I find it easier to throw away big things than small things. Small things can always be shoved into a drawer, placed on a shelf, or tossed into a closet. And when it comes to technical gadgets it’s often the small things cost big bucks, which makes some of these things more difficult to part with.

CloudFTP was a wireless device that launched on Kickstarter back in 2012. The small box served as a tiny web/FTP server that contained a USB port and was powered by a rechargeable battery. Any files stored on the attached USB stick could be accessed over WiFi.

For the CloudFTP to make sense, you’ll have to mentally time travel back to 2012. The iPhone 5 (released in September 2012) came with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB, which was all-to-easy to fill with applications, pictures, and music files. The CloudFTP served two purposes: it allowed downloading/streaming files from the device, and served as an inexpensive way to expand a device’s storage space (USB storage was relatively inexpensive, even back then). The other thing to consider is that few people had unlimited data plans for their mobile devices in 2012. The CloudFTP used a wireless connection, which did not count against your mobile plan.

I purchased my CloudFTP from a friend who backed the original Kickstarter campaign. I don’t remember why that person didn’t want to keep it, but I had a use for it. The iPad I owned at the time did not have a cellular connection (wireless only), and the CloudFTP was a convenient way for me to play movies and easily expand my music storage.

At the Tulsa Oklahoma Video Game Expo in 2013, I attempted to use the CloudFTP as part of my marketing plan for my book Invading Spaces. I put the first chapter of the book, a bunch of pictures, some mp3s, and a few other files on the CloudFTP, and left the device turned on for the duration of the convention. I turned on anonymous access (so no one would need a password to access the data), and sprinkled small flyers around the convention (including out in the hallways and even the bathroom) advertising the device’s IP address and hinting that it contained “secret” files. The convention lasted eight hours, and by the end of the day I believe a total of three people accessed the device. That night I tossed the CloudFTP in the back of my desk drawer, where it’s been for the past seven years.

A lot has changed since 2012. The iPhone I own today has 256GB of storage — more than enough for all the pictures and music I need to store. (I have approximately 5,000 mp3s on my phone.) More than that, I now have an unlimited data plan on my phone; any movies or music I want to consume, I can do via online services. The USB storage on the CloudFTP is nothing compared to the storage on Netflix and Spotify.

About once a month while digging through my desk, I’ll fumble across the CloudFTP and try and come up with a use for it. The closest I’ve come is Raspberry Pi storage, but the Raspberry Pi has four USB ports — why would I need a fifth one?

When cleaning, I tend to hang on to the little things. Then again, I have several drawers full of little things. Maybe parting with a few that I no longer use will free up room for some new ones.

Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. These are the people I have captured on video after owning a Ring video doorbell for two weeks.

Just kidding. So far I’ve captured video of trucks driving past my house, three visitors, construction workers across the street using the Porta-Potty, two Amazon deliveries, and several videos of Susan and I trying out the doorbell.

Like most gadgets, I bought a Ring doorbell not because I needed one, but because I thought it would be neat. If reporters are to be believed, our homes (and cars) are constantly being probed by scary criminals, checking to see if we are home. And, as an Amazon Prime member who orders more than his fair share of stuff, I am acutely aware of the threat of “Porch Pirates,” thieves who steal delivered packages from front porches. The Ring doorbell seemed like a good defense against all of those things. Additionally, the front door of our new house came with no peephole or window. Our front windows offer a clear view of the front porch, but it works both ways, and peeking through the blinds is pretty obvious. My hope was that the video feed from the Ring doorbell might work as an alternative solution.

Up until recently, there were three models of Ring doorbells — the original Ring ($99), the Ring 2 ($199), and the Ring Pro ($249). Amazon recently put the Ring 2 on sale for $139, which made my decision easier. According to reviews, the Ring 2 corrects several of the original’s shortcomings. (From this point forward, any reference to “the Ring” refers to the Ring 2, the model I purchased.)

Installing the Ring 2 doorbell took 20-30 minutes, and I could do it a second time in about 10. Inside the box, customers will find everything needed to install the Ring. Along with the device itself, there are two additional mounting brackets (one that angles to the side, another that angles downward), a screwdriver, a drill bit (for those installing the Ring on brick), and a bevy of screws and wall anchors.

Both the Ring and Ring 2 run off of batteries. The Ring 2’s battery is better than the original, and can be constantly charged by the wires that ran to your previous doorbell, which means you should never have to remove your battery to recharge the device. A fully charged battery claims to run the unit for an entire year, so temporary power outages should not affect the device. (That being said, the Ring requires an internet connection, so if your wireless network and/or internet connection go down, all video capabilities go away.)

