Believe it or not, but my personal financial situation isn’t really the rosiest; with Gentoo taking up a big slice of my time on a daily basis, and Yamato sucking up power to run the tinderbox on a daily basis, I’m always happy to break even.
Now, in general I try my best to not waste money wherever I can, so I look up the power consumption of new devices, try to stop everything I’m not using, and so on so forth. Unfortunately, I have learnt that simply using the “most effective” approach is not always feasible to apply. In particular, sometimes even a two minutes delay in a common task can break up a whole routine, let alone things I might forget to do altogether.
On this note, sometimes I simply wonder why do chargers not come with a “0-1” switch to shut them off without having to take them out of the socket — sure you can have sockets with switches, but not many powerstrips have individual socket switches, in particular I have yet to find one with the Italian sockets, which have a smaller profile than the Schuko plugs.
At any rate, I’m now considering at least making it easier for me to deal with one issue: unplugging the adapters that are not currently in use. Right now one of the issues I’ve got with that is that I have a hard time finding out which one plug is which, and risking to disconnect something in use, I keep a few that are not useful, still connected to the power line.
Since I’m now actually trying to put order in my office as well as trying to get rid of the most power-hungry, or at least more power-wasting devices – some of which seem to require quite a bit of replacement; for instance I’m trying looking up a ZyAIR G-3000H expansion card so that I can kill the other access point, since I’m currently running two! – I came up with a possible solution to at least reduce the need for me to keep cables always connected: label them. It might sound obvious, but I never considered that before, mostly because printing labels, for me, is a bloody amount of work and they tend to get difficult to read.
I was skimming through a brochure catalogue of my usual retailer office supplies when I was remembered of the existence of the device in the title. Once upon a time being mechanical and very low tech, nowadays digital as much of the rest of the office tools you can find. I’m now considering getting one (and had thus added it to my list although more than likely Amazon will refuse again to ship it to me because it’s electronics), could probably look for a second hand one just to stay on the cheap side given it’s not really expensive enough even new than a VAT invoice might not be enough of a reason not to go with ebay or similar.
Out of curiosity, is anybody else doing similar tricks to have order in their cables, plugs, connections and similar? Got any decent results?