No-crunch streaming

Both of the shows I plan to try watching this season (Flatcat & Sword and A-cup Alchemist, er, “Management of Novice Alchemist”) are streaming on HiDive. Crunchyroll has some good shows on their (partial) announcement, but just not ones I plan to watch.

Three Bodies, One Cour

I had lost track of Amazon’s film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and just discovered that the deal fell through and it’s now being done by Netflix, to be released in 2023. They’re throwing a lot of money and talent at a frankly terrible thriller with a thin veneer of technobabble. Seriously, it’s like Battlefield Earth without the SF content. I mean, really bad.

(Expo 2025 mascot is probably unrelated, and better designed)

I broke the scammer!

I just got a scam call offering “supplemental Medicare assistance”. In response to the first question, I said “I am not eligibile for Medicare”. The computer (complete with phony call-center background noise) proceeded to congratulate me for thinking about my health insurance options, then asked if I had thought about supplemental Medicare insurance. I repeated my answer. It then asked how old I was, and I answered “twelve”.

Silence. Two minutes of silence, then it finally hung up.

“Trending” on Twitter

Saw this one in passing: “Roevember is coming”. My immediate response was, “…followed by Dobbsember”. 😁

Achievement unlocked: new house networked!

• 5U vertical rack in basement with PDU & 48-port patch panel
  • 1 coax cable routed from exterior Spectrum Cable box
  • 1 24-port managed gigabit switch
  • 1 vendor-managed cable modem
  • 1 vendor-managed wifi router with wifi disabled (because the cable modem wasn’t bright enough to bridge my static IP block)
  • 1 OpenBSD firewall router (Shuttle DS61)
• 12 drops spread across 8 rooms (each 2x Cat6a, 1x coax)
• 1 8+2-port managed 2.5/10-gig switch (office)
• 3 8-port managed gigabit switches (office, family room, living room)
• Orbi Quad-band Wifi 6E and 2 satellites, claiming “up to 10.8 Gbps”, but has 2.5-gig ports on the back, so they’ll all be moving to the 2.5/10 switch soon (office, family room, living room)

I seem to have lost the rack-mounting ears for the 24-port switch, and the only people selling replacements for that brand are in Australia, so I need to find a simple wire shelf that sits inside the rack, so I can organize the contents and still close the door/lid.

I hadn’t realized until they’d left for the day on Saturday that they ran the cable bundles directly adjacent to the main gas line that runs the length of the house. Not how I’d have done it.

They also ran speaker wire from one side of the living room to the other as requested, but I had to convince the guy that no, I did not want 6 feet of speaker wire just sticking straight out of the wall on both sides of the room. I wanted wallplates with screw/banana terminals, like every other AV install I’ve ever seen or heard of. Baffling.

Related, if I’d known that the rack was a top-opener with the patch panel at the top, I’d have asked for it to be mounted lower on the basement wall, so I didn’t have to use a stepladder to plug in ethernet cables.

(cat-sitting is different in the city)

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