More wine whining . . .

So that new cooling unit for the wine cabinet was a total lemon. We gave it two weeks or so to prove itself, but it couldn't get the interior temperature below 15°C, even on "high," and could only maintain 17°C on average, despite coming on every 30 minutes. It's supposed to keep the wine at 14°C effortlessly, switching on at most every few hours. Moreover, it was noisy – frightfully so.

After some arguing with the company, we exchanged the old one for a new one at no charge. The arguing had to do with 20-kg items being ping-ponged via UPS at their expense. My feeling here is simple: If you sell a product with a one-year total warranty and it fails in two weeks, shipping is your problem.

The new unit went in this morning after breakfast – we're now achieving Formula 1 pit crew speeds on swaps – and we'll see how it goes. The name of this not-so-great machine is, again, a "Nuvo" cooling unit, sold by Drobot in Canada. Avoid this if you can. It appears to be a piece of crap next to similar units . . . like the original one that came with the cabinet, which produced good chill for years.

Another week in the life of GURPS

What's new with GURPS? Stuff. You know, things. Oh, you want details? Geez . . .

• We uploaded Stefan Jones' weird-and-wonderful GURPS Alphabet Arcane. You could use this for far more than GURPS games. The ideas would be easy to adapt to any game system (or shoot, a novel).

• We reviewed the penultimate draft of the really super Pyramid 3/2 (December 2008) this week.

• We reviewed rough PDFs of not one but two e23 promo items. Free stuff! Look for these soon-ish.

• Shawn Fisher and Hans-Christian Vortisch's GURPS Loadouts: Monster Hunters moved into Nikki's editing queue.

• GURPS Hot Spots: Renaissance Florence – the latest from Matt Riggsby (wombattery) – is out of playtesting and back to Matt for the final draft.

• The first draft of the inaugural volume of the GURPS Supporting Cast series is in.

• I finished the first draft of my crunchy e23 item. All I'll say for now is "around 32 pages" and "concerns magic" (including necromancy).

• I wrote half of a Pyramid 3/3 (January 2009) article with Peter Dell'Orto (peterdellorto) and edited it for Steven (waitingforgo). Two words: dog skull (and nothing to do with necromancy).