On the blissful silence of my home office
Today was unusual. It was raining this morning, so I initially left the dogs in the house. It was cool, but not cold. The air conditioner was off. No heater was required. The result was an unusually quite situation in my home office.
The Netatmo weather station, which tracks ambient noise, shows the office as 35 db A-weighted in the quietest moments. That’s pretty quiet for a city.
Looking around, I see the only devices with a cooling fan are my ages-old HP desktop, now recycled into service as a surveillance NVR, and the Mac Mini.
There’s a wine fridge and a second, small bar fridge. They were both handed down from other sites. They’re both very quiet.
The noisy Netgear network switch, once a primary source of noise, was replaced by the fanless Ubiquiti UniFi Switch USW-24-POE Gen2. My desktop PC is the Airtop-PC from Compulab, also a fanless, silent wonder.
I can hear the rain falling lightly on the skylight. This peaceful space is the successful result of my longstanding effort to migrate away from fan-cooled devices and spinning hard drives. I’ve come a long way from the time ten years ago when I had a full-height rack of servers roaring in the corner.