7 ms·

Building the ultimate home office again

77 points by GordonS 6y ago

njsubedi 6y ago
tl;dr: Troy went into the rabbit hole of buying a bunch of high-cost gadgets and accessories [that he legitimately needed] to get tax deductions.
- psds2 6y ago
  And due to changes in the home office deduction in 2018 most people can't even do the same for themselves.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I'm kind of surprised that congress critters are not focusing on home office deductions as part of the incentives. The $1200 is an advance (not free money), but an actual deduction would be useful come around next year.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Deductions are a tax break for people who have time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        Not sure your point, but if you're attempting to say that deductions only work for people that don't file 1040ez, then yeah, you're right. Surely, you have more of a point than that though, yeah? Hiring a CPA or even just an accountant to do your taxes can be more expensive, but it has never failed to yield a large enough reason to not incur that expense, for me.
        sjwright 6y ago
        Your response proves my point. As you are someone who knows that that an accountant saves you enough in taxes to justify the expense, you are a person who has time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system. Many people don't have the luxury of strategising any of their interactions with the tax system. Either because their situation isn't covered by any deductions, or because they don't posses the knowledge, or because they don't possess sufficient free time to investigate.
- hornetblack 6y ago
  Last I checked max you can claim for purchasing home office equipment in Australia is $300. Although he claim the decline in value every year. Which would probably get you $300 again. https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Deductions-you-can-claim/Tools,-equipment-and-other-assets/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Ded...
  - prawn 6y ago
    Could instant asset write-offs apply?
  - jonny383 6y ago
    If he is running haveibeenpwned, he is probably purchasing through a company with instant asset write-off.
war1025 6y ago
Honest question, what does this guy do that makes any of that even remotely necessary? I mean, good for him and all, but it just seems like a post about a guy who likes fancy toys getting fancy toys. Is there anything more to it than that?
- agotterer 6y ago
  You can read about Troy on his Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hunt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hunt tldr; he’s a security researcher and the creator of Have I Been Pwned?
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  When you spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer every day, you want the best experience for yourself. It’s the one place where I’m totally happy to be a bit extravagant rather than fancy clothes, cars, home location etc
  - war1025 6y ago
    I can buy that I guess. Probably the main philosophical disagreement I have with the article is summed up by (and probably the rest of the article was tainted by) the opening line: > I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good as the tools you use I personally (fully aware it's a quirk of mine that others don't seem to share) feel that fancy tools are often a crutch for a lack of understanding. Granted, this guy looks to have a long list of accomplishments, so good for him for wanting a fancy set up. If it brings him joy then more power to him.
    - wolco 6y ago
      I've always felt you are only as good as you are when your tools are taken away.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
jugg1es 6y ago
What does this guy need dual xeons, 128gb ram and 900w PS for? From his site, it looks like he does powerpoints and video conferences. I understand the monitors but the rest is totally overkill, even if its for a tax break. If he wants reliability, he's better off buying 2 identical machines for redundancy and using a SAN so he can switch machines if one breaks. It would cost more and therefore be a bigger write-off.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Maybe just stealth Lenovo marketing.
- fearoffish 6y ago
  Analysing data dumps for https://haveibeenpwned.com https://haveibeenpwned.com is one of the data intensive things he’ll do. That’ll suck the life out of the computer.
  - war1025 6y ago
    From the website [1]: > Fortunately, today's modern cloud services like Microsoft Azure make it possible to do this without breaking the bank! So I'd guess it's not for that. [1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/About https://haveibeenpwned.com/About
    - pmh 6y ago
      In the post, but easy to miss: >I do a lot of data processing in SQL Server which can be really memory intensive (no, the cloud is not always the solution to this, I've got a draft blog post on that) Add to that: video/photo editing, live-streaming, development, and general purpose usage, and it's not an unreasonable setup.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    seems like the sort of thing that would be better suited to an AWS instance (or azure, if you're a regional director at microsoft) rather than running a crazy power-hungry computer as your primary workstation.
egypturnash 6y ago
