Ear Pain

Shopping trip with the wife allowed me a chance to pop into a local charity shop that I have had some success with before. Not a bad haul today. 49p an album.

Been a while without any success. Decided to wander into my local charity shop after a long absence. Quite a successful visit. Not bad for £2 all in. All ready ripped to FLAC, re-cased damaged boxes and sorted on shelf. And now for an evening of some classic REM.

Another day, another Amazon special arrives. Probably one of Massive Attacks greatest (and their first) After listening to this a couple of times I have pulled out the CD of 'Collected', their greatest hits. This then let to a spinning of 'Dummy by 'Portishead'... it just goes on and on....

Deviation from usual content...well kind of. I keep all my FLAC files on a NAS. One of these: https://www.netgear.co.uk/business/products/storage/readynas/RN524X.aspx It a great machine, more than powerful enough for what I use it for (including Plex Server, file Server, Apple Time Machine backup, etc...). But the noise it makes and the temps it registers have been bothering me for a while. CPU was idling in the high 70s (celsius) and the fan noise was not pleasant in the room it sits - which is also my office! Job 1: New thermal Paste Dismantled the the whole thing, which was not easy because I could not find any schematics online. Eventually got the system board out, carefully removed the heatsink off the CPU and cleaned up the touching surfaces - much scraping of crusty old paste. Applied some fresh Arctic Silver thermal paste and put everything back together. Temps dropped to high 60s. Not bad, but the fan noise was still annoying. Job 2: New Case fan ...

While I love searching through the shelves of the local charity shops for my next CD purchase, there is one major problem. Cracked cases! Nothing worse than finding a long sort after album only to realise the case is a depressingly, unloved, disaster zone. Advice - keep a box of these handy. Only problem is, the price per empty box actually costs more than I am paying for some of the albums :)

Really loving the vinyl deals that keep popping up on Amazon. I present todays delivery. Never really listened to this much when it first came out due to already having a huge backlog. Really loving it now I have the time to just sit and listen.

The joy of working from home. Mr Amazon Driver delivered this classic today. We don't need no education...