 8.9-Inch netbook with 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive. I replaced the XP SP3 operating system with Windows 7 RC1 gaining an improvement in performance and battery life. I have also purchased a 7800mAh extended life battery for this machine which gives me 9 – 10 hours of battery life, although I get around a third less if I’m running my mobile broadband dongle.
Which brings me nicely onto broadband connectivity. You can only work “anywhere” if “anywhere” comes complete with broadband access to the Internet. I have two methods of solving this problem. Firstly, with my iPhone contract with O2 I have access to WI-FI hotspots proved by The Cloud, of which there are 12 in Dundee, so plenty of choice there. If The Cloud fails me then I have a pay as you go mobile dongle with Three.
Well that’s about it for hardware. Moving on to software; what do I use on my netbook? Well one of the downsides of the netbook form factor is the lack of screen real estate, especially with regard to the start menu. You only have to have a few nested levels of menus before things start to look ugly and usability takes a nose dive. A great little utility to combat this is Launchy. From their web site:
Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!
The 160GB hard drive on the AspireOne is pretty generous, but some netbooks are not so generous, especially if you take the SSD option. To combat this, and for general mobility reasons, I use the PortableApps suite. The suite of stand alone applications installs to a pen drive and allows you to plug and play with your favourite software. Note though that, as of the time of writing, OpenOffice does not support Office 2007 file formats. Of course the PortableApps Suite, although powerful, doesn’t contain everything I need, I still had to install Visual Studio so that I can work with XAF and the other DevExpress products; and of course, where would I be without the my trusty Windows Live Writer for blogging?
Well that’s about it for this edition and the tour around my mobile toolbox, but if you’ve got a favourite “digital nomad” utility or piece of hardware then don’t forget to share it with the rest of us via the comments!