Bought any computing stuff today?

[Afasoas]

A reconditioned rackmount UPS 
It's only 750VA (where as the existing mini tower one is 1300VA), but given that the Rack's power draw is ~60W that should be more sufficient and a bit more energy efficient.
I've already sold the old UPS so I should be £+ on the transaction.

[David Martin]

A 512Gb SSD to upgrade my desktop. I'm doing increasing amounts of video stuff and this should speed things up.

[Afasoas]

Jolly nice and bargainous Lenovo T430 Laptop.
Sadly bought for someone else, jolly well tempted to keep it.

[BrianI]

A refurbished HP ProBook 6450b i5-520M Grade B WEBCAM Windows 7. 250gb hard drive, 8gb ram £155.  Considering I spent near enough £300 a few years ago for a Samsung NC10!

Yes, it will be getting Ubuntu dual booted onto it, while I'll keep the (types wearing rubber gloves) Windows 7 install for things like satnav updates, camera firmware updates etc, which are actually easier on a Windows machine, rather than trying to do it via Wine or a virtual box on Ubuntu.

[Mr Larrington]

A couple of SSDs - one for the machine in the Great Hall which keeps running low on space and one for the laptop which keeps running out of speed.  The latter will also allow a fresh Windows install prior to going to USAnia

[David Martin]

Got the SSD installed quite painlessly and cloned. The only problem is that Office now thinks it is a new install so a helldesk call has been logged.

..d

[Afasoas]

I've been contemplating a cheap hypervisor with enough oomph to perhaps run 8 or so small VMs for quite sometime. After considerable waxing, waning and deliberation a dual socket Supermicro board of some vintage, complete with a pair of Xeon L5520 CPUs has been requisitioned.

It has lots of RAM slots which is good, because whilst 4GB DDR3 ECC registered dimms can be acquired for £notmuch, 8GB equivalents are £alot. Of course all those RAM slots come at a price - and that in this instance is a bloody big board. So now I have to find an E-ATX suitable rackmount case that is less than 484mm deep, with enough 120mm fan mounts and without silly-sticky-outy handles that foul that brackets on the server cabinet door. Such cases don't seem to exist - which means I can see the dremel being utilised to fashion something suitable.

On the bright side, I've two disks, a PSU and some other bits ready which should make this the thriftiest hypervisor by far. Save for the running costs. Which will be mitigated somewhat by restricting it's uptime to a few hours each week.

[Feanor]

Not bought, rather blagged.

Our office is moving, and tomorrow is the last day at the old site.
Today was the ransacking and plundering of anything not nailed down, or marked up for transferring to the new office.

The IT cupboard was one of the first to be ransacked, and I came away with a Netgear GSM7224 24-port gigabit managed switch, which will replace the switch which died it the IT Meltdown I had earlier this year.  It's currently screaming away under my desk, having been factory-reset and then RS-232 consoled onto it to set up it's IP address.

I've set up the homenet VLANS and it's all working rather nicely, if a little noisily.
It's not actually in service yet, it's just hanging off the network for config porpoises.

I really need to do something about the wee screamy fans though.

[Kim]

I really need to do something about the wee screamy fans though.

Swap it for a Procurve J9028B.  It's the only way to be sure.

[Insert standard rant about rackmount kit all being noisy bastards.]

[Feanor]

I really need to do something about the wee screamy fans though.

Swap it for a Procurve J9028B.  It's the only way to be sure.

[Insert standard rant about rackmount kit all being noisy bastards.]

Yes, rackmount kit is noisy because rack space is priced per-U, so everyone makes stupidly flat products.
So the fans can only be about 20mm high, and you then need lots of them spinning at 10,000RPM to get any airflow.

These fans have shot bearings, and simply doing a like-for-like replacement for new will help.
Otherwise, I may modify the case with a HBFO slow quiet fan on the top.

[ian]

A Magic Trackpad. It doesn't disappointingly do actual magic (as far as I can tell, I've yet to find the Metatron's Cube gesture, but I'm working on it). Actually, I didn't buy it, it was a present.

I have a Magic Mouse for the finer work, but I do like the trackpad on my Macbook. I have to say it's rather spiffing for general scrolling and clickery but I'm running out of desk space.

[Kim]

The scrolling's all wrong of course, but I reckon that Apple's trackpads are undoubtedly the best.

