When Jeff was four or five, I thought it would be a nice idea to buy a bottle of Port from his birth year and share it with him on his 21st birthday. I found a bottle of “Late Bottled” Vintage Port at Trader Joe’s (this was before we started going to wineries!) and put it aside.

Jeff’s 21st birthday came – but he was away at college. The bottle sat.

Years passed.

Jeff’s home for the holidays, and I thought New Year’s Eve would be a good time to finally share the Port. I took the bottle out of the closet and tried to open it.

The cork had disintegrated. I managed to get enough of the cork out of the bottle to pour the Port through a strainer and into our glasses – but it was undrinkable.

If only I’d read the back side of the bottle and followed their advice.

Next time for sure!

I recently put an Amazon Echo Dot in my home office. It needs USB power; rather than plug in yet-another-power-adapter, I plugged it into a spare port on a USB hub connected to my Mac Mini.

All was well…until I needed to reboot the Mac. Then I noticed two things:

• A normal reboot took a long time to show the login screen (more than a minute, versus the usual 10 seconds)
• Pressing Option during the reboot (to try to reboot from another device) failed – the machine hung, never giving me the screen with devices to try.

I tried resetting NVRAM and the SMC; no dice.

Eventually, I managed to reboot and took a look at the system log; there were many, many error messages like this:

Oct  6 12:52:00 office kernel[0]: 000573.331885 AppleUSB20HubPort@14233000: AppleUSBHostPort::disconnect: persistent enumeration failures

I started disconnecting devices, and when I unplugged the Dot, the messages stopped appearing.

I’m now powering the Dot with its own power supply, plugged into a power strip. It works great, and the Mac Mini is happy, too.