“Come and get it, prices slashed!” — that’s basically what an email from Amazon was screaming at me about a grand sale on all sorts of stuff from WD and SanDisk.

The first time I changed strings with my own hands. The first string (as always) snapped, but at the time the guitar was hanging on the wall and we weren’t even home. I suspect the cat may have helped, though there’s no evidence.

Another necropost dug out of drafts. In principle, everything is still fairly accurate and relevant, except that “recently” (became the owner) — it’s not even clear when…. Couldn’t find the purchase data, which is rather strange. But roughly off the top of my head, 2015 or so…..

I thought it over and decided not to wait for Black Friday, nor for the storage to run out ahead of schedule. In the spirit of increasing diversity inside my NAS, a green Seagate joined the two existing red WD drives.

Red is for love, and black is for sorrow….

Today at the store I saw a whole variety of hand sanitizers — looks like the panic is over, and some production capacity has been created or retooled.

The joke about forced ventilation has come true — it’s not even peak summer yet, and the equipment shelf is already showing +38ºC.

So a quick Amazon search turned up the smallest (80mm) decent consumer fan I could find — USB-powered, a 3-speed gearbox, and advertised as quiet.

The result: 30ºC on the first gear. Ready for summer!

Working from home has shown that Wi-Fi can sometimes be unstable — it’s still unclear whether it’s the microwave oven or something else. So I’m going to try connecting the laptop the good old way, with a cable. The one catch is that my router only has 5 Ethernet ports, and all 5 are currently occupied. I decided to tackle the problem systematically — first draw out what’s connected where, then figure out where to plug what, whether to get a PoE switch or a plain one, whether to save money and go with Fast Ethernet or go for Gigabit after all… The price range runs from $10 for the simplest 100 Mbit switch to $60 for a Gigabit one with PoE. While the deliberation is still ongoing — here’s what a simple home network diagram looks like. Of course, there are still a few components missing from it; I’ll keep adding them little by little….

And here is what arrived to me in packaging proudly labeled “Made In USA” — a bigger box of boxes! It’s a bit larger than a matchbox, shown for scale. And a cat for scale too. The creature really wanted to get into the frame, so it helped however it could.

Bought this little box-of-boxes to store boxes for boxes )))

The thing itself is not very large (25×20×16), but the compartments turned out to be long enough to fit tweezers, a spare spark plug, and my DIY phone-to-tripod mount adapters. Now all the junk rattles around in one place. Well, almost all of it… Another box is on its way….