The working from home thread: tips and advice

If you'd meant Nintendo Switch I'd've been all over it.

So is the paint dry and do you have pics?

Pics of an empty room with a half-built (not yet tidy) network and PC rack... yeah, I can do that much.

Yet to put the desk together or anything, have been working on work stuff in the evenings instead.

The room is 1.8m wide, by 2.6m length. It is small but should make a good office.

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Very minimalist.

I noticed yesterday a colleague has had air conditioning installed in his home office, not one of the floor standing units though, a proper 'hotel room' wall mounted unit.

How much does something like that even cost to install and what are the logistics? #jealousy

Aircon for the 5 days it's above room temp in this country?

This is fine.

How much does something like that even cost to install and what are the logistics?

For a single room install, £2k for the kit and then £1k for fitting it and making good afterwards. If you fit multiple rooms then it's going to be more expensive and vastly disruptive as it requires laying / chasing pipework and power.

In theory you need permission to fit the external heat exchanger, in practice if you fit it where nobody can see it / hear it then not so much....

@soul just had it fitted IIRC.

I think people are beginning to run out of stuff to spend their season ticket + holidays money on. I think he is out in Hertfordshire so must have £000s to play with

^^ This isn't that accurate...

@dubtap - we've had 4 assets and an 8Kw condenser installed, earlier this year. It was about £9.5k including installation, some plastering where we had two units installed on internal walls so had the pipes chased into the walls and the 30amp breaker box installed.

We recently enquired about a second condenser with two more units and that was priced at £1,600 for a 3.2kw condenser and two 2kw units including installation. A single unit + condenser was £1,450.

^^ This isn't that accurate...

But ballpark. Tonnes of variables obviously, like room location, room size, requirement for scaffolding, ease of pipework and cable routing, amount of making good afterwards etc. If you have more accurate costs for a single room install, then go ahead, but I suspect my guesstimate isn't orders of magnitude out.

A house up the road from our flat was for sale around the time we were looking and they had a spilt unit. From the pictures, it seemed to only be in one room, but with the big, fuck ugly condenser out front. Just tried to find it on Google maps but it seems the new owners were similarly unimpressed with it.

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Maps shows it there in sept 2020, current view shows it's gone.

Someone up the road from us with a semi has one fitted above the shared driveway. It faces directly on to a window in the next door house.

If that was my house, I would want to smash.

Hope these things aren't the new Satellite Dishes and end up blighting every other house you see.

Sorry - didn't mean that to sound so cunty.

Crazy people that commute by train into London.

"Oh we have the good life"

No you don't, you have hours on a train every week. Hard fucking no.

I think people are beginning to run out of stuff to spend their season ticket + holidays money on. I think he is out in Hertfordshire so must have £000s to play with

I am also out in Hertfordshire and have just had aircon installed. Am I him?

Depends how you use it and what your commute is like.

I used to love the 45 minute train journey on one of my old commutes. Always got a seat, pretty much always with a table, nice and quiet, could get work done or read a book in peace. Non-stop journey and very reliable. (Cambridge to Kings Cross).

Other train journeys are an utter ball ache, like Guildford to London. No chance of a seat, and often so packed you may not even get on the first train.

If you have children then any long train commute time seems like a guilty escape no matter how shit the actual journey is.

Will be looking for 100% remote work or, at most, one day in an office in London somewhere (ideally somewhere I can run to/from, so 10km ish) when I finally start to search for a new job.

I'm still waiting on my new role to be decided (which is looking likely delayed since head of dept is off now with baby) but on my JD I had "remote working". My expectation is I will not return to an office. I guess if your train commute is nice (are any, really?) then maybe but I'd still rather be wandering around in my pants working on bikes for an extra hour a day than sat on the train. I do miss my tube reading time though - that was the one novelty I got from PT.

Has anyone encountered the MS Teams bug that just kills both your meeting and your wifi connection at the same time? Completely random what meetings I'm in, camera on/off no difference.

Just started happening to me in last two weeks and I've found threads on it all over the place but its happening on Macs and all types of PCs/laptops, docked/undocked. I'm on an ancient NHS supplied W7 Toshiba Portege which probably doesnt help.

My connection has been remarkably shit this week, either in home WiFi or tethered to my phone. Usually the latter solves connection woes, but not this week
Was starting to assume something to do with my network card. I'm on a fairly new dell latitude, w10.

I’ve been hoofed out of VS Code live share sessions several times recently because of “Azure Cloud Relay” issues. Teams screen sharing has not worked at all for a few days. I’ve also ordered a cardioid mic to dodge the noise of my MacBook fan caused by Teams/Electron pegging the CPU when using an external 4K monitor. Microsoft can do one.

Oh joys to look forward to. Entire workplace just switched from Google to Microsoft. Currently in the zone between Gmail freeze and new Outlook. Remarkable how odd it is not to be able to check work emails on a Saturday morning...
(I think my outlook has probably been set up now, I'm just putting off checking it)

All purchasers of the Flexispot still happy with it? Hesitating between that and the Jarvis one.

Very happy with mine still. Solid as a rock.

Ditto - Great desk.