Two Blegs

One for me, one for Antiwar.com. Them first:

Antiwar.com is an Amazon.com affiliate. This means that any time you buy something through their storefront or affiliate link, they receive a commission. Now, above and beyond that, you can point 0.5% of your Amazon.com purchase totals at Antiwar.com by designating The Randolph Bourne Institute (Antiwar.com's parent organization) as your Amazon Smile charity.

Yes, Antiwar.com runs quarterly fundraisers. Yes, Antiwar.com works to constantly connect with major donors. But ongoing income from things like Amazon commissions helps close the gap between formal fundraising and actual operating costs. If you've been watching the news lately, you know that Antiwar.com is more relevant and important than ever ... so if you shop at Amazon, please consider doing it in a way that helps out.

Now, me:

I just ordered a new Chromebox. I've been using the first one for nearly two years and love it. There are only two problems:

• I've been getting occasional strange hardware behavior. It may be nothing important (a USB port going bad, a lose connection), or it may be a sign that the machine is getting ready to bite the dust. I'm just not sure. Frankly I would be a little disappointed if the machine lasted less than two years, even though it was cheap and even though I use the hell out of it. But it's a consideration, and I really can't afford to wait for it to lie down and die completely before taking action.
• My younger son insists that he hates every operating system except for Windows. But he also refuses to visit certain sites/download certain content/etc. on Windows, which means he's constantly using MY machine, which he insists is inferior to his Windows laptop. Yes, we've discussed his poor reasoning on this matter, but ... well, that poor reasoning doesn't seem to be amenable to correction. Getting a second Chromebox would allow me to let him have the old one, so that my machine gets used several hours a day less and so that I don't have to kick him off my machine when I have work to do.

So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and order the new Asus Chromebox. I thought about ordering it from Amazon via the Antiwar.com affiliate link, but I didn't want to shell out full payment in advance -- I seldom use credit, but in this case I went with PayPal's "Bill Me Later" service so that I can pay it off over time, and Amazon doesn't accept PayPal. I ordered it from NewEgg. I even got $10 off using a promo code. So for the Chromebox and for an adaptor I'll need (to convert one of my monitor cables from DVI to HDMI -- this Chromebox has no DVI port), the total cost came to about $175.

On the one hand, $175 probably isn't going to kill me, especially since I can pay it off over the course of six months with no interest.

On the other hand, I do in principle work for money, and my revenue model is "provide the content, ask people to pay if they like it." So, if you like KN@PPSTER (and the other things I do online) enough to fork over a little bit, please feel free to contribute to the KN@PPSTER New Chromebox Fund:

I'll shut the button down once it reaches (IF it reaches) $175.