Dumb things we find at home...
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Small thread for random things we find and wonder "
do I have that for?"...So, I was looking at stuff in my network, using my actual eyes to look at the actual physical stuff rather than using network scanners and the like to look at the informatic aspect.
And look, there's my old Netgear FS108 that I thought I retired years ago when I bought my first or maybe second gigabit switch (either way, long before Mrs Cynic became the late Mrs Cynic in 2015).
Let's look at the blinkenlights. (For the short of memory, the FS108 is an eight-port Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) unmanaged switch, and I bought mine in around the year 2000, maybe 2001, when I wanted something faster than the 4x10Mbps Netgear hublet that I had before that, and discovered that it cost one pound more than the 8x100 hub.) Well, there are seven cables plugged in, and the two on the ends are showing lights, while the others are showing darkness. No activity, though.
So, I dug through the cables, and found the other ends of all of them. Turns out there were only six cables, and the other ends were plugged into ...
- Port 1 was connected to port 8
- Port 2 was empty
- Ports 3-7 were connected to nothing at all.
- Port 8 was connected to port 1.
So the end blinkenlights were just the machine talking to itself, and it had been like that for at least six or seven years. All it had been doing in that time was contributing to the heat in the room...
No idea what I'm going to do with it, poor thing. It seems a shame to just throw it away, but given that the total traffic it can carry on all eight ports combined is less than my Internet feed can supply to one GigE cable (I have gigabit-down fibre Internet service), it doesn't seem to provide a lot to my network. And it has a
power brick, which is an obstacle to gifting it to a colleague or the office, seeing as how I live in 
...
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I feel I should point out that it's the original version with a pushbutton for selecting whether port 8 should think it's talking to a PC or to another switch...
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@Steve_The_Cynic Find a hardware collector and fleece him?
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I've got an FS108 which is currently in a drawer and only got displaced about 18 months ago when I replaced it with a GS108 (which was originally upstairs but got replaced with a second-hand HPE switch).
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Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
No idea what I'm going to do with it, poor thing. It seems a shame to just throw it away
I used to run a trash for swag campaign, called Souvenir Potpourri. If you can figure out a way to send it back in time, and ask for a delayed delivery, there's a chance the Alex of 2010 will send you something cool.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
- Port 1 was connected to port 8
- Port 8 was connected to port 1.
At least it's consistent.
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@GÄ…ska said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
- Port 1 was connected to port 8
- Port 8 was connected to port 1.
At least it's consistent.
I did think about making a joke about1=>8 vs 8=>2...
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@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
Parallel (printer) port ones or parallel IDE ones?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
it has a
power brick, which is an obstacle to gifting it to a colleague or the office, seeing as how I live in ...Isn’t changing plugs a skill all British people over about the age of 30 learned as part of their general education?
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@Gurth said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
it has a
power brick, which is an obstacle to gifting it to a colleague or the office, seeing as how I live in ...Isn’t changing plugs a skill all British people over about the age of 30 learned as part of their general education?
Not exactly, but I do know how to it. It doesn't matter, though, because it's one of those all-in-one bricks where the pins of the plug are part of the brick. And also
plugs these days aren't easily changeable-to like that.
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@Steve_The_Cynic Don’t they sell separate plugs in France that you can take apart easily so you can put them on any cord?
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@Gurth said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@Steve_The_Cynic Don’t they sell separate plugs in France that you can take apart easily so you can put them on any cord?
Probably. Somewhere. It's been a while since I last looked, in part because everything I buy has either a pins-in-brick thing or a moulded plug. Doesn't matter, as I said, because it's a pins-in-brick thing, not a plug-wire-brick-wire-plug thing. (And of course the obvious live-vs-neutral clue in a British plug isn't there in a French plug - British plugs have a changeable fuse in the live side, and no fuse in the neutral side, and French ones don't.)
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
Parallel (printer) port ones or parallel IDE ones?
Printer port. I've also got (from my synthesizer days) a MIDI adapter cable that plugs into the joystick port.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
Parallel (printer) port ones or parallel IDE ones?
I wonder... Huh, I do still have my printer port one. (I also have a USB one) Sitting on the shelf gathering dust...
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@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
I've also got (from my synthesizer days) a MIDI adapter cable that plugs into the joystick port.
So that's what that old MIDI cable of mine used to plug into. It's been so long since I used it that I didn't remember, but it doesn't fit any connector on a computer from this (or last) decade. But at least it worked, which is more than I can say for the USB-MIDI adapter I have now (although that may be a software problem, not the adapter's fault; the software is for music notation, and playback is not well supported).
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@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
I had three drives at some point. 24 disks. Maybe I'll unpack them and see if I can find my portable Windows 95 install...
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Any takers for a DC6525 tapestreamer?
I guess it's from the early 90s (maybe late 80s), and still working last time I tried it in the late 90s or so.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Dumb things we find at home...:
@da-Doctah said in Dumb things we find at home...:
Anybody interested in a couple of Zip drives? And thirty discs to use in them?
I had three drives at some point. 24 disks. Maybe I'll unpack them and see if I can find my portable Windows 95 install...
I still have an old pc right here, with a zip drive.
It also contains a floppy (3.5") and a dvd drive.It's been so long since it was last switched on, I can't even remember what kind of hardware's in it. Could be Pentium-ish.
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@nerd4sale said in Dumb things we find at home...:
a dvd drive.
Ooh, make sure you turn it on and exercise that. If you let it sit too long the drive band tends to develop a lump it can't get over...
