lemann

The quality of stuff being sold on Amazon has been a race to the bottom for a while now, somewhat following in the steps of Ebay.

In this video Louis has two crimp butt connectors: one bought from Amazon and one bought from a hardware retail store - the Amazon purchased one, which a regular user of the site may consider as reputable at a glance, fails to crimp the wires securely. The hardware store one however securely crimps the wires in place.

It's a pretty mundane example, but extends across to other products in other industry verticals too. A pretty major concern raised in the video was that the failure of this specific product would cause excess heat, potentially leading to an electrical fire in the worst case scenario.

There's also the issue of reputable brands not even listing their products on Amazon anymore, leaving users with mostly poor quality alternatives shown prominently in search results.

Personally I find myself preferring to shop at dedicated or independent online storefronts, where it's a bit more obvious what exactly I'm purchasing, and where there's at least some minimum guarantee of quality - in contrast to a Prime "dropshipped", generic product from Amazon. Also kind of like the fact that by purchasing from sites that aren't massive marketplaces or outlets, real individuals benefit from my custom, not massive behemoths that don't need the sales to survive

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My Harman Kardon headphones and my sausage fingers don't go well sometimes - occasionally when switching off the ANC I accidentally put the headphones into pairing mode.

When this happens, a massive popup with a picture of my headphones appears on my phone screen, prompting me to connect via bluetooth, a bit like that iOS one that shows up when you hold your earpod case near the device.

Anyone aware what this popup feature is called? I'd like to ultimately switch it off - don't really like the idea of nearby bluetooth devices opening massive popups on my device, just because they're in pairing mode

I woke up this morning to an awful looking homescreen on my Android - turns out my Niagara Launcher subscription had lapsed!

I went to check the renewal prices, and they were literally 2-3x more expensive than what I was paying recently - not really excited about that.

Since my homescreen already looked like garbage, I decided may as well try Kvaesitso, a FOSS search-based launcher. I tried it in the past, but abandoned it since I would want to set up my homescreen and apply an icon pack to all the apps individually.

After several hours of setup (mainly applying the icon pack 😭), I've been using it throughout the rest of the day and I'm pretty pleased with it, it's a very smooth, polished and well thought out minimal search-focused launcher. Here's what I like and don't like so far:

Like

• Search is much more powerful: can use DuckDuckGo or any custom search engine, search app shortcuts (i.e. webpages saved as apps), as well as tagging apps - none of these are possible in Niagara
• Very, very customizable
• Supports gestures to open apps or run things, so even less apps are needed on my homescreen
• The clock looks so nice
• Cool charging animation that shows rising bubbles from the bottom of the homescreen
• Contextual media controls under the clock
• Allows full-size widgets on the homescreen, these can be hidden off-screen by default if you prefer

Meh but not dealbreakers

• Upcoming calendar events don't show up under the clock, however there is a very nice custom calendar widget included
• Contextual media app cannot be set (e.g. when bluetooth/3.5mm headphone is connected, pin music app on homescreen)

Highly recommend giving it a try if your Niagara subscription lapses, and open to trying a neat FOSS alternative!

F-Droid | GitHub

I've noticed quite a lot of new accounts popping up recently, wondering if something new happened over at Orange Alien HQ or maybe is this just normal growth?

This decade old electric cooler box gave up the ghost around 2 years ago, with the indoor outlet plug no longer working. The independent 12v input was still operational, so I kept it with the intention of eventually fixing it...

And two years later, this is the eventually 😅. The integrated 10v ~45w unit had failed short on the primary side, with a burnt out Y-capacitor and some fried zeners. I started removing bits from the board to try and find all the broken components... but ended up letting out the magic smoke in the process, oops!

I set out looking for a new power supply, and came across a 12v 45w unit from Meanwell. It was actually smaller than the cooler's original power supply too, meaning more internal space to use later 🤫

After searching for a distributor that was actually willing to ship it to a home address, I ordered, and boom:

It's so tiny compared to the original.

Next I installed an Arduino Nano to control the TEC/peltier module & fan via a cheap LED repeater. I was hoping to reuse the internal temperature sensors, but left them disconnected for now

After hours writing the arduino code, I finally got it into a usable state. There were issues with brownouts rebooting the Arduino, however with the Meanwell supply in-circuit those mysteriously stopped.

There are 3 power modes now for the module: 30W, 40W and 50W - with the first two using PWM, and the last one giving it all the beans. I wanted to PWM control the fan too, but decided against it since it sounded absolutely terrible at whatever PWM frequency the Nano is using.

It powers on to 40W by default, which is under the 45W max rating of the PSU.

Everything looks good so far running from the bench supply:

Now all that was left was to connect the internal supply, and the 12v vehicle input. I was actually supposed to use JST connectors for the Meanwell psu, but didn't have anything on hand - so improvised with crimping spade terminals and friction fitting those on

And the moment of truth. Up until this point I hadn't actually checked if the replacement psu was working or not

Looking good! I don't really like the LEDs though, so might do something about those in future.

