Further adventures in home computing: Loot

[mdlbear]

My order, of three replacement UPS batteries, arrived from APC this morning. One is for the BackUps 500 I've been having trouble with in the office. The other two went into the two BackUps Pro 650's that I salvaged from the discard pile at work. I may do a little shuffling-around.

This afternoon, after a successful demo (and a fight with balky presentation software that inadvertantly illustrated a talking-point about the superior simplicity of paper as a document representation), I went to the dentist to get my new crown installed. That, of course, puts me across the street from Guitar Showcase, and the Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones I'd spotted two weeks before after the first appointment for the crown. They advertise 32dB noise isolation, and are significantly more comfortable than the Vic Firth 'phones I bought about a month ago -- they have nice wide, deep cuffs, and nothing presses on my ears. Not horribly expensive, either. I may take them in to work; my office there is pretty noisy, and they're comfortable enough to wear for long periods.

Comments

Delivery Time?

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

How long did it take for APC to deliver the new batteries? I've got an old APC 350 that needs a new battery, so I explored the APC website a bit. I'm not hurting for protection, I first got a much larger new APC (1500 VA) for the biggest area of need and shifted each remaining UPS down the line to areas of lesser need. But having a spare ready to go could be useful.

On the other hand - is there any way to disable the alarms on an APC UPS? It might be more useful to me as a portable AC source, but not if that alarm keeps going off.

Re: Delivery Time?

[mdlbear]

They were ordered about 10am on Tuesday, and arrived sometime on Thursday. I was astounded.

I don't know of any way to kill the alarm, but have seriously considered taking one apart and attacking it with wirecutters. I've had some large Tripplite UPSs that had a "shut up" switch, but they didn't last as long as I would have liked, and didn't appear to have replacable batteries the way APC's do.

Hmm: just took apart an APC BackUps 400 (another one from the salvage pile) -- it was definitely designed to be put together and never taken apart. There appears to be a piezoelectric beeper soldered to the board that runs along the top of the frame. Should be a simple matter of unsoldering. Extra points for wiring in a switch.