…because I stupidly fried my archiving PC on Sunday evening: melted plastic, smoke, the works. I’m boring about these things so I lost no data, but I did lose too many hours to re-building and re-configuring hardware and software and restoring files. And now I’ve just rounded the tedium off by fishing the last couple of weeks of spam out of the Euston Manifesto signatories list.
Bed time.
What exactly did you do to your poor computer that you got smoke and melted plastic?
You know those little white plugs that trail out from the power supply to provide juice to the various components of your computer? Well you should never try to fit them blind into an awkwardly positioned board and then switch on and hope for the best.
You might have wedged a piece of metal across the terminals, shorting the supply and causing the wires carrying the current to become so hot that they melt their plastic coating and fill your lungs with poisonous smoke.
Don’t twat around with electricity. That’s my top tip for the week.