paradoox

Be careful out there!

I received the following email which almost caught me:


Now the $20 fee seemed low and was a little curious.

Of course hovering over the goo.gl/form/<redacted> and seeing it was really going to a different URL was a total tip-off.  

I wonder where www.johnathanworley.com would take me?

One of these days I'm going to put a sandbox up so I can research these things in more detail.

I'm thinking it is time to start recycling some of Arthur's* boxes** and burning them as fire starters. About 2 months ago he had 2 boxes in the family room.   He's up to 6 boxes at the moment between the shoe boxes that A left for him and boxes I've gotten from Ebay. There are 2 more boxes in the front hall with Xmas gifts to unpack. So, if I don't do something, he'll be up to 8 boxes at the end of the day. And he only uses a couple of them on a regular basis - including the smallest one which is too small for him.

* Arthur is a cat.

** We are talking cardboard shipping boxes that he likes to sit in; not the other type of cat box.

WGBH just gave me two "free" tickets to their $150 pp Food and Wine Weekend kickoff reception on Thursday night and invited me to the VIP invitiation only pre-reception. I wonder what this is really going to "cost" me in the long run.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say there was something in Texas that was eating disk drives. The bad news is that the disk drive in my primary laptop started throwing all sorts of read and seek errors while at LSC3 and this was the second drive that I'd seen that had failed down there (Hi Lisa). The good news is that at least it waited until after the con was over to fail.

So, I'm back to carrying around a backup laptop. I actually have two more recent laptops from work, but one is too big and one doesn't have any of my software on it.

I guess the other piece of good news is that the disk drive is still under warranty and I have an RMA from Hitachi already. The bad news is that it was a replacement for the drive that failed in May and they apparently sent me a refurbished drive which I guess wasn't all that refurbished. I may just go out and buy a WD drive from Microcenter.

I've just spent about an hour trying to cleaning the touchpad on my Dell E6510 which I use as the family room computer at Chez Wood. The touchpad was working poorly but the trackball (once I turned it back on) was working fine. I even went so far as to take the keyboard out to see how hard it would be to replace the touchpad (non-trivial). I was trying to figure out what I had spilled on the touchpad or something. Eventually it occurred to me that I was trying out a new "non-OEM" power adapter. (I bought it by mistake on Ebay. I should have realized the price was too good to be true and looked more carefully at the listing. But, since it was my mistake I wasn't going to send it back for the $10 I paid including postage, given the postage back would probably have been $5.) I switched back to the previous Dell adapter and the problem went away. I then tried it with just the battery and it also worked fine. This is weird because while the laptop technically requires a 90 watt adapter, it will run fine (but not charge well) on one of the 65 watt D-series adapters. I can only theorize that the non-OEM adapter isn't really putting out 19.5 volts and the touchpad is more sensitive to this than the rest of the computer or something.

I then tried the non-OEM adapter on one of my D630s and everything seems find there.

So, then I pulled out my trusty old (and I do mean old) voltmeter / multitester. I turns out the non-OEM adapter is putting out closer to 20 volts while the real Dell adapters are putting out closer to 19.5 volts.

So, the touchpad is sensitive to over-voltage?