I kept on scrolling waiting for the price tag on this and it was never listed. Let's see. (All prices are US$) Røde Broadcaster mic: $420 Lenovo Thinkstation P720, custom config: "As Configured $6,204.00 / Item Discount -$1,985.28 Use Coupon THINKJULY10* -$421.87 Your Price $3,796.85" 49" monitor: $2k 2x 32" monitors: 2*$540 Ergotron HX monitor arm: $280-310 2x Ergotron LX monitor arms: 2x$165 Sony a6400 camera: $1100 Lens for camera: $640, this may be AU$ in which case it's US$454 Elgato Cam Link: list of $130 but they are in high demand and only available on ebay for usorious prices, "it stung a bit", whatever that means in the context of already being around $10k in the hole for this setup so far Elgato multi mount "modular rigging system": out of stock, no retailer partners listed, I'm gonna guess, I dunno, $100 Fingerprint reader: $140 Also some Hue lights that don't have prices on the pages he links to and I don't wanna chase those down Elgato Stream Deck: $150 Surface Precision Mouse: $100 Surface Ergonomic Keyboard: $130 Eaton 5p UPS: "Contact us" SO I am getting around $10400 for this setup, plus whatever "stung" for that Cam Link, however much the Hue lights cost, and the UPS. Plus whatever shipping he paid for all this stuff. Christ, and here I am feeling like I was splurging when I spent like $200 on some new Ikea stuff to replace the standing desk I left behind when I moved from Seattle to New Orleans. It's still not even really functional because I haven't been able to find a stool that I like for when I don't feel like standing. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Dude paid like 80% of my year's rent for this setup.
- Bobbcatt 6y ago
  He way overspent. A threadripper build would be 2k max.
- wolco 6y ago
  Sadly he was let go before the items had a chance to arrive.
  - javawizard 6y ago
    Source? Or is this supposed to be a joke?
    - 6y ago
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
Nice setup, no doubt, but it's a bit of the "more money than I know what to do with" setup. I've set up mine as following 1. just get one ultra wide. I've had 3 or 4 monitors before. his setup with another monitor on either end strikes me as borderline insane/gratuitous. plus then you can consider different graphics cards. 2. mic: blue yeti pro 3. webcam: just my Android smartphone with droidcam installed. With blu-tack and having a bunch of three prong powerpoint plastic safety things for my toddler, I've rigged them up as the mounts/tripods. 4. logitech Master 3 mouse 5. mechanical keyboard 5. computer I haven't upgraded for almost 10 years (this is likely the year), but as hinted in the post, AMD seems obviously the way to go right now. 6. seat: I've actually got a kneeling chair because of limited space. I don't mind it but I agree that chair is a necessary expense. 7. desk: actually a custom cabinetry job off the side of my bedroom: possibly a spot where I've one upped him. I think my setup will soon be approaching his in terms of practical capability, but probably cost 4 to 5 digits less...
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  I think two of the items will have a particularly significant impact. The camera and lens will yield a vastly superior result, much more visually pleasing. If you’re capturing video for public consumption, it’s well worthwhile considering. (Concerning the camera body: Troy speaks of the Sony α6400, but the α6100 will produce identical results at a somewhat lower price; the main differences are that the α6100 lacks colour grading profiles—something only useful if you do post-processing—and has a plastic body and an inferior screen and viewfinder.) The computer: ten years is a rather long time in desktop CPU performance. Per https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html, the average desktop CPU is now more than 5× as fast as the average 2010 one. That rate seems roughly right for high-end consumer CPUs, though once you go up to your Threadripper SKUs it jumps up to 7.5–10× the best of then ’cos you’ve got so many cores, though at a somewhat higher price. And that’s just CPU—storage is waaaaay more than 5× faster; if you are still on a ten year old hard disk drive, updating to a solid state drive alone will increase task performance for many things far more than fivefold; make it NVMe with a new PC and some things you do may genuinely be more than a hundred times as fast.
fpgaminer 6y ago
Always interesting to see other people's setups. I'm curious how that ZigBee graph was generated. Would be really cool to see under the hood of the network my Hues have formed. He mentions a "ConBee II sniffer". I skimmed Google for ConBee II, and indeed it's a ZigBee gateway, but I couldn't find any explicit sniffer functionality? > I ended up with an Eaton 5P 850VA / 600W Line Interactive Tower UPS It bothers me to no end that UPS's are rarely specified by their Energy capacity (e.g. Amp-Hours or Watt-Hours); only the maximum Power. Often times the Energy capacity isn't even specified anywhere obvious; you have to dig to find it. Bonkers. > The main consideration was whether I should get 3 x 4K screens or go with an ultrawide which tends to be a lower pixel density. Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has proven to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small. A third is fine for watching a video on the side, or working on a terminal. But it's too cramped for code. Plus if you split it in halves, you end up moving your eyes and/or head a _lot_ to look from the left half to the right half. Remember, you're going to be at this screen for 8+ hours a day. The last thing you want is more mileage on your eyes and neck. On a regular monitor, half a screen-width is "just right" as Goldilocks would say. So between Ultrawide versus two or three regular monitors, I'd rather go back to regular monitors. I also thought it would be great for gaming, and to be fair it does deliver. The view in Subnautica is amazing! But the extra FoV and pixels are _expensive_, and one would need to account for that by pouring more money into their GPU. Realistically, I would rather have spent more money on upping my FPS than my FOV. That said, any movies shot in ultrawide ratios look great on it...
- jen20 6y ago
  > if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small. This depends on what you mean by "ultrawide". I have a 49" widescreen and thirds are perfect for almost everything - though occasionally it's necessary to use a 2/3-1/3 split. Six terminals side by side provides more than 80 columns per terminal. Most operating systems make it unnecessarily difficult to use a large display effectively out-of-the-box, though. On macOS, Magnet is the saviour, I'll have to try the tool mentioned in the article for Windows.
Havoc 6y ago
That's a cool setup. Surprised that he went with a prebuilt though given that he clearly weighs all options carefully. ie thinks carefully about the hdmi adapter off ebay but doesn't pick a case that doesn't annoy him

