Home offices are becoming more prevalent then ever and if you are adding a new member to your family then you are going to notice that babies take up a lot of room. In fact, the amount of room you child will take up is inversely proportional to their age. My research shows that it's 142.5 times that of a 20 year old. This is of course completely made up but you get the point. Children always take up more room than you expect so the amount of room that you have will shrink ...to about zero.

What can I do?!

To combat this trend, you need to start thinking about consolidating anything you can. Your printer, scanner and FAX is a great place to start. I have recently purchased the HP Photosmart C7280. It's rather small, it has excellent specs, a sheet feeder for the scanner and FAX plus it works with Linux. This printer unlike the HP printers of old, has individual ink cartridges and it has a wireless network interface.

What does that mean?

Let's break this down a bit.

Individual ink cartridges: HP's old style ink cartridges have all of the colors in one unit. If your printing needed more yellow than anything else, you would have to replace the whole cartridge and throw away some good ink. With this new system, you only need to replace a color when it's used up. That's slightly cheaper in the long run.

Wireless network interface: This one give you two big advantages. First, it attaches to you network so everyone in the house can share it without leaving a central computer on all of the time. Your computer talks directly to the printer over the network. Second, it can attach to the network over a wireless connection. Now you only need the power wire. That means less clutter and fewer wires for small hands to get into.

The bottom line.

This one item takes you from 3 power cords, 2 USB cables, one phone cord and about 6 square feet of desk space to 1 power cord, one phone cord and about 2 square feet for desk space. If you are like me and have removed Ma-Bell from you house you won't even need that phone cord. That's why they invented eFAX but that a different post.