New gaming desk design

One area my daughter said was growing was architects for virtual space. Kids who design buildings and things for virtual worlds were at one point in demand. Might be an interesting area.

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How do you not fall asleep like that? LOL! =) Looks awesome!

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Heaven!

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There is a lot going on here. First this desk is like a cockpit. I have to pull out the chair to get out, and go in and pull it in to get in. I am going to get one of those desk carpet plastic roller mats to make that part easier.

I had to pull off the arm rests on my desk chair to get it to fit in. I use both side desks as arm rests. The right desk has a 1’x3’ gaming mat (water proof). My whole arm is on it. It is meant to hold a keyboard, but I like the flat long piece with no ridge. To really use the desks as arm rests, I had to pull them in close for the ‘cockpit’.

I have that footstool underneath the monitor shelf at 37".

That pillow is held on by a bungee and piece of clothesline. Yeah I could do better. The chair doesn’t have a lot of tilt positions, so I picked this one for comfort and added a head pillow for a head rest. Works fine.

I put the CPU (left) on its sides with all fan exposed. I took off the feet from the standing position, and jacked it up by those feet on the side position. Used duct tape to hold them on. The idea- if water spills, the computer is on stilts. If I put it in the upright position, it blocked line of sight for my son (desk to the left). If I put it on the floor, dog hair clogs the vent. This is the compromise.

I have a couple separate sound setups here. First is a pair of old computer speakers. I jack in to a old land Sirius system or my ipod…just move it where it needs to go. Got the antenna out the window to my right up on the roof, and subwoofer is on shelf behind monitors. THe other system is the UE Megaboom red speaker (left) which is paired with the Echo (on shelf, in center, between monitors). I can stream radio via IHeartRadio or various Alexa apps, or do anything with Alexa, including drop in, command lights etc.

I have this power strip tower (shelf, left) which has a retractable length cord, outlets on 4 sides, and a couple USB jacks. Works great for keeping all that stuff powered. Router, Tmobile phone extender are on right desk (behind me). Have a land phone line going into that router too.

Mouse cable goes up underneath the monitor shelf, keeping the cord off me. I have a headphones hook underneath the left desk, and I need to get the length better there. I need to manage that cable better, since if I am not careful the chair rolls over it. I think I will route it from the left side.

I have my Razor keyboard on my lap. I just went with red keys. You can have it go rainbow and blink.

I am thinking of this light package : starter kit with 2 bulbs and hub for $80 on Cyber Mon, and this smart strip for $60. You can take that strip and put it behind monitors or TVs to illuminate. I am thinking about going under the monitor shelf for indirect lighting. Then you can voice activate and change lighting. The other color bulbs I am thinking will go in an overhead and desk lamp for the wife. It is really nice walking into a room and turning on the lights with a voice command.

Going to have a couple shelves above the monitors and I will put up my old computer games on them to complete the picture.

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When you find issues during updates, you can bet there are others elsewhere. Good luck on all the repairs and getting setup. Nice setup for gaming.

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All it needs now is an ejector seat , for these bursting on the loo moments when you should have gone 30 minutes ago :smiley:

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Well Christmas came and things got even better. I got a Phillips Hue strip for under the shelf, that I voice activate by Alexa. Problem is mine is defective and is not working and I have to go through a call with Phillips support to get it fixed.

The smart bulbs are in and working. I have not done much with colors yet. You have to set up a scene where you define the color and illumination level, then you can call that up by Alexa. The basic default is for full illumination and dimming. The Phillips Hue lights are nice indeed. I have one in the overhead fixture, and I can still turn on the lights with the light switch if something fails via Hue. Hue itself is pretty resilient to router resets too. I am going to program a ‘WarMode’ red illumination setting. I tried doing some of that earlier but the red looked kind of pinkish, taking away from the whole masculine war mode notion.

Since I pulled the armrests off the chair, I can pull the desks close and have no issue with ergonomics now. I got rid of the pillow and put the chair more upright, which I suppose helps with posture some.

I have been playing around with Spotify. My daughter has it, my son ran out his free use of it, so for Christmas I bought the family Spotify premium @ $15/month, and they all can have their own accounts and playlists. For me it is music revival time. I quit collecting music when my iPod 60GB filled up, but with playlists, the entire world is my oyster. My aim is to make a series of playlists that function as channels with low chance of repeating owing to high numbers of songs. So far my New Wave channel is getting there with 1400+ songs. Needs some pruning though. But while gaming I will drive the Megaboom speaker with my phone and add songs to the playlist that way.

I put shelves above the monitors and have all of my old MMO’s and RPG game boxes up there.

My wife did not want to sit next to me. She likes her corner on the other side. I was a bit bummed by her choice, but she likes that spot and happy wife = happy life. Instead my son over Christmas sat in the copilot seat next to me and we had a load of fun running Path of Exile together.

Santa also heard my musings over what would complete the office- a beer fridge. And she-Santa bought one for me last October, successfully hid it in my son’s closet all the way to Christmas, and I was truly surprised. It is basically a wine fridge with 3 shelves and temperature control. I set it to 50F, which is on the cold end for ales. I had not consumed ale at the proper temperature ever, and there is a lot more flavor when you do. Now the big problem with a beer fridge in an office is if you put in on the floor, you have to stoop all the way down and root around to find what you want. Also it takes up floor space. Well I solved this problem by putting on top of a file cabinet. I am tall and can see it easily now at eye level, although I put a little step stool so my wife can get to it. I have a shelf for ales/stouts, a shelf for IPAs, and the lower basket has cans. We go down and pick out a beer every night after work and have a little happy hour. Fun.

I think I have finally got to the bottom of my WiFi issues. I had a FIOS G1100 router with a Netgear AC1200 extender. It was unreliable when I would link it via WiFi with the FIOS router. So I went to access point mode where I ran an Ethernet cable from the router to the Netgear, and things got better, but it still randomly would shut off. I called my buddy Ray and he suggested I replace the Netgear AC1200 and turn off WiFi on the FIOS router and let the new router handle it all. But I reasoned that if channel interference was the issue, I could just turn off WiFi on the FIOS in the present access point configuration, and avoid problems. And so I have been doing that. I can get 2GHz in the basement, the rest of the house, and sometimes I walk within 5GHz range. The problem with smart houses is if your WiFi is flaky, you have all of your smart devices fail every time the WiFi fails. So far this current fix is working. But if I have to do it over again, I will move to one of the new mesh systems (Netgear Orni is likely the way I would go). Those are cool since they maintain the same channel wherever you wander in the house and they efficiently operate together to deliver you the best speed they can rather than fight each other for bandwidth like we have with extenders. Prices on these systems are coming down.

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Your office sounds like heaven.

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It is an ongoing pursuit of gaming heaven. You never quite get there, but steadily chip away at it.

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You aren’t on airbnb are you? :smiley:

If you don’t have space for snacks…

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Wife would be a little pissed at the Air B&B! Hah!

That hoodie trick…wish I had known about it when the kids were toddlers.

For anyone who cares about this little saga, I did get a replacement strip from Phillips for the defective one. That is on the slate for installation this weekend. I will then create a lighting ensemble called ‘war mode’ where the whole room is the best shade of red they can reproduce. Should look great for gaming.

I did a little cord cutting this weekend to save money. Wife is on furlough, so cutting back helps.

First was FIOS internet. We were out of contract on internet + router phone, and bills were $140+ per month. Ouch. I thought about that router phone. The only people who ever called us on it were solicitors. I suspect Verizon sells your phone info to the entire world with that service. Even when I tried to use it to call my wife or son who would not answer their cell phone, they would never pick up since that thing only has solicitors. So that went. Verizon upgraded me from 100MB/s to 300MB/s on a 2yr contract at $60/month, with no fees for installation. Tech guy comes out Sunday to upgrade us.

