Having spent day 23 of my December Adventure on some fairly process-heavy sysadmin, much of day 24’s adventure time was consumed writing it up—I always struggle to work out how much detail to include, and end up constantly reworking such posts. In spite of that, I managed to roll nginx out to some of the services I run (including this website, the Psion Software Index, and WriteMe), and spent a little time organizing my retro computing and preparing for future adventures. I’ll not write about the switch from Caddy to nginx more here; if you’re curious, check out the various projects on GitHub.

Cable Labels

Whenever I pick up a retro computer, I try to sort out a convenient way to power it using USB-C: I’m keen to actively use the devices I have and not having to carry an extra power brick significantly reduces the friction of doing so. Often they’ll use some kind of barrel connector at one of the standard voltages (5V, 9V, 12V, 15V, etc). This makes buying cables easy (there’s a plethora of USB PD cables out there), but means I have an increasing array of cables that really shouldn’t be plugged into the wrong device, lest I blow something up.

Some time ago, I came across a model on MakerWorld for labelling network cables, and I thought I’d give it a go.

Since the model was designed for network cables (which have a fairly large diameter), it was a little large for my power cables. After a couple of test prints, I found that scaling the model to 70% worked perfectly:

I plan to print a few of these over the coming days for each of the devices I try to keep in daily rotation.

Trying out different sizes and color combinations

Adventure Preparation

Following my struggles to photograph my various projects, Sarah treated me to an early Christmas present in the form of a desk tripod from Facebook Marketplace (presumably owned by a lapsed TikToker). The anglepoise mechanism was missing a bolt which was easy enough to fix, and I now have an overhead camera setup:

This should unlock both my Libretto 50CT and Series 3a maintenance tasks, and I’m unduly excited about it. I couldn’t resist a quick test to see how well it works: