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managging the wall wart zoo
Wednesday, February 24 2021
Throughout the day I went through my collection of wall warts and laptop power supplies, labeling them (usually using large characters painted on with acrylic white paint, since they're mostly black in color), packaging them in individual zip-lock sandwich bags, and sorting them into either containers or piles. The idea is to never again have a mess of different wall warts in a big nasty box, mixed in with cat hair and catnip, with the cords hopelessly entangled and no way to easily read the specs. The text on wall warts (the thing that gives the most essential info about them) is often just in tiny embossed letters (that is, black-on-black) that, at least given the state of my eyes these days, require a bright light and a magnifying glass to read. My writing was white-on-black with characters a half inch to an inch in height, telling me immediately whether the device in question provided the voltage and amperage I would need. Another solution would be to keep the wall warts with the devices they came with, but that would require keeping the boxes, and I don't have the room for such a luxury. Also, wall warts with the same plug, the same voltage, and equal or greater amperage are okay for substitution, so it makes sense to store them in segregated containers so I can easily find what I need when I need it. The sandwich bags are to contain the wires and keep them from tangling around other things and causing the rat's nest that makes extricating a wall wart from storage such a miserable task.
In some cases it seemed best to just throw away a wall wart instead of keeping it. These days I rarely use linear wall warts (the kind with big transformers that do the voltage change at 60Hz and then rectify and regulate the reduced voltage). Such devices are needlessly bulky and electrically inefficient. I have especially come to loath linear wall warts that produce less than 300 milliamps. What devices use so little power? Today when encountering such devices, unless they produced a rare voltage like 7.5 volts, I snipped off the cable with barrel jack (for future use) and put the now-cordless wall wart in the trash.
After work today, I drove the Subaru out to the Brewster Street rental to fix a toilet the tenant had been complaining about for months. She said it was loose and that sometimes fluid appeared between the toilet and the floor when it was flushed. I flushed it numerous times and never saw any evidence of a leak, though the toilet moved a little when I shoved it. So I tightened the brass closet bolts securing against the waste pipe until I feared I might crack the ceramic around the bolt holes. Then I injected clear latex caulk into the crack between the toilet and the floor to better secure it in place. The whole operation only took about ten minutes, long enough to leave a persistent smell on my clothes of that bathroom (it was the smell of budget disinfectants).
Back at the house, I through most of my clothes into he laundry hamper and took a bath.
I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine and eaten a fair amount of old cannabis buds, so by this evening I had a pleasant buzz going on. It was the kind where things I'd done sober seemed clever enough for me to want to spend time marveling about them.
Meanwhile, Powerful had taken the Prius to Van Kleeck Tire and gotten the flat tire fixed for free.
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