I’m always afraid that computers might open up in the boxes that are used to ship with. I have this habit of using too much tape, but the people who I send them to never complain about it and so far they have all arrived safely.
Why am I sharing this? I sent out a box today that had a PC/Mac/iPad. There was a cushion between them and I put a clean wash towel at the top to make sure that the iPad didn’t slip around during shipment. Then I wrapped tape around it three times in three different places so I feel pretty good it will be safe.
So now I am down to 5 devices which feels great. Instead of my U shaped desk being overloaded with hardware it looks reasonable now. I once worked at a company where the person working with me said he had 20 different laptops pilled up in a corner with companies that didn’t send him a box to return them. Yikes. I wouldn’t want that. I would try to recycle or use them.
Surprisingly my electric bill was $73. Most of the time all of the lights are off except the projector and the 1-3 laptops that I randomly use during the day. My main one is where I do the bulk of the work, but the secondary is my notification window. It shows my RSS feed, teams chat/outlook email, and LinkedIn. That gives me the full focus on what I am doing on my main machine. I rarely have to use the 3rd machine which is the mac unless there is an emergency.
For example this morning I had a meeting and the person wanted to see my face and I hadn’t figured out how to do that yet in Linux. So I fired up the meeting on my mac and the video worked perfectly. Now that it is working on Linux Mint I will be using that. Interestingly the video quality is poor on Linux so I will be looking at that further. It hides my flaws so I’m not so motivated to fix it. Just kidding I’ll figure it out today.
Its OK to overdo things sometimes, if the cost of not doing it is more expensive. I have seen plenty of things damaged in transit because they weren’t packed well enough and I don’t want to be the cause of shipping issues.