77 points by GordonS 6y ago

tl;dr: Troy went into the rabbit hole of buying a bunch of high-cost gadgets and accessories [that he legitimately needed] to get tax deductions.

psds2 6y ago
And due to changes in the home office deduction in 2018 most people can't even do the same for themselves.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I'm kind of surprised that congress critters are not focusing on home office deductions as part of the incentives. The $1200 is an advance (not free money), but an actual deduction would be useful come around next year.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Deductions are a tax break for people who have time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      Not sure your point, but if you're attempting to say that deductions only work for people that don't file 1040ez, then yeah, you're right. Surely, you have more of a point than that though, yeah? Hiring a CPA or even just an accountant to do your taxes can be more expensive, but it has never failed to yield a large enough reason to not incur that expense, for me.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        Your response proves my point. As you are someone who knows that that an accountant saves you enough in taxes to justify the expense, you are a person who has time or resources to strategise their interactions with the tax system. Many people don't have the luxury of strategising any of their interactions with the tax system. Either because their situation isn't covered by any deductions, or because they don't posses the knowledge, or because they don't possess sufficient free time to investigate.
hornetblack 6y ago
Last I checked max you can claim for purchasing home office equipment in Australia is $300. Although he claim the decline in value every year. Which would probably get you $300 again. https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Deductions-you-can-claim/Tools,-equipment-and-other-assets/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Ded...
- prawn 6y ago
  Could instant asset write-offs apply?
- jonny383 6y ago
  If he is running haveibeenpwned, he is probably purchasing through a company with instant asset write-off.

war1025 6y ago

Honest question, what does this guy do that makes any of that even remotely necessary? I mean, good for him and all, but it just seems like a post about a guy who likes fancy toys getting fancy toys. Is there anything more to it than that?