[ian]

It only feels wrong for about a minute and then you realise the rest of the world is scrolling wrong and you were part of that conspiracy. Especially my wife, who switched hers back to, as Apple refer to it, unnatural scrolling.

[Kim]

All this up-down scrolling stuff is nonsense anyway.  The One True Scrolling Device is the ring on my Kensignton trackball.  It's like a jog/shuttle control - turnwise for forward, widdershins for backward.  If the bloody thing had a middle mouse button, it would be perfect.

[Chris S]

All this up-down scrolling stuff is nonsense anyway.  The One True Scrolling Device is the ring on my Kensignton trackball.  It's like a jog/shuttle control - turnwise for forward, widdershins for backward.  If the bloody thing had a middle mouse button, it would be perfect.

Still the perfect HID for Defender, IMHO.

[ian]

For Defender you just needed twelve double-jointed fingers. Leastways you did to crack hyperspace on Level 142 when you'd run out of smartbombs. I think the highest score ever achieved was 33 million and took 38 hours to get there. I only played Defender in the chippie while I waited for my fritters and chips. They were usually ready in five minutes. There's no such thing as too much starch.

Anyway, owing to Magic Trackpad, I just learned that Apple trackpads have two levels of click (three if you count the tap). Despite owning a Macbook, I never knew that. It's another awesome thing I have no particular use of.

[Feanor]

Not bought, rather blagged.

OK, so I've blagged rather more switchage.
The previous Netgear switch was in the IT cupboard of discarded things.
The latest blaggage was from the in-use server room.

I rocked up at work today at lunchtime, the final day at this office as we are moving.
Everyone is downstairs in the kitchen eating sossidge rolls and sammitches and drinking boozahol, prior to being kicked out at 1pm to allow the removal dudes to get on with it.
But also, the IT dudes are getting on with it.
The dude is in the extra-double-triple locked server room, stripping it down.
I wander in casually, and get talking.

The Dell Poweredge 48 port gigabit PoE switches?
They're not on The List, so help yourself, mate.
And I did.

[SoreTween]

Part 1 of moving my home office from flat+dumb into a bit less of each, a Draytek G2260 24+2 managed switch.

[Morat]

All this up-down scrolling stuff is nonsense anyway.  The One True Scrolling Device is the ring on my Kensignton trackball.  It's like a jog/shuttle control - turnwise for forward, widdershins for backward.  If the bloody thing had a middle mouse button, it would be perfect.

Still the perfect HID for Defender, IMHO.

don't forget Missile Command (and clones)!

Pre-ordered a Note8 today. I felt a twinge of guilt but it faded as my Note3 dropped out and heated up during the call to EE. It has also stopped blanking the screen during calls so I often end up putting people on hold while my ear checks my voicemail with a long press on key 1.

[mcshroom]

A new charger for my Dell Laptop, which has solved the 'unrecognised charger' issue that dell build into their laptops when a small wire snaps in the charger head. I did make sure the charger was not a dell official one as I don't appreciate this sort of messing around to try and keep you using a company's products.

[Kim]

Dog help us - I've just bought an internet-of-shit lightbulb to play with.

[Maverick]

HP Microserver Gen10 entry level to replace my ageing Gen5 ML110 + my 2010 model HP microserver both of which have performed flawlessly. The new model has space for a SSD + 4 drive bays so I can combine my email/DNS/DHCP/internal Web Server + my FreeNas driven NAS into one box. I have 120GB SSD from the ML110 and 14TB of drives from the Microserver that can be transplanted. Not sure whether to stick with Ubuntu (that I've been running for the past 9 years) or try a different server (CentOS/FreeBSD/Debian). All advice welcome.

[pcolbeck]

An Amazon Echo Plus and a bunch of Philips Hue light bulbs.

The plus has an inbuilt smart home hub so it will control the bulbs. Finally I will be able to get some light in the kitchen/living room and still keep Mrs Pcolbeck happy (she loves mood lighting).
The bulbs are very spendy though, they better last as long as claimed.

[David Martin]

Are your bulbs running on ZigBee protocols? Should be fairly easy to get into. It is also possible to build your own but ZigBee (XBee) stuff starts to ramp the price up a bit.

[Canardly]

A Sapphire 8 gig vram RX 480 graphics card from a friend. What a difference! Due to having a micro atx mobo now need to find a PCI slot win 10 compatible sound card. On board sound chip too noisy and new GPU covers pcie slots.