The power supply on my laptop has died. Drat. At least it is most likely to be the power supply, I would confirm it, but I’ve been waiting about six years to buy a battery for my multimeter. This is a round-a-bout way of me saying that I am not hugely optimistic about my chances of being able to replace the power supply any time soon, even though it’s probably quite cheap, given how cheap a battery is and how many years I’ve not been able to replace that. In addition to that, you’ll gather from a recent post, I’m pretty much going to need two new wheels and some new forks soon depending on how well my fixes last.
My actual computer is in the cloud, but I still need someway to access it. I have my works mobile workstation at home this week, but after that it looks like I will be moving to just two hours a week (four days of half hour lunches) in which I can write blog posts or programs because I really only ever want to cycle home with this when I absolutely need to - it weighs a ton. Things are going to slow. I really hope no one opens any issues on anything I maintain.
Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe I should be grateful for the year I had with it as opposed to bemoaning the loss of it? It was, after all, really quite old. I can put those two hours to good use instead of reading Twitter, RSS feeds and the Pinboard Popular page (although I have pretty good self-restraint at this already). Maybe I can print off some books from Project Gutenberg and do some reading at home in the evening? Maybe I can just go to bed earlier?
Failing that, there is always more ironing.
[EDIT: 2015-05-01] And I’m back in the game! Let’s just say I came into some money, enough to finally be able to spend £1.32 on a battery for my multimeter; actually, I got two batteries for that price - bargain. Thanks to the multimeter I found it was not the power supply as I suspected, rather a crack in the solder where the DC-in connector connects to the board - I couldn’t see the crack, but I knew it was there thanks again to the mutlimeter. Fortunately I have a soldering iron (I think I’ve had it since I was a teenager) and, although I don’t use it very often, it is a remarkably useful thing to have at times.
Also: I learnt some interesting things with this unplanned experiment of being offline outside of working hours for three weeks. I may write about them elsewhere.