Using the Ring requires the Ring app. Connecting the doorbell to my wireless network was quick and easy. Ring recently issued an update that stops the doorbell from passing your wireless password in plain text when joining your network. The odds of anyone actually exploiting this in reality is pretty low, but it’s bad practice regardless, and I’m glad they fixed it.

Once wired into your original doorbell wires, pressing the button on the front of the Ring will cause your original doorbell to ring. (The Ring is also compatible with “digital chimes,” but the installation is slightly more complex.) The real magic comes in the Ring’s alerts, and there are two: “someone rang your doorbell” and “Ring has detected movement.”

When someone rings the Ring doorbell, an alert immediately pops up on your phone. After opening the app, you are able to see through the Ring’s camera. The fisheye lens offers a complete view of my entire porch. Using buttons on the screen, you are able to turn on/off a microphone on the porch, and turn on/off the microphone on your handset, allowing you to chat with anyone on your front porch. The video is automatically saved to your Ring cloud storage account. (First month’s free; it’s $30/year after that.)

Now’s as good a time as any to talk about the Ring’s WiFi signal requirements. Ring says that you’ll want to place your Ring doorbell as close as possible to your wireless router. They’re not kidding. My Ring is on the outside of my house (obviously), which means the signal has to travel through a layer of brick before hitting my router, which is literally 10′ away. In that configuration, my Ring barely meets the minimum signal requirements. Suggested solutions included moving my wireless router, removing obstacles between the Ring and the router (there are none), or adding additional wireless signal boosters near the Ring doorbell. My signal is good enough for it to work, but if your wireless router is in the rear of your home, I can see signal strength being an issue.

I’m not the type of guy who always has his phone in his hand, which means each time someone rings my doorbell I have to (a) find my phone, (b) open the app, and (c) connect to the Ring doorbell. Each of these steps takes several seconds, and when you know someone is waiting on your front porch, those seconds seem like hours.

The other alert users can set up is motion detection. The Ring app does a decent job of guessing how sensitive to set its motion detection based on a few questions it asks you during installation. “Does your house face a busy street?” was one of the questions. For the most part I haven’t experienced a lot of false alarms, although it seems large slow-moving trucks are enough to trigger the motion detection while cars passing by at a normal clip do not. That being said, there is no way anyone walking up my sidewalk or standing on my front porch would not trigger the device, at which point it begins recording, and continues to do so until no more motion is detected.

In the past two weeks I have captured three separate visitors. The first of which were two kids raising money for their basketball team. The second were two members of our home owner’s association stopping by. Part of the “fun” (I suppose) is being able to see what happens on the other side of your closed door. For two whole minutes before they rang my bell, those two kids took a load off their feet by resting on my porch furniture. No harm, no foul. As for the other men, you can clearly hear them rehearsing our names (“Rob and Susan, Rob and Susan”) before knocking on the door. I suspect that most people assume the device isn’t activated until they press the button.

The third visitor was a stranger. I don’t know who he was, or what he wanted. He knocked, stood around for a bit, and left. Was he there to steal my Amazon packages? To ask for donations? To invite me to church? I don’t know. Does it matter that I know this man stopped by my house and rang the doorbell while I was away at work? I don’t know that, either.

Hang on to your Big Brother hats, because now I’m going to talk about Ring’s videos.

The Ring app has another feature, called Neighborhood. When I installed the app, it used my phone’s GPS to pull up a map of my neighborhood and the location of my house. After confirming where I live (it didn’t seem to be optional), Ring showed me some of its additional options. If I determined something was “suspicious” (like the stranger who rang my doorbell) I can flag it as such and send a notification (including the video) to every Ring user within my neighborhood’s radius (the default setting I believe was five miles). I haven’t flagged any videos, but some of my neighbors have. I’ve received two notifications since installing the Ring. “Someone was checking my car doors at 4:45 a.m.,” said one alert, complete with night-vision video. The other was of a man standing on someone’s front porch. “This guy rang my doorbell and stood there for a long time,” says the post. Others have commented. “Looks like he’s on drugs,” said one.

