Old server or desktop chassis make great little tables to put stuff on next to your desk. So that I don’t spill that drink on my keyboard while I am writing my assignments. It is another step along the way in getting everything set up in the house the way it needs to be. The living room is looking a lot better with things getting put in the right place and made tidy. This has been pushed along in a big way this week because I have started my studies for this semester and need to have everything set up for this. The bedroom is also getting a makeover as an alternate study location and I am making a keyboard slide to go under the desk there. It will also need a 2nd computer running Windows to work with the scanner so I have fitted a screen mount post to the side of the desk. That means both the bedroom and the living room will have two PCs each. I have a couple of old USB KVMs to mount under each desk to switch the keyboard and mouse (but not the screen) between computers. Each computer has its own screen(s) rather than switching them through the KVM. This is because the KVM can only switch one screen, which is useless if you have more than one, and because these KVMs only have VGA connectors. I am using Logitech Mk270r wireless keyboard/mouse sets at both locations.
MS is apparently releasing Windows 10 for the Nokia Lumia 635 Real Soon Now. Vodafone in other parts of the world has released it to their customers, but I suppose little old NZ will be last in line as usual. It will be interesting to see if Cortana is still vapourware for NZ or whether MS have pulled their finger out and got it out the door this time. I’m not too bothered as I am not going to use my Lumia unless there is a much wider range of apps released for it. Win10 is supposed to cater for this by allowing Android apps to be released for Phone, although only if they are recompiled under the Win10 platform. MS should have gone the whole way and embedded the Android APIs but I suppose there would still be a problem of where to source apps, so I suppose this makes more sense.
I have found that Ubiquiti 802.11n Unifi access points can give faster speeds than the wireless router that Vodafone supplied me with. So a UAP is installed in the right place to beam a signal out to the sleepout and also provide the wireless for the house, in place of the Netcomm router, which is reduced to being a gigabit switch and DHCP server. The computer in the sleepout uses a Edimax 802.11ac USB wireless adapter. Although the access point isn’t working on 802.11ac, it doesn’t really matter because the line speed on my home broadband connection is only a maximum of 50 Mbps which is well within its capabilities.
Vodafone have at last brought the cost of tablet share down to zero in a special promotion lasting until the end of July. I have been pretty tightfisted about this but I just don’t see why I should have to pay $10/month extra for the tablet share plan when I can tether the tablet to my phone for no extra cost. The tablet share SIM will go into a Vodem for my tablet as it doesn’t have a sim slot of its own.
The “main” PC is getting a memory upgrade. As running a lot of open browser tabs gobbles up the memory, I am getting another 8 GB for it, which will take it up to 20 GB. I will have to also resize the partitions on the SSD to bring the swap partition up to 40 GB to match. The computer’s motherboard was specially selected by me because it is capable of addressing 32 GB with four DIMM slots.