Fixing a loud PSU fan without dying
Three months after I built my new computer, it started annoying me. There would occasionally be a
noise that sounded like a fan was catching on a cable, but there weren’t any loose cables to be a
problem. Over the course of a few weeks, the sound got progressively worse to the extent that I didn’t
want to use the computer without headphones on. I measured the sound at 63 dB, which is about the
sound of someone talking. That may not sound terrible, but it’s a constant, nasty noise coming from
something that sits about 40cm from my head.
Escaping Spotify the hard way
For the longest time I used Spotify for all my music needs. And I listen to a lot of music: sometimes
actively, but mostly passively as background noise. I cancelled my premium subscription last December,
and stopped using the service entirely. Why? There’s a bunch of reasons.
How tech companies failed to build the Star Trek computer
In most Star Trek series, the ship or station computer is ever-present in the background, waiting to
be called on by the main characters. It nearly always does exactly the right thing, and there’s little
limit to the functions it can perform. Take this mundane example from DS9:
