organized the computer stuff

2020-09-10T22:55:39Z

I had the day off, and decided to organize computer stuff. I had ordered another external hard drive, which arrived today, so that was helpful. And I got another power strip. I unplugged everything and swept under the desk.

I also recently acquired an ethernet switch. It's like a router only... not. It's basically a splitter for CAT 5. I ran one cable from the router to my side of the room, then plugged everything over here into it. That is my computer, my work laptop and the wireless thingy for the garage door opener (it's nice to have that working again). When we both started working from home, we ran out of jacks on the router.

I've got eight devices plugged into power over here. Computer, laptop, monitor, lamp, ethernet switch, garage door opener and two external hard drives. I have more hard drives, but those two have power switches so I can leave them turned off. One of them has some kind of startup routine on it which messes with my computer during startup, so it is not connected to the computer until I need it. They're only for backup storage, so that's fine.

Anyway, I got everything plugged back in, and the cables routed nicely and tied together. There are, like, 20 cables down there. The only downside is that the power strips are just sitting on the floor. I feel like I should mount them to the walls, to keep them from drifting around the floor.

I've only got one free USB port. I switch it between my webcam, phone or a USB stick. I've got a USB hub. I wonder if I should dig that out and hook it up. Nevermind, I guess I no longer have its power supply. Dammit, I saved it all these years!

We'll see how long this tidiness lasts. Now I've got to backup some files.

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computer problems

2020-05-27T03:12:14Z

I guess our company suffered some sort of cyber attack a couple of weeks ago. So they decided to start requiring multifactor authentication, or MFA, which is an acronym for what I call it. MFA is a pain in the MF Ass, but that's not the big problem. The big problem is that whatever they intended to do, it dropped the network for the entire company. It took a week to get back on track, and I'm still struggling.

Today, while working over a remote connection, I lost Windows Explorer. This meant everything vanished from my desktop but the wallpaper - that is, my task bar and start button. Without that, I couldn't access anything, much less my task manager to start Explorer back up. I had to drive to the office and start it on my desktop machine.

My mom bought a new Dell laptop computer a few months ago. It keeps locking up on her. Every week or so. It's just dumb luck if we ever get it restarted. I need to get her set up with backing it up, so if we have to wipe it, she won't lose anything. Not that she has much to lose, but still.

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low_delta

organized the computer stuff

computer problems