Here’s where things get a little sketchy. The Ring doorbell itself does not store any of your video data. Instead, it is transferred through your wireless signal to Ring’s cloud storage. You can view it and you can download it… but I’m not sure who owns it. According to a Washington Post article, Ring has partnered with 400 police departments, offering them access to Ring data. According to the article, police departments are supposed to ask nicely to view your videos. My only knowledge comes through reality television programs, but I’m not sure I love a system that depends on me trusting (a) someone else owning my videos, (b) them not releasing them unless I say so, and (c) police departments asking nicely and taking “no” for an answer. Orwell would get a chuckle, for sure.

In a follow up article the number of police departments working with Ring rose to 600. In this article, Ring also claims that they do not knowingly collect videos of children or random people walking on public property (i.e. walking down the sidewalk). They say it is up to Ring owners to make sure the devices don’t collect those images — which, as an owner, I can tell you is 100% impossible. Installing the device so that it does not collect video of the street in front of your house is literally impossible. I suppose placing a sign at the end of my driveway warning children not to approach my house might stop the latter, although I suspect all it would really do is provide me with videos of kids egging my house in crystal clear 1080p resolution.

Even after buying and installing the Ring doorbell, I’m still morally on the fence. The ominous black box with the glowing blue LED ring will, I hope, dissuade Porch Pirates and other no-gooders from targeting my home. On the other hand, I can see how videos collected from devices like these could be (and probably is being) misused, and I don’t feel great that I paid $139 to contribute to that web.

The longer you work on computers, the more weird tricks you learn. Over the years I’ve straightened the pins on IDE hard drives, made temporary jumpers out of paperclips, bypassed BIOS passwords by removing the CMOS battery, and used rubber bands to remove screws with stripped heads.

And then there are the really weird ones, like sticking a failing hard drive inside your freezer as a last ditch attempt to save it. While a lot of people (myself included) seemingly had success with this trick, more recent analysis has determined that there’s a much greater chance of this making the drive worse (best case scenario is that it doesn’t do anything at all).

Another trick I’d heard, but never personally tried, was running a computer keyboard through a dishwasher. Over the years I’ve heard of people trying this, many of them swearing it worked. Up until last Friday I’d never had a reason to try it myself. That was the day I dumped a bunch of salad dressing directly into my keyboard.

Once upon a time computers came with keyboards attached, and replacing a keyboard was so incredibly expensive that nobody — especially kids — were allowed to bring food or drink within five miles of a computer. Over time, the price of keyboards dropped — so much, in fact, that one time I accidently bought 300 of them. It happens. The point is, I have five spare USB keyboards out in my garage. With little to lose and knowledge to gain, I decided to try the ol’ “computer keyboard through the dishwasher trick” for myself.

Before putting the keyboard in the dishwasher I decided to rinse it off first. After letting the keyboard fill up with water, hair, a few fingernails, skin cells, and dandruff began washing out and into the sink. Once all the stuff that used to be a part of me stopped flowing out of the keyboard, I turned off the water, turned the keyboard upside down, and let it drain. Then I scrubbed the sink real good because… skin cells.

Surprisingly my dishwasher does not have a setting for “$10 USB Keyboard,” so following the advice of someone named MetalliHunk138, I put the keyboard in the top rack and let ‘er rip on a normal (not “pots ‘n pans”) cycle. I also turned off the drying cycle because I only wanted to wash the thing, not cook it.

When the dishwasher finished, I removed the keyboard and placed it outside on a table. Within ten minutes the keyboard seemed pretty dry, but I let it sit for about two hours, just to be sure.

The biggest problem with this entire experiment is that as I previously mentioned, I had five spare USB keyboards out in the garage. Now I have four. Instead of waiting for the keyboard to fully dry, I just went and got another keyboard from the garage and hooked it up. Still, I was curious what the outcome of the washed keyboard would be.

Two hours later, I connected the keyboard to my laptop. The end result was… a keyboard that constantly sends the dash key to the computer. (I wasn’t completely sure what it was doing until I opened Notepad.) Without the ability to add dots and spaces, it won’t even work to send Morse code.

Later that evening on Twitter someone suggested I should have let the keyboard dry for a full twelve hours before using it. By the time I read that tweet, the keyboard had been out of the dishwasher for two hours, and in our garbage can for four.

Verdict? Inconclusive. The next time I find myself eating a Wendy’s salad and I go a little crazy with the salad dressing, I’ll give the dishwasher trick another spin. I have four more spare keyboards to practice on.

If there’s a silver lining to a furlough, it’s that the combination of time off and no income makes it convenient to work on small home improvement projects. It’s a bad time to start an expensive project, but good for checking off all those little honey-do projects that take more time than money to complete — things like hanging pictures and setting up bookshelves.

