So, my podcasting setup is a bit… janky, you might say. For years, I have been making most of my content on a laptop, from the comfort of my living room recliner. No fancy studio. Only the most basic of gear.
Well, I’m getting ready to fix that, after a fashion. What I’m thinking of is an upgrade, mixed with a downgrade.
You see, I have an office in my house (a Home Office, if you will), but I frankly never use it anymore. I haven’t done anything but store things in there for close to a decade now, which is a shame, because it is a perfectly good space… Or it will be, once I clear out the flotsam. This is a much larger task than I expected it would be originally, but still doable.
My plan is this:
First, I need to get rid of about 20 years worth of obsolete electronics, old computer parts, and stuff I haven’t used for the last year. That gives me room to store a bunch of my Renaissance Faire garb and gear, which in turn frees up more room. When all that is done, I want to build another bookshelf, put that in the office as well, so I have more than enough room for tabletop roleplaying games, as well as curios and baubles.
When this is all done, I should have full access to my computer desk, which I haven’t used since 2010, if I recall correctly. I plan to use that as my base station, where I will plant my ‘spare’ laptop. It is a perfectly good device, fully acceptable for recording and editing podcasts, at the very least. I wouldn’t stream on it, but that’s not my plan, anyway.
What I want to be able to do is have a quiet, enclosed space, where I can record my podcasts, play my guitars (or violins, or mandolin, for that matter), or just relax and study my roleplaying books, while My Lovely Bride™ uses the living room for… whatever. Usually talk with her family on the phone, or listen to music, but that doesn’t really matter.
This should allow me to get back to recording with a quality microphone and my open-back headphones, as opposed to using a gaming headset, as I am now. Working in the living room, with no desk, makes that all a major challenge, to say the least. But having my office available to me would make working with all of my best gear much, much easier. Which in turn should improve the quality of the recordings, even when recording and editing on a much older laptop.
Now then, the long-term goal is to build a new computer for the office, which will be, as with the desktop PCs I used to build before we moved to playing on laptops, an absolute beast! But I think I’m still a couple of years away from that, especially considering the upgrades I made to my current gaming laptop just a few months ago. It has plenty of life left in it, since I only play MMORPGs and less-taxing PC games, nothing really difficult to run. Also, as I said, our ‘spare’ laptop (which is really my wife’s old computer) works perfectly fine for light content creation and editing. Since I’m not doing video work anymore, it should be more than enough for my current purposes.
Anyway, I still have a LOT to do before my office will be back in usable shape. That said, while the weather is still nice, but not broiling hot (like it was just last month), I’d like to get at least the majority of this clean-up done. I really should recruit my wife to assist with this, but somehow, I don’t think she will be interested.
Why does any of this matter to you? I doubt it does, but sometimes I just need to talk things out, to get me motivated to start. And I really need to get started.
