Posts tagged with "personal"

Recently, I have been bouncing between my two home office spaces, hotels and an occasional visit to a cubical in my companies building. My home office spaces are nicely equipped with dual 28” or larger monitors (which I’ll post about later), full office desks. I went overboard on some really nice high-end office chairs years ago as a business I worked for went under and sold off equipment and furniture. So my home office space is often nicer than what is provided at most businesses.

My new to me Thinkpad T480 is doing great. The better processor and the upgraded Nvidia MX150 GPU are both getting a workout with several of the new LLM models. I maxed out the RAM, Wifi, Hard Drive, and swapped around adding all the best components/features to one laptop consolidated from several different junkers I purchased. Those components include IR Camera, WWAN, backlit keyboard, good batteries, and a nice case.

I’ve been using an older Lenovo Thinkpad T460p laptop that I bought brand new May 2017 for $2210 USD with a pretty impressive discount for the time. The Thinkpad T460p released April 2016 over a year earlier from when I bought it. I over bought on the CPU/processor and bought extra power adapters and batteries upfront. It has been a great laptop but starting to show its age and I’ve been looking for a new laptop with a little more pep. Older USB is starting to be limiting and I’d like to go beyond 32Gb RAM.

So it’s been quite awhile since I posted anything to any blog. I did post a couple updates as I did projects in grad school. The Wordpress site I used for this earlier died and was hosted on a VMware ESXi server in my homelab. I didn’t have time to fix it while in school so no postings since mid-2016.

I did something completely different. I didn’t boot my laptop the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

I went to the beach, ate steamed oysters, grabbed several gallons of water, spent time with my wife, filtered the water, watched television, and boiled the water to get sea salt. I now have a nice little container of sea salt flakes from my favorite beach and a salt slurry.

I read a couple of web pages on doing this and most of what they say is common sense. Filter the water to clean out the sand and other impurities. Boiling is recommended to kill off any nasty organisms. Getting the water from a beach that is not polluted is recommended. Also do not collect just after a rain. The resulting salt is a mixture of salt flakes similar to kosher salt and crystals like the fancy salt mills use. I may take the salt slurry and add a bit of water and put in a shallow pan to crystallize so it is nicer looking.

I’m considering making some of this into Christmas presents to family who like our little beach cottage.

Now that was something completely different.

I bought new cell phones (Motorola Razor v3) for the whole family and I’ve just gotten them connected to my laptop. I’m trying to get my calendar and contact list on Gmail to download to it. The MPT (Motorola Phone Tools) lets you tie Outlook or Lotus Notes to your phone. The 5th gen video ipod has a tool to convert Gmail Calendar into your iPod. That might be an interesting place to start. It would be nice to tie the calendar together for the whole family on our phones.

The phone itself is actually quite a powerful little toy. The mobile java is an interesting environment.