One of the projects I’ve been wanting to tackle since purchasing our new home was running ethernet (network) cables down through the walls to all (or most) of the rooms. The people who originally planned to buy this home (but backed out for whatever reason) paid $750 for a “network package” that, as I inherited it, was unfinished. The package included wall jacks in four rooms (the master bedroom, the movie room, Mason’s bedroom, and the living room) with unterminated cables culminating in a utility closet. The problem this presented was two-fold: first, those four cables needed ends attached to them in the closet; and two, what I really needed was a network jack added to my office, and the one in the living room moved to where we had placed the television.

You might be asking why I don’t just use wireless, and we do. Morgan uses the WiFi for her Chromebook, Susan uses the WiFi for her laptop, Mason was using the WiFi for his computer, I was using the WiFi for all my computers and Raspberry Pis, and all of us were using the WiFi for all our phones and tablets and televisions. Our wireless router was straining to keep up with all the traffic, and when Mason would play online games while Susan and Morgan were watching Netflix and I was trying to download something, the whole network would come to a standstill.

The first thing I needed to do was terminate the cables that had already been run, and for that I called my old buddy Jeff. Jeff has been making network cables for half his life now, and is better at it than I’ll ever be. One day after he got off work, Jeff stopped by and the two of us made a trip to Home Depot to pick up supplies. I already had most of the required tools (like crimpers) so all we really needed was a small box of network ends. I picked up a cable tester too, just to make tracking down which cables went where easier (since none of them were labeled).

There’s an art to making network cables. Inside each cable are eight tiny wires. First, you have to strip off the outer shielding of the main cable. Then you have to arrange those eight tiny wires in the right order. Then you have to trim them, slide a connector over the end, and crimp it down without anything moving out of place. When I was good — and it’s been a while — I could probably do one in a minute or two. Five minutes had passed since Jeff had started working on the ends, and for a moment I began to wonder if he had lost his touch. I shouldn’t have. A moment later, he informed me that not just one, but all of the cables were done!

The next part of the project involved running around the house with the cable tester, since the builder/installer hadn’t labelled any of the wires or connections. It took us a few minutes walking around with the tester to figure out which cable went to which wall connection, but eventually we tracked them all down. Each time we found one, I made a label so I’d know in the future which cable went to which room. Part one was a complete success! Thanks, Jeff!

Part two of the project was a bit more tricky, because it involved running new cable across the attic and down through the walls. My buddy Tim volunteered to squirrel his way around our new attic, and so back to Home Depot it was. On Amazon you can buy 1,000′ of network cable for around $40 (which is why we all scoffed at that initial $750 charge), but we needed cable that day, and Home Depot had 100′ for $20. I also picked up a couple of wall terminators and face plates.

Tim only had a couple of hours to work on the project, so we split the work up over two days. For the network drop in the living room, we were able to move the existing one (installed over the fireplace) and reroute it back down behind the television. In the process, we accidentally drilled into the coax cable. Fortunately there was enough slack in the wall to pull a bit more down, and replacement ends were $1 at Home Depot. Getting a cable run to my office took a bit more work, but we were finally able to get it done. Thanks, Tim!

After Tim left, the only part left was to crimp an end on the new cable we ran, and attach the other ends to new wall jacks. I had just watched Jeff do four cables in five minutes — surely I could do one, right?

And I did (after three tries). The wall terminals were easy, but crimping new ends on… let’s just say it took me a couple of tries before it came back to me. I’ve made hundreds of network cables in my time, but I haven’t made any in at least ten years. Maybe fifteen.

Once everything was in place and pushed back into the wall, I tested everything one last time with the cable tester I bought before wiring everything up. I plugged my computer into the jack, heard the cable click, and saw the green light indicating a gigabit connection. Aw, yeah…

After a bit more wiring, all of my computers (my workstation, laptops, server, and Raspberry Pis), Mason’s computer, the living room television, the movie room television, and the master bedroom television are all now connected to the network over gigabit ethernet. Not only is that significantly faster than wireless, but removing all that traffic from the wireless router has sped it up, too.

The last part of this project that needs to be completed is to tuck, wrap, and clean up the wiring in the hall closet. I had planned on doing that on Monday, but then the furlough ended. You can always use one more day off!

All together I spent around $40 on this project (not including the cable tester). It was something I’ve been wanting to do since buying the house, and the furlough gave me enough time to finish it.

Thanks again to Jeff, Tim, and Home Depot!