Nice! Could take a turn for the worse when you need something smaller than E. coli though--you'll be wishing you named the Chromecast "tardigrade" when some lightswitch has to be named "herpes."

Rest assured, IoT deserves to be named herpes...

My parents use the same scheme; they have developed a tradition of buying a corresponding stuffed animal to live next to the computer.

I use Simpson’s bit characters. Never gonna run out of those.

I use One Piece characters for the same reason. My most beefy PC is Monkey D. Luffy and so on. Like you, I like the whimsy in using names from a fictional world, and some worlds have more names to choose from than others.

My first job, I named each web server off of a different Simpson’s character, all attached to a big KVM, so I customized each desktop to the character, so I could easily tell what server I was in.

Some people thought it was annoying, but the desktop picture had the character in the upper right corner. Away from the Icons, but you could glance ad see who it was and go right to it.

Also have used Simpson's for test data. There is some built in structures that can be used Abe-> Homer == Marge > Bart, Maggie, Lisa. Lots of people mostly remember them.

I went for traditional Russian names, because I’d also have a healthy amount of diminutives to use if the device behaved well, and could fall back to the full patronymic version if it acted up.

It’s like having a little family.

I'm a bit reluctant to be that guy, but... E. coli is not an animal...

There are some really small animals, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotifer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_bear

Yes, this is more or less what RFC 1178 recommends:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178#page-6