Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usual in ISP choices. There were two votes for municipal broadband (one being over 10 years ago and the other being in the last local election), and this town is the only place in Northern Colorado that I'm aware of that still doesn't have it. On the other had, I've heard a lot of complaints about municipal fiber in Fort Collins going down.
Of course, it's even slower today because I updated Linux and got some broken firmware. I'm now using an ancient USB thing that only works in Linux. It's using an AR9271 chip, but with the device ID reprogrammed so it only works with a Netgear driver in Windows. I might try to hack that to the generic AR9271 device ID some day just to see if the generic driver is any better. The Netgear driver randomly disconnects and reconnects automatically a few seconds later. Modern Windows hides that, but XP would give me a bunch of pop-ups to indicate that this was happening (and yes, it has been happening since XP was still supported).
Since I have some kind of weird company holiday today, I was getting some yard stuff ready and decided to check my UPS battery while I was buying a new trimmer battery. My UPS is four years old, and apparently APC stopped giving the battery replacement reminder after three years. Maybe I'll leave it another year since the Duracell SLAs don't seem to last very long.
I dug out my old desktop today, and the CPU fan was a little noisy when I first turned it on. It settled down, but maybe it's time to finally replace the stock cooler. I just need to find something that seems appropriate for an i5-8500. Liquid cooling and large tower coolers are a waste on a CPU like that, but I don't have any height limitations. Maybe I'll just get a 92mm tower cooler since they seem to be cheaper than down-blowing coolers.
