End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

MacGyvering Avian Surveillance

WYZE Cam Pan v3There’s a well-worn bird feeder that hangs just outside of our kitchen window. It was made by Stella’s late brother Robert. It hangs on a rope, well above head height. There was a time when we put seed in it. More recently, we feed the birds at a stand in the back yard that’s easier to reach. So this particular feeder has been empty a long while.

In March a Wren appeared to be renovating the kitchen bird feeder. For a week or more he appeared to be diligently filling it with nesting material. We could see the stuffing being amassed between the plastic sides of the feeder. Now and then the female would show up to inspect his handiwork.

I was impressed. So much so that I thought I should capture this activity on the part of our latest tenants. I happened to have a few Wyze Pan Cams 3’s in my collection of techno-junk. They had been purchased for a transient project, but were now idle.

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Well, hello there big boy! Duromax offers a 28 kW portable Inverter

DuroMax 28,000 Watt Tri Fuel Portable Inverter GeneratorDuromax continues to lead the market for large, portable inverters. After launching a 16 kW model last year, they have recently introduced a portable inverter that delivers a whopping 28 kW (starting Watts) when running on gasoline. The XP28000 is available in two versions, supporting (iH) dual-fuel or (iHT) tri-fuel configurations.

It’s plainly a mighty beast, capable of delivering 16 – 22 kW of continuous power, depending upon fuel type. That puts it up there with the typical Cummins, Generac or Kohler permanently installed standby generators.

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Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 7: Upgrading WWAN from 4G LTE to 5G

My laptop, a 2019 Lenovo X1 Carbon, was ordered with the optional WWAN interface. At the time, the state-of-the-art was a 4G radio which I added to our Mint Mobile account. I only need to use mobile data occasionally, but it has proven very handy.

Several months ago I noted that it suffered very poor performance at a meeting off-site. This even as my mobile phone was working much better.

Earlier this week, while I was taking Stella to an appointment in another part of the city, the laptop reported being completely offline. It was wholly unable to connect via 4G. I looked at my mobile phone, which reported connected via “5G UC.”

Mint Mobile 5G UC

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NUC 11 Extreme: I’m Still Not a Fan of Fans

I shall try not to drone on about the passing of my trusty Airtop-PC. Suffice it to say, it’s truly dead now so I must move on. I’ve tried the laptop-as-a-desktop thing, and while it’s a good stop-gap measure, it left me wanting something better. So, I rather impulsively bought a used NUC 11 Extreme to try something that is at least different, if not better.

I’ve long been interested in the NUC line. The NUC 11 Extreme is built for gaming, with an i9-11900KB CPU, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and an RTX3060 Ti GPU. It has good specs on paper. While a few years behind the cutting edge, it should handle everything I need to do. It’s certainly vastly better than the Airtop-PC from 2016.

NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon

However….there is a catch. This beast (it’s literally known as “Beast Canyon”) has no fewer than 6 fans! There’s a CPU fan, two large GPU fans and a trio of 90mm fans arrayed across the entire top of the case.

This is stark contrast to the Airtop-PC which was a completely fanless, dead silent, workstation. After almost ten years of zero fan noise in my office I’m not clear if this will be acceptable.

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Monday Morning: Snakes In A Drain

Snakes in a drain

This week started in a most inauspicious manner. Monday morning, as we were getting ready for the day, we discovered that the kitchen drain was clogged. Thinking that I had to get to work, Stella suggested that I could leave it until the evening. But I thought, there was nothing pressing on my desk, so might as well address the problem straight away.

The bathroom sink was draining freely, so it wasn’t a main line clog. We’ve had some experience with those in the past. The water in the sink smelled faintly of bacon grease, which implied the clog was close to the kitchen sink.

There was a time when we had quite a lot of recurring drain trouble. I had different plumbers out to snake the drain line at several times over a few years.

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