Nothing since the middle of July? Well, I admit I have a boring life, nothing much going on.
Cats are all doing well. Loki and Simon are a little clingier than normal.
It's been very, very hot. At least four weeks of high heat in the last couple of months. Our last month's utility bill was over $850 when it's usually under $600. Lots of A/C; we even ran it overnight. It was more humid than the heat streak we're having right now the humidity is fairly low, so that helps.
I guess I've hit the wall with computer and internet devices. I would have liked to get a bigger NAS system, but boy howdy, the cost of the equipment has skyrocketed since last year. No way I can afford it. I am lucky, though, that when I first started with the uGreen NAS I bought a couple of 24TB external drives, planning on shucking them and using them in the NAS instead of the drives that are sold to be internal, but I decided to get dedicated internal drives as well. Lucky because now I have two 24TB external hard drives not in use that cost me $597.99 for both. Right now, just one is $813 on Amazon.
I was running Plex in the Docker app (which allows me to run my own media files to any device in the house) on the NAS, but was running out of space. I attached an external drive to the NAS, but it wouldn't play the shows on the external drive through the Plex app. I realized it was moving those files to the NAS itself, which was decreasing the available disk space, which defeated the purpose of using an external drive. Okay, I'll figure something out.
In the meantime, that external drive? Was no longer recognized by any of my systems. It was a 22TB drive that I bought last year on October 18th from Amazon. I checked the warranty on the Seagate website (a one-year warranty), and using the serial number, the warranty ran out on July 7th. Three months before I bought mine. Okay. I checked into buying another. WHAT! Three times what I paid for this one! Okay, I put in a chat with Seagate, and they extended the warranty to October 18th. I sent it back under warranty and they sent me back a working unit. Whew!
Meanwhile, I'd moved Plex off of the NAS onto one of the other computers and tested out pulling shows from the smaller external drive that was on the NAS, and it worked nicely. And now, the 20TB returned unit is running off of the NAS.
I have downloaded a lot of movies and TV shows (which I paid for). I didn't use to think this was a thing, but I'd head over to Fandango to watch one and it was no longer available. Something about licensing. (One nice thing about owning hard copies). I see online that lots of people have thousands and thousands of shows that they "share" with others using Plex. I came to the realization that they aren't actually sharing them; they're getting money for renting them out. No bueno in my book. The only people who have access to the ones we have are my husband and me.
So, Cox and Spectrum have merged. I had a great deal with Cox: 1GB download, unlimited data, $70 a month. I got a message that I could upgrade to 2TB for $20 more a month! Let's do it. I can use my own equipment! Even better. The installation tech showed up yesterday morning at 9:00. Two hours in, he had to leave; he had other jobs to go to. Leaves me with a mess and no internet. An hour after I had begun to get things back to where they had been before he showed up, he was back at the house. He told us that the upgrade order had been cancelled (shortly after he started here) because our equipment wasn't adequate. I finally had most everything where it was supposed to be.
He claimed he hadn't messed with the router, but surprise, surprise, my login no longer worked. He HAD messed with it. He had reset it to factory settings. Years of settings just gone. I'm still working on those.
About 8:00 last night, I quit. I'm sure there will be a little cleanup, but the idea of 2GB service right now is not high on the priority list.
The kicker? When the tech came back, he said he was sorry about the misunderstanding, but hey, here's a discount! Instead of the $90 for 2GB, since you'll only have 1GB, your new rate will be $20.00 less! I just stood there, looking at him. And I said, "That's what I was paying."
And that's been my excitement for the past few months. Like I said, I have a boring life now. Today, I will catch up on paperwork.
And try to figure out how to automatically turn off the spotlight mode on the weather cam so it goes off at six in the morning. I have a Home Assistant smart device, and I'm having a bear of a time with automations. I did get the spotlight to come on at 9:30 pm (so we can watch the stars at night without the spotlight going off and on), but it needs to turn off by sunrise. As it is, I have to manually turn it off during the day so it's off when it gets dark.
Ah...first world problems.
I hope all of your lives are going smoothly.
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