Imp. Workstation

Well this has certainly been a March unlike what I'd envisioned!

I wanted to complete Beta 15 and get it out there so the ongoing work wouldn't conflict with my upcoming annual 7DRL streaming (not to mention a desire to finally release the polished version for everyone), then came the delays already discussed due to further expanding Protoforge content...

That part would be about done by now, but no, of course I got sick last weekend and my laptop also chose March to start acting up xD. I've already used it much longer than my previous laptops and it seriously needs yet another good internal cleaning and re-paste--it shut down due to overheating when starting a stream a few weeks back. So rather than putting in that maintenance work I decided it was finally time to just get a new one, which as always takes me a while to set up as I need it. Tons of installing and configuration to do...

Here I should point out that I do all my work on a laptop with a large external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Yeah it lives on my desk 95% of the time, but rather than a desktop PC it's small, quiet, plenty powerful enough for my needs, and it's also easy to take everything on the go like to Japan where I used to work for a few weeks each year:

I have an extra monitor I bought over there a decade ago which is ready if I visit, but it's also my same setup here at home, including back when I started Cogmind development in 2012, as seen here in a shot from 2015 when I'd ordered a t-shirt test run:

A year after that we moved to another apartment down the road, where we still are today:

I've been using that same monitor for the past 9 years (Dell U2412M), and will continue to do so (it's great and I like 16:10), but this week while sitting here with a cleared desk and two laptops beside my main monitor during the transition, it got me once again daydreaming about having yet another monitor.

In the search for a new laptop I discovered that it's actually getting hard to find laptops with a large screen these days, which is what I've preferred for work due to my use case. As a result my chosen laptop (Acer Predator Helios Neo 16) ended up being a bit smaller than before, and upon arriving and attaching my monitor I discovered it has three different ports for hooking up external monitors, just sitting there, staring at me...

I haven't bought a monitor in almost a decade so wasn't really aware of the types of things available in that space, and started looking around for a smaller external monitor to hook up for a little extra workspace, no doubt useful because I'm frequently cross-referencing lots of different software. There's a lot of cool stuff! While originally looking at the cheap low-end 16" stuff, just to save money and make sure everything would fit on my desk, I explored more and more and examined larger and larger options while pulling out the measuring tape and eventually, after hours, realizing I could and should just get one of the newer Dell monitors after all :P

Aw yeah! So yep now I've got a new U2424HE to assist me and although I've barely gotten started with it and am still getting used to the possibilities, it has immediately led to the sort of giddy excitement that I imagine nerds everywhere can appreciate. Workstation +1!

Bigger releases call for a bigger desktop :D

HEX: "+1 to what," I asked. The answer was "everything!"