Bookvember 26th: Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

Some years back I decided to read all of Christie’s novels chronologically. I’ve mostly been reading them when hung over or when I’ve had a cold, so it’s taken a while.

But today I reached the final book. The novels from the last decade of Christie’s life were, er, not very good, but this was written in the 50s (I think) and published after her death. And it’s lots of fun, even though I guessed who the killer was halfway through.

Small Change

After innumerable requests (when counting, it’s “zero, one, innumerable”, right?), here’s my new DVD storage setup.

I got an allegedly 7W AMD computer from CompuLab, recklessly disregarding any current boycott of wares from the occupied country of Palestine.

I got the bareback, I mean, barebones (funny how WordPress only thinks the latter word is misspelled) version of the machine, so I had to root out an SSD from the Closet of Mystery.

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I found this old Kingston thing that I probably used in an old machine some years ago.  It’s not a good SSD (I think it’s barely faster than one of them there old-fashioned spinning disks, hee-yaw), but this machine is just going to serve out films, so it shouldn’t really matter…

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The Israeli Machine. So small.
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Lots of ports on the back. I can identify… er… Probably a DisplayPort thing? And then two eSATA ports. And then HDMI and ethernet. Two USB ports with a micro-RS232 port on top (I had to bing that), an audio port, two USB3 ports (which is what I was loiking for), and an SPDIF port
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That’s really out of focus. But it’s got room for some SO-DIMM goodness…
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Fortunately everybody at the office buys Macs, and fortunately they always run out of RAM, so we’ve got a big case of discarded SO-DIMM strips
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The smallest ones were 2GB, so I put a couple of them into the machine
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Snug
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And then I slid the SSD into the machine

I tried to measure the wattage on the machine, but the only wattagometer (it’s really called that) didn’t see to actually register that I switched it on, so I’m going to assume that it’s not pulling a lot of power.

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So the CPU is one of those new-fangled low-powered and wimpy AMD CPUs
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SilverStone cabinet and the computer in the closet. Together.

Anyway!

The SilverStone USB3 cabinet is called “SST-TS231U”.  And it seems totally unproblematic. It just works.  I’m running it in JBOD mode, and I’m not getting any of the errors I was getting with the Icy Box enclosure.

It does have a very loud fan, though, which I’m just going to disconnect.  If the disks die the heat death, they die the heat death.