Next I looked at Comcast, which was charging us over $160/mo for cable. Ugh. After looking around and talking with colleagues I went with no contract Direct TV Now which at $78/mo had all of the channels we had before with cable. I think a very close second was PlayStation Vue, which is very attractive with the unlimited DVR. The thing is these services have no contract so I can flip around and chase the best deal.

To play them all I needed a better streaming devices. Our old Samsung TV is 8+yrs old with a smart hub that crawls in molasses and has hardly any apps and I think the thing is powered by a gerbil. I had got a Amazon Fire Stick for $20 on cyber Monday a few years ago, but that thing was also so slow as to be unusable. So I started digging around.

Chromecast did YouTube, but did not play nice with Amazon. Amazon did all of the smart stuff and Alexa content, but did not play nice with Google. Roku Ultra came out to be the best choice, as an agnostic content streamer with the broadest array of services. Going with that as the base would let me hop around with whoever was the best in the near future. Paid like $85 for it on Amazon, and it came yesterday. I hooked it to the Netgear AC1200 range extender via Ethernet cable (cat7), and it is screaming fast. So easy to set up. Also had some free content from Roku. I like the find the remote function to show me which sofa crack to go hunting for the remote. Also it is cool that you can voice search across all Roku apps for any kind of show, and Roku will saw who will rent you that movie cheapest.

This is a whole interesting area I did not know much about. If you look up your router, you can see the standard it follows and check what rates you get on it see wiki. My base FIOS router is a g1100 which supports the 802.11 n standard, Oct2009 2.4/5GHz 289/600 Mbps. There is bandwidth (related to how much you can pull through the wire, and number of people/devices affect this) and transfer speed (Mbps, megabits per second).

For comparison, HD gaming needs around 4Mbps, same for HD movie streaming, most other activities like email need 0.5Mbps. So we are well under things with 100 Mbps, but you start adding up a lot of people in the house and you hit bandwidth limits. Also latency is impacted here.

Looking up my old cables

cat 4 = 16 Mbps, 20 MHz 1996
cat 5 = 10-100 Mbps, 250MHz 2001
cat 7 = 10 Gbps 600MHz today

Cat 7 wasn’t that expensive. Got a 3’ cable for about $5, got a 50’ cable for about $20, got a 2 pack of 10’ cables for around $10. So going up to cat 7 would mean I have more capacity in the Ethernet cables than the router and range extender, and I would be limited by my router for speed, and have some room to grow into. Also I could handle a lot more devices, which matters for smart home stuff.

The standard I think Verizon is upgrading me to is VSDL 2 Vplus 300 Mbps. The Ethernet standard for my FIOS router is MoCA 2.0 , which goes up to 1Gbps, so I have headroom there. That router should handle the 300Mbps. So with that cat 7 cable from the router to my computer, I should see that kind of speed, and probably a lot less latency. My Netgear AC1200 ex6200 is the 802.11ac standard (better than the FIOS router) with the same 1Gbps Ethernet and similar WiFi. So with cat 7 to the extender I should be limited to the new 300Mbps rate coming into the house, whereas the old 1990s cable would likely throttle speed and bandwidth.

Phew.

I have some cabling ahead of me this weekend. The good news is that Netgear AC1200 seems to be working OK.

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What the wife doesn’t know… :wink:

What goes on in the gaming room stays in the gaming room.

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That table doesn’t look big enough for that :stuck_out_tongue:

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There is a sofa bed…

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Recent shot with decorations up. Two sword (Roman Gladus, replica of Sword of Charlemagne), Jar of D&D dice, lots of gaming titles, foot light operational and other signs of gaming geek.

Tested 300 Mbit/s on WAN after Verizon came. WiFi is limited to 60 Mbit/s, not sure if this is a router thing.

Got Phillips Hue working. Format is ‘alexa turn on (adjective) office’ where office is the group of lights, and adjective is a saved scene within Hue. Put War Mode in there with a nice deep red, gives the room a darkroom feel. Shot above is with lights all the way up.

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