agotterer 6y ago
You can read about Troy on his Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hunt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hunt tldr; he’s a security researcher and the creator of Have I Been Pwned?
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
When you spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer every day, you want the best experience for yourself. It’s the one place where I’m totally happy to be a bit extravagant rather than fancy clothes, cars, home location etc
- war1025 6y ago
  I can buy that I guess. Probably the main philosophical disagreement I have with the article is summed up by (and probably the rest of the article was tainted by) the opening line: > I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good as the tools you use I personally (fully aware it's a quirk of mine that others don't seem to share) feel that fancy tools are often a crutch for a lack of understanding. Granted, this guy looks to have a long list of accomplishments, so good for him for wanting a fancy set up. If it brings him joy then more power to him.
  - wolco 6y ago
    I've always felt you are only as good as you are when your tools are taken away.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

jugg1es 6y ago

What does this guy need dual xeons, 128gb ram and 900w PS for? From his site, it looks like he does powerpoints and video conferences. I understand the monitors but the rest is totally overkill, even if its for a tax break. If he wants reliability, he's better off buying 2 identical machines for redundancy and using a SAN so he can switch machines if one breaks. It would cost more and therefore be a bigger write-off.

jayd16 6y ago
Maybe just stealth Lenovo marketing.
fearoffish 6y ago
Analysing data dumps for https://haveibeenpwned.com https://haveibeenpwned.com is one of the data intensive things he’ll do. That’ll suck the life out of the computer.
- war1025 6y ago
  From the website [1]: > Fortunately, today's modern cloud services like Microsoft Azure make it possible to do this without breaking the bank! So I'd guess it's not for that. [1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/About https://haveibeenpwned.com/About
  - pmh 6y ago
    In the post, but easy to miss: >I do a lot of data processing in SQL Server which can be really memory intensive (no, the cloud is not always the solution to this, I've got a draft blog post on that) Add to that: video/photo editing, live-streaming, development, and general purpose usage, and it's not an unreasonable setup.
- notatoad 6y ago
  seems like the sort of thing that would be better suited to an AWS instance (or azure, if you're a regional director at microsoft) rather than running a crazy power-hungry computer as your primary workstation.

egypturnash 6y ago

I kept on scrolling waiting for the price tag on this and it was never listed. Let's see. (All prices are US$) Røde Broadcaster mic: $420 Lenovo Thinkstation P720, custom config: "As Configured $6,204.00 / Item Discount -$1,985.28 Use Coupon THINKJULY10* -$421.87 Your Price $3,796.85" 49" monitor: $2k 2x 32" monitors: 2*$540 Ergotron HX monitor arm: $280-310 2x Ergotron LX monitor arms: 2x$165 Sony a6400 camera: $1100 Lens for camera: $640, this may be AU$ in which case it's US$454 Elgato Cam Link: list of $130 but they are in high demand and only available on ebay for usorious prices, "it stung a bit", whatever that means in the context of already being around $10k in the hole for this setup so far Elgato multi mount "modular rigging system": out of stock, no retailer partners listed, I'm gonna guess, I dunno, $100 Fingerprint reader: $140 Also some Hue lights that don't have prices on the pages he links to and I don't wanna chase those down Elgato Stream Deck: $150 Surface Precision Mouse: $100 Surface Ergonomic Keyboard: $130 Eaton 5p UPS: "Contact us" SO I am getting around $10400 for this setup, plus whatever "stung" for that Cam Link, however much the Hue lights cost, and the UPS. Plus whatever shipping he paid for all this stuff. Christ, and here I am feeling like I was splurging when I spent like $200 on some new Ikea stuff to replace the standing desk I left behind when I moved from Seattle to New Orleans. It's still not even really functional because I haven't been able to find a stool that I like for when I don't feel like standing. Talk about conspicuous consumption. Dude paid like 80% of my year's rent for this setup.

Bobbcatt 6y ago
He way overspent. A threadripper build would be 2k max.
wolco 6y ago
Sadly he was let go before the items had a chance to arrive.
- javawizard 6y ago
  Source? Or is this supposed to be a joke?
  - 6y ago