You might be wondering how exactly I change the power settings... well since the manufacturer decided it was good enough to shove all the cables in the back, I did the same with a pushbutton 🤫

Glad to have the electric cooler working again though, feels nice to save large things like this from going to the landfill and extend their life a bit. Excited to hear any thoughts and feedback!

How nice of Windows to spam me with notifications when I temporarily fill my scratch disk, despite turning them off...

For me personally, trams are right up there. Aside from the main issue of sharing the roads instead of having a dedicated line, they really make it easy to get from one part of a city to another, especially for wheelchair users. They're usually as frequent as buses, but much faster. The stations are much more attractive compared to bus stops (on newer systems), and can really make an area feel much nicer IMO.

For those that have a bike, suburban and inter city rail is a strong second. The speed and ease of last mile mobility is what appeals to me the most. Recently took my bike across the country to my home city and it ended up being much faster than driving (by almost an hour) - the multimodal commute was pretty hefty, but lots of fun nonetheless.

One would assume that if you paid for the 4K Netflix plan, you'd be able to watch media in 4K on all your devices? Unfortunately not, Netflix maxes out at 720p if you're watching in the browser.

If 🏴‍☠️ can watch whatever media they want in 4K from any device, but paying customers can't... the choice here is a no brainer.

Bonus: Louis has a mini rant about his $3000 LG TV which is packed with trackers, all enabled by default. A bit greedy of LG to also track user activity after paying that much money for the TV?

Watch elsewhere:

Invidious / Piped link in comments

What do you think of dual actuator hard drives? I never knew these even existed...

Here's a quick summary of the vid for those who want a TL;DW:

• Dual actuator drives are a single drive with two actuator arms inside
• These arms have their own platters, each with access to half of the drive's capacity
• The SAS version shows up as two separate drives: one for each actuator
• The SATA version shows up as a single drive, however can be partitioned at a specific LBA near the middle to use both actuators independently
• Linux kernel updated to support these drives better when queuing commands
• Capable of saturating a 5gbit SATA link

Personally, my concern is RAID setups, particularly in a SAS config. Will filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS know that two storage devices are the same physical drive... aside from that, and concern about more mechanical parts, this looks exciting especially for sequential speed throughput!

EDIT: fix typos

The Retro Lite CM4 is a passion project by two modders StonedEdge and Dmcke5, inspired by the Switch. This emulation handheld is based around the Raspberry Pi CM4 and RetroPie.

While sharing a very similar look to the Switch, this thing is been built from the ground up, with a custom machined shell, PCB, and various other components. There's an optional custom dock with an integrated LCD, that can show the current game's cover art.

Personally, I think this is absolutely impressive. Hats off to these guys!

Picture grabbed from the GitHub, which is also linked below

https://github.com/StonedEdge/Retro-Lite-CM4

I've been in need of a bench supply for a while, up to this point I've been using little buck/boost boards with a multimeter to get the voltage I want when working on a project. The limitations of that started to show though, so I was after a more ideal solution.

After spending a while looking at various power supplies, I happened to come across this tiny adjustable supply. After binging a bunch of videos on it, I decided it'll do, especially compared to the absolutely chonky big alternatives.

Right out the gate, the aluminium casing feels amazing, but they could do with a bit of a stronger adhesive holding the glass screen cover in-place 🤦‍♂️ I'm personally not too bothered by this, but it doesn't set a good first impression IMO

A few seconds after pressing the glass back into place, the opposite end of the glass popped loose. At least I now know there are screws hidden under here if I ever decide to open this in future 💭

Aside from that, it has pretty reasonable specs for the size:

• Dual input, either AC (mickey ears plug) or DC 7-28v (XT60)
• 30V 10A (max output 200W on DC, max 100W on AC)
• Minimum output 1v 500mA
• 65W USB PD output (handy for the Pinecil I recently ordered to replace my old iron 😁)
• 200x200 IPS display
• AC input uses GaN parts

When watching the videos a few people complained about the absence of an XT60 to banana jack. This may have changed at some point, as one came with mine

The internal AC converter appears to supply 19V into the unit, which you can use via the XT60 connector at the rear. Not sure if intentional or not, but pretty neat nonetheless - as long as you dont accidentally leave a lipo plugged in there 😳

I'm not sure if its worth the price tag ($60-120 depending on where you look) when you can get a RuiDeng clone for under $30. I mainly jumped for this because of the size, integrated AC input, and that 65W USB-C. Voltage ripple is a little concern at lower voltages where some components may not be so forgiving...

Happy with the purchase so far though, can't wait to start using this for projects!

Never realised that quite a few third party mods for the deck are available - such as a transparent chassis, colourful buttons, and even an aftermarket APU cooler.

Linus pretty much pimps the heck out of the refurbished deck in this video.

The main downsides shown (aside from the difficult chassis swap) were the aftermarket chassis joystick tolerances being a bit tight, and the new HD screen increasing system power consumption by at least 10W - while also bringing a noticeable performance penalty, with ~37 FPS on the HD screen vs 60 FPS on the standard deck screen when playing F1