Ask HN: 2 jobs, two environments, one laptop. Any tips? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: 2 jobs, two environments, one laptop. Any tips?

1 pointphamilton6 comments

I use my laptop at work and work on my startup at home. It's a MacBook Pro. At work I need to have Mail and iCal open, as well as a few stat tracking webpages. At home I usually have plenty of documentation open (8-10 tabs in Chrome). At work I'm on a 30 inch monitor. At home I'm usually sitting on the couch.

I'm getting a little frustrated with this setup. To keep my tab limit down, I close the documentation for my startup when I'm at work. When I'm at home I close Mail and iCal and the pages specific to work. If I don't things just get sluggish.

Has anyone found an easy way to "switch" environments on a mac? I could use spaces, but that won't help with performance, it will just get it out of my way. Any good extensions for Chrome that will let me save a session and let me restore it later? Has anyone else had this issue?

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Fast user switching, perhaps?

You could probably create the new account, note the user/group of the new account, then copy the contents of your main account home directory into the new user's home directory. Then chown -R as appropriate so that the copied files belong to the new account.

That ought to give you a second user account, that has an identical environment to the one you've been using. You might want to use different desktop images so you quickly know which account is active.

The obvious one is dual-boot.

Really, what kind of MacBook Pro can't handle email, iCal and 10 tabs? What else is it doing? Can you upgrade the RAM any more? SSD?

RAM upgrade on the way. That may make spaces easier to manage. Right now I've only got 2GB and its full with 8 tabs, Cal, Preview, and 6 terminals. Usually I have a dozen or so more disposable tabs.

Have you checked out the tab sugar extension for Chrome yet? I think you can save your tabs as groups and quickly pull them back up. I messed with it some; it didn't really do what I was looking for but might be more in line with what you're describing.

http://tabsugar.com/

I'd be more worried of your employer seizing your startup, since you've been working on it with their equipment. Either that, or you've been bringing their information out into the world on your personal laptop, which probably isn't a good idea either.

This has been a discussion. The laptop is mine. Everything I work on is on network storage, so I work on our cluster over SSH. The laptop is mostly just a client, with nothing stored locally. (Email is the only thing I can think of, and that's IMAP.) Also, we're a 5 man department, so there isn't much bureaucracy getting in the way of things.

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