K. P. Alexander

The Future…

Hi folks,

Hope everyone’s been keeping well.

Time for some straight talk. Before you start worrying – no, I’m not quitting writing for you guys and gals. The Artifice series is far from done.

(Added post-edit: let me preempt this by saying that the following is not intended to guilt anyone into doing anything financially. In fact, please don’t. These are pretty much just the ravings of an idiot.)

Quick Update

Hi there, folks.

Sorry for the hiatus, but I hope all of you are doing okay.

I’ll be honest with you guys and gals. I haven’t gotten much in the way of writing done in the past few weeks. A touch of winter blues mixed with endless IT emergencies at the day job just isn’t conducive to writing…

Anyways, I need to get some sleep.

Stay safe and take care, folks.

Crap-5 Cabling II: Coax Woes

First off, hi folks. Hope everyone’s doing okay.

Second, if you ever buy a house, get the wiring checked out. In fact, get everything checked out with a fine-tooth comb. If anything looks off, raise hell.

We bought our house just over ten years ago. It was a brand new subdivision. I figured that, at the very least, we wouldn’t have to worry about old, out-of-spec wiring.

Well, turns out that it was the least of our worries, and not in a good way. But, I digress. That’s a story (or stories) for another day.

Over the last two and a half months, I’ve been getting random internet drops.

Another Spin Around The Sun

Hi guys and gals.

Don’t worry. I haven’t disappeared again.

Just dropping this message-in-a-bottle into the great ocean of the internet to make sure everyone’s doing okay, considering the crazy times. Wasn’t the greatest year last year for anyone, save for perhaps the uber-wealthy who somehow managed to rake in even more riches than usual, while many families were getting tossed into the street. But, I digress. Here’s hoping it gets better for us.

Stay safe, folks.

Doctor Octopus Rides Again

Hi guys and gals,

No grand announcements or anything this time. Just wanted to say hi and see how everyone’s doing. Also, just wanted to mention that I post nonsense to Instagram and Facebook every so often, so check those out if you have any insomnia. As a follow up to my last Instagram post, Mister Stinky is currently resting in peace at a garbage dump right now.

Anyways, as I’ve got some space to fill, here’s a hack on how to build yourself a “helping hands” soldering tool for cheap. If you’ve got no idea what that is, search “solder helping hands” on Amazon. It’s basically just a tool to hold your wires or circuit boards for you so that you can solder without the need for a third or fourth arm.

Crap-5 Cabling

This one’s a tale that happened back at the beginning of the pandemic this year.

With everyone in the family here doing their work/school from home, I decided to double check the networking in the house to make sure everything’s up to snuff. Everything seemed okay.

Except for one thing. The network switch on the main floor was a fast ethernet (100 megabits per second) switch, not a gigabit (1,000 megabits per second) switch. This same switch was feeding my Unifi wifi access point, and was working fine up until now.

However, it wouldn’t be just a few Echo devices and the occasional Netflix viewer being serviced now. My wife would need the wifi to be rock solid and as fast as possible to get her work done.

So, I decided to update the switch to a new gigabit model.

Horrible DIY: Ottoman

Hi there, guys and gals.

Thought I’d toss some more nonsense at you folks. Not sure how interesting this’ll be for most of you, but here we go.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to work from home for the duration of the pandemic. Long story short, I had a small ottoman under my desk to act as a footstool. He started complaining after a while, so I had him deported and replaced with a piece of furniture instead.

The ottoman (furniture) was covered in faux leather. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens to faux leather after months of exposure to my feet: