Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Airplane footware

(by technically challenging I mean not currently a solved problem as told to me by a few people I know who have done good work to improve the situation in the past couple decades)

I should have made coffee before I left. Excellent coffee brewing in an airplane is technically challenging. At least once I'm on the ground I packed some of the new Kenyan coffee and a travel brew kit (Clever, filters, electric water heater, compact hand grinder). There's also a local roaster within walking distance of the hotel I'm staying at that I hear does a good job.

I thought I'd miss a phone meeting about classes at the event in April but it happened during my layover so I was able to jump in on that. We'll need lots of people helping as station instructors or class logistics support for the 8 roaster focused workshops that are happening. It looks like a solid lineup and I'll be interested to see what some of the newer classes are in more depth.

On the bright side, the gate for my connecting flight was in the same terminal and a short walk. I think the next flight feeds me, which is good as breakfast is wearing off.

Do you think I've gotten across the idea that they need to send the little part with one fan and not a third instance of the giant assembly with 2 fans that they keep sending me?

I usually try to avoid this message style because it's not nice, but so far this issue has been handled with such an enormous heaping pile of fail that I don't know what I can do to convince them to follow through and actually do the thing they said they'd do.

#System76

While in the air my sister sent a message showing that not only did System76 sit on mailing the part until it could not possibly arrive before I left, they also sent THE SAME WRONG PART.

Airport security was moving quickly today, though the person telling people what line to get in sent me to the one for uniformed military, which I am obviously not, so that was odd. The scanners always have a problem with my hair.

Came back to the shop to finish up a few final things, leave final instructions for staff. Would have done it earlier in the day but other stuff came up that I needed to work on instead. Now I'm just killing time while I wait for a database backup to finish.

Dropping the cat off with my sister. Cat thought she couldn't get out of the box on her own.

@professor_stoke Plausible but not happening.

If I'm willing to tolerate something nearly 3 inches thick some of the smaller desktop form factors might be workable. Maybe make the case transparent? That's probably enough space to build in a really good keyboard, too. Hmm...

So this is probably what pushes me to learn about 3D printing, right?

On a long shot I took the machine to the computer repair place a block over, but since laptop parts aren't well standardized they couldn't sell me a part. I didn't expect they'd have something but I figured I needed to try.

If it's not bigger/heavier than, say, the Toshiba T1600 (this used a 286 processor and had a 3 color display to give you a sense of things) I can work with that.

Why can't we have standardized laptop form factors and modular parts available so people can just build their own laptop? I'll gladly take a slightly larger thing if I could just buy replacement parts and manage repairs myself.

fan saga (2/2)

10/15 - GPU fan arrives. This is not the part they were supposed to send so it does me no good. I call back and they say they'll overnight the correct part so it'll arrive by today.

10/17 - I still don't have a tracking number because they haven't shipped the damn part which means that it's impossible for this to arrive before I need to leave for the airport and I'm stuck with this problem for an extra 2 weeks (at least).

I am not happy with how System76 has handled this.

So here's the time line on the fan saga: (1/2)

10/5 - Fan starts failing in the morning. I call System 76 tech support. They agree that it's a bad CPU fan that needs to be replaced. I'm up front about my upcoming travel and the need to get this dealt with before I leave the country but that's still far enough off that it should be fine.

10/10 - I still don't have a tracking number and someone on the support ticket suggests not sending the part until I'm back. The shipment had already gone out.

Pro tip: Overnight shipping only works if you actually ship the thing.