I can see where this would really fill that social void when working at home, it would just have to be with the right person. Then again, I have been getting a lot of contact requests (read: porn spam) lately on Skype, maybe they would want to be my portal buddy.

Cool post. I have been making a living doing (mostly) web development for the past few years and posts like this are what motivate me to keep trying some of the open source tools that are out there. Coming from a corporate environment, I have stuck with Microsoft tools for my work. They get the job done, but often…

I have the Logitech G5 at home and it works just as well for work as it does for gaming. The adjustable sensitivity is especially handy when making fine adjustments in Photoshop.

Has anyone here replaced the back light in an LCD screen? I have a 5 or so year old Samsung 21" screen, it was a higher end panel at the time and quite expensive. The colors now very dull and yellowing, but works fine otherwise.

During 2+ years of working from home, I have found myself wanting to work outside the house more frequently than when I first started. It just feels like my focus and motivation are much better outside the house. In either case, I am still completely independent with no one watching over my shoulder, but the tendency…

We had a leaky flapper valve for about a year on one of our toilets. It was one that we never really used, and the leak was really quiet so I never heard it.

I just got Windows 7 loaded on my 3 year old Vaio laptop (T2300@1.66GHz/2GB) and it runs better than it ever has. The machine came with XP MCE, I later loaded Vista which worked fine, but felt sluggish.

Nice and clean... and I really like the glass shelf and the lighting. I will be moving my office into a smaller space in the next few months and some of these recent smaller workspaces are providing some good ideas.

I tend to go with the 'let it build up until I suddenly get the cleaning bug' type of schedule. Thankfully that bug hits me frequently enough that it rarely gets out of hand. The downside is that sometimes dishes sit in the sink for a couple of days. Oh well, no system is perfect.

Make sure your chair and desk are configured so as to allow enough room between your lap and keyboard to accommodate an adult cat while still allowing you to type comfortably.

@djlurch: ROR is pretty much an extortion scam. I have a client who also got a report on there that was pretty clearly from a competitor. The report was written in the same broken english that the guy uses to pump up his own feedback (and bash other competitors, usually with the same story) on various other review…

@JayDeEm: Wow, thanks for all of the replies! It sounds like most of you are really happy with this vacuum. With my wife's allergies anything that does a better job than what we currently have would be a nice change. I may just have to look into getting one :)

Even my crappy vacuum fills up with cat hair after about 3 trips around the house. Any Dyson wielding cat owners out there, is it worth the upgrade?

I use a D-Link DPH-50U phone adapter with Skype which also has the ability to record calls. The device isn't free of course, about $25, but it's also a nice way to integrate Skype with your regular phone as opposed to having a separate headset.

Gmail is still 99% effective for me, and what does get through is usually 1-2 a day for a few days. What I also do, and it's not a solution for everyone, is just block messages containing domains like spaces.msn.com and googlepages.com. It's extremely unlikely that anyone I know would send me a link to that kind of…

I have never seen it before, but Scanwiches seems like a perfectly acceptable, healthy (and tasty) fetish. I didn't get very far in the site so it's possible that I missed it, but I see great potential for a sister site called Scanburgers.

One thing I don't think the article mentioned was freshness. In my experience anything pulled from a shelf at the local grocery store is, more often than not, stale. About a year and a half ago I began ordering my beans online from a company that does their own roasting. A freshly roasted 5 pound bag of beans stored…

Very nice. Though not super functional, the colored LED's are just plain cool. I used a shorter version of those legs from IKEA and a shelf (actually part of a file cabinet from the scrap room) for a monitor stand and it works out great. That extra space under the monitor is great for stashing stuff out of the way and…

@QuintanaOsgood: No Photoshop there... That's just the key to M.C. Escher's front door.

@OscarWinner_GitEmSteveDave: I had the opposite experience at a remote office once. They decided to move a couple of walls (shrinking an already cramped server room) and did nothing to protect the equipment. Upon my arrival I found servers & switches all chock full of gypsum & saw dust. Everything was still running,…