Moving to a desktop PC

For the last 4.5 years, I exclusively used laptops as my primary workstation on which I stored all my data (usually with the aid of a PC on which I'd keep my media collection and backups). I like this because I have all my data with me all the time and can work when travelling. On the other hand, using a laptop constantly isn't terribly ergonomic so I have been thinking for a while whether I should get a desktop (or an external USB keyboard for my laptop but I couldn't get used to the particular keyboard I bought). A few weeks ago, I found a spare monitor in my department and moved it into my office (with permission of IT staff). Today, I put a PC from home into my office to use as a desktop system. Another reason I love laptops is that their keyboards with touchpads are so much faster and easier to use than mice, but surprisingly enough I didn't find using a mouse awkward today. The good thing is that I don't have to carry my laptop to work every day anymore…

… however, I have no idea how I will handle my data. So far, everything has been on my laptop. While I had other machines, it was clear that the laptop was the primary machine with all my stuff on it. Now that I have a desktop at work which I regularly use, I have the problem of keeping the data in sync somehow, or just logging in remotely to my laptop at home. Ideally, I'd just follow Joey Hess and put everything in SVN, and while I'm increasingly putting my files into SVN, I don't think I'll go the whole way. In particular, I'm worried about how to handle my mail setup. I don't quite see the benefits of keeping my mail archives in SVN and offlineimap probably doesn't work with the way I handle my mail.

Furthermore, I finally (after a year of being here) got around to configuring my system to print to the network printer via Samba. I made some minor efforts before which completely failed. I've been told that CUPS is easy, but believe me, it's not. I finally found a solution which just uses smbclient directly in /etc/printcap together with a magicfilter which does the right thing.