ACow_Adonis 6y ago

Nice setup, no doubt, but it's a bit of the "more money than I know what to do with" setup. I've set up mine as following 1. just get one ultra wide. I've had 3 or 4 monitors before. his setup with another monitor on either end strikes me as borderline insane/gratuitous. plus then you can consider different graphics cards. 2. mic: blue yeti pro 3. webcam: just my Android smartphone with droidcam installed. With blu-tack and having a bunch of three prong powerpoint plastic safety things for my toddler, I've rigged them up as the mounts/tripods. 4. logitech Master 3 mouse 5. mechanical keyboard 5. computer I haven't upgraded for almost 10 years (this is likely the year), but as hinted in the post, AMD seems obviously the way to go right now. 6. seat: I've actually got a kneeling chair because of limited space. I don't mind it but I agree that chair is a necessary expense. 7. desk: actually a custom cabinetry job off the side of my bedroom: possibly a spot where I've one upped him. I think my setup will soon be approaching his in terms of practical capability, but probably cost 4 to 5 digits less...

chrismorgan 6y ago
I think two of the items will have a particularly significant impact. The camera and lens will yield a vastly superior result, much more visually pleasing. If you’re capturing video for public consumption, it’s well worthwhile considering. (Concerning the camera body: Troy speaks of the Sony α6400, but the α6100 will produce identical results at a somewhat lower price; the main differences are that the α6100 lacks colour grading profiles—something only useful if you do post-processing—and has a plastic body and an inferior screen and viewfinder.) The computer: ten years is a rather long time in desktop CPU performance. Per https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html, the average desktop CPU is now more than 5× as fast as the average 2010 one. That rate seems roughly right for high-end consumer CPUs, though once you go up to your Threadripper SKUs it jumps up to 7.5–10× the best of then ’cos you’ve got so many cores, though at a somewhat higher price. And that’s just CPU—storage is waaaaay more than 5× faster; if you are still on a ten year old hard disk drive, updating to a solid state drive alone will increase task performance for many things far more than fivefold; make it NVMe with a new PC and some things you do may genuinely be more than a hundred times as fast.

fpgaminer 6y ago

Always interesting to see other people's setups. I'm curious how that ZigBee graph was generated. Would be really cool to see under the hood of the network my Hues have formed. He mentions a "ConBee II sniffer". I skimmed Google for ConBee II, and indeed it's a ZigBee gateway, but I couldn't find any explicit sniffer functionality? > I ended up with an Eaton 5P 850VA / 600W Line Interactive Tower UPS It bothers me to no end that UPS's are rarely specified by their Energy capacity (e.g. Amp-Hours or Watt-Hours); only the maximum Power. Often times the Energy capacity isn't even specified anywhere obvious; you have to dig to find it. Bonkers. > The main consideration was whether I should get 3 x 4K screens or go with an ultrawide which tends to be a lower pixel density. Having gone Ultrawide, I regret it. It sounds good on paper, but it has proven to be far more hassle than it's worth. The problem is: if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small. A third is fine for watching a video on the side, or working on a terminal. But it's too cramped for code. Plus if you split it in halves, you end up moving your eyes and/or head a _lot_ to look from the left half to the right half. Remember, you're going to be at this screen for 8+ hours a day. The last thing you want is more mileage on your eyes and neck. On a regular monitor, half a screen-width is "just right" as Goldilocks would say. So between Ultrawide versus two or three regular monitors, I'd rather go back to regular monitors. I also thought it would be great for gaming, and to be fair it does deliver. The view in Subnautica is amazing! But the extra FoV and pixels are _expensive_, and one would need to account for that by pouring more money into their GPU. Realistically, I would rather have spent more money on upping my FPS than my FOV. That said, any movies shot in ultrawide ratios look great on it...

jen20 6y ago
> if you tile windows into two halves, they're a little too big; if you tile into thirds, they're a little too small. This depends on what you mean by "ultrawide". I have a 49" widescreen and thirds are perfect for almost everything - though occasionally it's necessary to use a 2/3-1/3 split. Six terminals side by side provides more than 80 columns per terminal. Most operating systems make it unnecessarily difficult to use a large display effectively out-of-the-box, though. On macOS, Magnet is the saviour, I'll have to try the tool mentioned in the article for Windows.

Havoc 6y ago

That's a cool setup. Surprised that he went with a prebuilt though given that he clearly weighs all options carefully. ie thinks carefully about the hdmi adapter off ebay but doesn't pick a case that doesn't annoy him