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so many orphan phone cords
Friday, April 2 2021
Today the weather returned to wintery conditions, with highs in the upper 30s and lows down well below freezing. It's normal to have a few days like this even into April, but they're no fun for us humans (or the many birds arriving from the south).
[REDACTED]
The laboratory cleanup continues to be a huge distraction, particularly that nest of wires near my feet. I continuing pulling abandoned cables out of the mess, finding a surprising number of conventional telephone cords. You wouldn't think I'd have had much need for many telephone cords. But there was that phase when my computer's dial-up modem provided household internet. Then there was the several generations of cordless landline phones situated near my computer. On top of all that, there have been several phone experiments over the years, including an Arduino project that hoped to decode caller-IDs to auto-hangup on some numbers (something I eventually abandoned when the caller IDs proved impossible to parse in a reliable manner). Somehow, though, there were many more cords than can be accounted from from these projects. Clearly (as I've seen with other kinds of cords) my pattern is to use a cord for something, remove the equipment that it had been attached to, but leave the cord, never thinking to look for an abandoned cord the next time I need to attach something that could use it.
This evening, I made a big effort to organize the devices and cables that provide household internet. In the DSL period, that equipment lived in the boiler room, where the phone line enters the house. But when we got Spectrum cable (just a few days more than a year ago), the cable came strung from a pole on the street directly into the laboratory, and to accommodate it, I got a cable modem, a router, and an eight-port gigabit managed switch (a Netgear GS108Ev3). Until I began tidying that part of the laboratory a few days ago, that equipment had been resting on cans of beans that I store in the laboratory as a mild form of prepping. Today, though, I attached those three devices to the underside of the bottom shelf of the custom shelving unit installed on west third of the laboratory's north wall. I then reorganized the cables going to them, using twisty-ties to make tight bundles. The three devices are powered by three different power supplies, one of which is bulky laptop-style brick. Two of them required 12 volts and the cable modem required 15 volts, but some testing revealed the cable modem was perfectly happy with 12 volts. I then tested their combined power usage with a Kill-A-Watt and found it was only 14 watts. This meant that a small 12 volt/2 amp wall wart could power all three of them, eliminating the need for a whole power strip. So I set to work adding two more cables with barrel jacks to the wall wart I wanted to use, soldering the connections and using heat shrink to make it all super tidy and reliable.
Meawhile, Gretchen had made matzo ball soup again, although this time the soup was full of vegetables like broccoli and carrots. Unfortunately, she'd had to throw out the last of that noodle bake she'd made before Passover, as we'd all been such good Jews that we'd avoided noodle-containing leftovers.
During dinner, Powerful told us about a nutty conversation he'd had with the owner of a business we frequent. She's a nice woman, but she's kooky about some things. For just two examples: she's both an anti-vaxxer and has a poorly-educated daughter as a result of home-schooling. "She doesn't even know the nine parts of speech," Powerful said with some alarm. To no surprise of anyone, this woman will not be getting a coronavirus vaccine. She also wonders why it is we have to keep wearing masks once we're vaccinated, not apparently having considered the social issues this would cause (or the fact that the vaccine isn't 100% effective, and neither, certainly, are masks).
The new, tidier network setup in the northwest of the laboratory [photographed April 3rd at 12:24 PM). (I stored some power supplies beneath the three networking devices.) Click for a wider view. Note the way the HDPE drawers fit beneath the shelving in the manner described yesterday, and just right of that intersection is the small, well-labeled 24 watt wall wart that powers all the network equipment. Also note the banana peels on the steps out to the laboratory deck. I put them there until I have a few, and then I throw them into the hickory tree just north of the house.
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