Creature comforts —

Staffsource: Ars’ most coveted work-from-home essentials

Our staffers gush about the items that make their homes better than any office.

LEGO bricks

Jonathan Gitlin
LEGO Speed Champions Ferrari Ultimate Garage product image

LEGO Speed Champions Ferrari Ultimate Garage


There's a lot I like about working from home. Not spending the better part of two hours a day being subjected to the vagaries of DC's Red Line. Or the alternative, sitting for the better part of two hours a day in DC's wonderful traffic. No one microwaves fish leftovers in a kitchen directly outside my office. No one makes me attend office potlucks or white-elephant gift exchanges. I even get to share my new home office with several feline companions—although this isn't always a positive thing as they seem to know exactly when I've finally gotten into a writing groove, as that seems to be when they come and bug me incessantly.

But the best is the ready access I have to a giant tub of LEGO bricks. Yes, I am a 43-year-old child, and I've found spending a few minutes putting some bricks together is a great way to refocus my mind while waiting for writer's block to subside.

In the old days, when I was an actual child, I was all about Space (you know, like Benny from The LEGO Movie). Or I was all about the early 1980s Castle line. Some of those bricks even made it across the Atlantic with me, although if you know where all my old baseplates went to I'd love to know. More recently, it was Star Wars LEGO, but my main jam these days is the Speed Champions line.

Makes sense—I write about cars, so I might as well put together little LEGO ones, right? It's not an out-of-control hobby; I haven't the time to learn LDD, and I don't spend my entire salary at BrickLink. But I have been known to take a Ferrari to the LEGO store to buy a LEGO Ferrari, and I'm working on a nice little collection of Le Mans cars, since I'm not quite quick enough to drive the real thing.

The photo above shows some of my more recent creations. You'll notice they're all built to the instructions; I do go off script, but it's more an act of 3D doodling rather than building something specific.

Jonathan Gitlin, Automotive Editor

Olympus recorder, Asus monitor, Brother printer

Olympus WS-822 Recorder product image

Olympus WS-822 Recorder


In contrast to many of my Ars peers, I take a decidedly laggard approach to the technology I use in my home office. This is largely out of a conviction that older, less-complicated gear is a better use of my time and money. I spend less time shopping, reading manuals, and seeking online support and more time doing things I truly enjoy, such as gardening and listening to music. I also save a pile of money not owning the latest supposedly must-have products. That means I end up throwing a lot less stuff into the landfill each year.

My 2013 MacBook Pro suits me just fine. Its 16GB of DDR memory gives it plenty of pep, and I haven't come close to filling its half-terabyte hard drive. My 24-inch VE247 Asus monitor is even older, but I like it just fine. I still swear by the Brother HL-L2380DR printer I've owned for the past seven years. I use it to print notes and long or complicated reports I'm reporting on. (I print onto previously used paper to save money and trees.)

I tape interviews on an Olympus WS-822 recorder. With 4GB of built-in memory, it stores hundreds of hours of conversations. It does a great job of picking up faint voices, too. For coffee, I boil water in a 25-year-old tea kettle and pour it into a size-4 Melitta Pour Over Single Cup Brewing Cone. (In my backyard, I compost the grounds and the unbleached and chlorine-free filters along with the rest of my food scraps.)

A few years ago, a tiny piece of plastic broke on the Sennheiser headset I had used for the previous three years with my Polycom SIP phone. That left the headset unusable. I ultimately decided against buying a replacement since (a) I figured it was a good bet it would suffer a similar fate and (b) I use the SIP phone less and less. I still transcribe interviews myself, since costs are high, accuracy is just so-so, and I don't trust most services to keep my notes confidential.

This approach is a departure from my earlier days when I proudly identified as a technology enthusiast. As I've covered the security beat longer and longer, I've developed a healthy appreciation for the unintended consequences of technology. And as I've gotten older, I've increasingly embraced the minimalist philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, which questions whether people own possessions or possessions own people. My home office may not be populated with many of the cool, whiz-bang amenities other people consider standard, but that's fine by me.

Dan Goodin, Security Editor

Unifi G3 home security camera

Ubiquiti Unifi G3 Camera product image

Ubiquiti Unifi G3 Camera


It's hard to find a "work from home" essential that isn't also just a plain ol' essential-essential, since the work/home lines tend to blur for me at Ars. But I do very much like being able to keep an eye on the outside of the house while I'm working—I like knowing whether or not I can ignore who's knocking on my door, for example. So I've got a bunch of Ubiquiti Unifi G3 cameras hanging under the eaves of my house and detached garage.

I went with Unifi cameras as opposed to another brand partially because I already had so much invested in the general Ubiquiti ecosystem and because the Unifi engineering folks didn't seem to mind answering a direct email or two every few months (I am not above using my journalistic position to occasionally skip the general tech-support queue if I know I've got a complex issue). I am reasonably happy with the G3 cams—they're compatible with a number of camera-monitoring applications, though I'm using them with the default Unifi Video application, hosted inside an LXD container and recording onto an iSCSI mount off of my NAS.

And that, really, is the main reason behind my choice of Unifi cameras versus a Nest cam or other solution: I do not want my videos in the cloud. I don't want to pay for cloud hosting, I don't want continual video uploads sucking up any of my precious data cap (thanks for that, Comcast), and I do not want my home security camera footage to be out of my direct control. I don't want Amazon or Google or another third party being in a position to respond to an official outside request for my camera footage. It's mine, and if law enforcement wants it, they can serve me with a warrant or a subpoena, not an opaque third party that won't tell me about the request.

Paranoid? Maybe. But maybe not, ya know?

The Unifi cameras do have some technical downsides. The motion-detection algorithm is, let us say, continually evolving (if I'm being kind). This doesn't bother me much, because I leave my cameras continually recording rather than on a motion trigger and I keep about two weeks of footage on hand, which takes up about two terabytes of space on the NAS. The 1080p sensor is adequate. The image quality is fine. The low-light performance is not great, but the built-in infrared is usable and looks fine. I'm confident that if someone breaks into my house or whatever, I'll at least have recognizable images of them.

But truthfully, the absolute most useful thing about having the cameras is being able to glance at my front porch to see who's knocking and if they're bringing a package. That, at least, means I'm not leaving something steal-able sitting on the porch for hours.

Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

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