My Android phone updated itself last night. The most visible change? The time-and-weather app keeps popping up a big white dot in the notification bar to remind me that it's running. Hello? Why is it doing that, and why isn't there a way to make it stop?
I set forth during a random bit of time this morning to address an equipment issue. The charcoal grill we have at this point was left behind by the previous owner, and is is decidedly used shape - also, the little side box (which I suppose is for using it is a smoker; looks like it's meant to have charcoal burned in the side box, with the smoke going into the main chamber) was not at all well attached. I had the notion of drilling some holes and adding some sheet-metal screws. Well, whattaya know? There are places for two screws to be, where screws aren't. Got nice permanently-installed nuts and everything. So let's see if I can find a pair of machine screws to match the nuts... it's something bigger than a #10-32. Bigger than Random Junkbox Screw A; smaller than Random Junkbox Screw B. Huh. Hey, why do I have a pair of stainless 6mm capscrews in my junkbox? Randomly try one of those: sure enough, the nuts are M6. The holes don't quite line up right (maybe it came that way, and the original owner got frustrated and didn't install those screws?), but a little Dremel treatment later I can bolt the thing together properly.
Scattered through the day, I've been fielding issues on the current ToasterCo project; this is a particularly challenging situation, since there's not really a proper setup for testing the last-minute FPGA changes, either here or there.
I managed to get a little bit of yard work in... but just a little. After dinner there might have been time, except for ToasterCo being three hours behind and thus still at work, and anyway the long-promised rain finally arrived.
And, I ordered most of the bits for the new workstation (ATX mid tower format, X470 chipset, Ryzen 7 3700X). All supposed to arrive before the middle of June (I think the motherboard went out of stock while I was pondering, but is supposed to be back in stock Real Soon Now). Not ordered yet: the SSD; I need to ponder further on that, in particular since name-brand 2TB M.2 NVMe devices are pricey, so I want to be clear on what my requirements really are, as well as what's a good match for the motherboard. With 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a decently capable (but not exactly gamer-god-level) video card, well, it kinda adds up. Still, it's basically a once-in-a-few-years thing.
Oh, well. Back to pondering the FPGA, and whether there's any reasonable way of bringing out some internal signals to test points that'll be accessible on the unit at ToasterCo.
Addendum: I omitted to mention that, this being 2020, of course there was another complication. The workstation bits belong on my business credit card, so I tried to change my payment method... and Amazon wandered off to examine my available payment methods and never returned. Return to cart, checkout, rinse, repeat... I ended up putting it on my default personal card. Not a big deal, but it's just one more aggravation.
Still (next morning) pondering the SSD. I've historically used Samsung, but $$$$$. Might go for WD Black, or maybe - just maybe - one of the lesser brands for significantly less money. It does appear, though, that (as ever) there are arcane compatibility issues between storage devices and motherboards.
Update: The Thursday morning email from Newegg brought a discount on the WD Black 2TB NVMe module that brought it down to right around Amazon's price... but with delivery promised for early June rather than the Fourth of July. Still expensive... but... for something I plan to rely on for work for the next few years, getting something with solidly 5 star/egg reviews and good brand reputation seems advisable, and it's significantly less pricey than its Samsung counterpart. Hm. I should probably also round up an M.2 heatsink, being as how longevity is a concern.
... And now I'm trying to remember how much I paid for my first 20 Mbyte hard drive... in 1985 dollars or whenever it was [edit: more likely 1984-ish]. Maybe I should dig out an old issue of BYTE and check the ads for historical pricing on 8" SSSD floppy drives.
Update 2: Historical disk drive prices may be found here. I think those are in original dollars, not inflation-adjusted. Maybe I shouldn't be squawking about the price of a 2-freakin'-terabyte "drive" with insane transfer rates and an MTBF that 1980s IBM could only dream of?
Also, while I was at this sort of thing, I finally broke down and ordered a replacement for my aging laser printer. Slightly bulkier, but it'll still fit on my printer table. Has Ethernet and WiFi, in addition to the USB port. Duplexer, of course - I've insisted on that feature on the primary office printer for a great many years now. And, this one's in color! Ends up costing a bit over (if memory serves, and not adjusting for inflation) a third as much as my first MX-80. Consumables aren't that bad, and the black cartridge is sold separately from the colors.
Still holding off on a wide-format inkjet printer, though. The one I have will do 11x17, and I can do cutting & pasting for the occasional mega-sheet.
Further afterthought: I'm trying to remember how much I paid for my first PC - a fairly basic Made-In-Taiwan Turbo XT Clone. Had, if memory serves, an 8088 CPU, a button on the front to switch the CPU clock between standard 4.77 MHz (for CPU-speed-dependent games) and a whopping 8 MHz, 640K of RAM, a floppy drive or two, and... was the hard drive 10 MB, or what? Pretty sure the price tag was well north of $1K, in 1985 dollars or whatever year that was.
Supplemental rambling: That MX-80 wasn't my first printer... before that, I had a converted wide-carriage Selectric, bought (extremely used) from Electro-Labs in Palo Alto (upstairs, at the time, from Peninsula Scientific, if anyone remembers that). Didn't speak ASCII, nor even EBCDIC, and the computer had, IIRC, a certain amount of responsibility for timing the solenoids correctly. Hadda write my own driver, first for my homebrew 6502 system and later for the SwTPC box running FLEX/09, handling (approximate) translation from ASCII to whatever flavor of Correspondence Code corresponded to the typeball in use.
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