Oh my god... Storytime.

A customer comes in with I assume is his father or grandfather.

Customer: I need a computer, but without all the internals

Me: So a case?

Customer: Yes, I need a Dell computer outsides, but without the internal components.

Me: Well, we don't have Dell cases, but we sell custom build cases and they come with a power supply.

Customer: *says nothing, but looks interested*

Me: *walks over to the cases to show him* So this is what the cases look like and we have two types, one for a ATX and one for a micro-ATX.

Customer: *still says nothing, but looks at them*

Me: What motherboard do you have at the moment?

Customer: Well, I don't have anything right now, but I'm replacing another computer that didn't work very well. I'm going to be getting some Dell parts to put in here.

Me: O-okay. So this other computer, I'd like to see it in shop to see what's going on with it.

Customer: Oh, you do NOT want to do that. I hooked it up to another computer and it blew it up.

Me: Huh, that's weird. I'd still like to look at it if possible.

Customer: Oh no, it's all wired wrong and... *some bullshit, but stay with me*

Customer: I am the best at technology. My hand has computer parts in it--government funded. *some more bullshit*

Me: Okay... *I try to bring it back around* Well, I'd still like to see the other computer for myself. So you don't have parts for this new build yet, right? You don't know what type of motherboard you have?

Customer: No.

Me: Well, I would get the internals first, so you know what size of case to get, and then get the case.

Customer: Okay. Thank you for your time.

He shook my hand with his "cyborg" hand and I was tempted to say something about "try not to crush my hand," but elected not to. Also during this entire exchange, the old man continuously farted in the background.

When your PSU isn't enough 👍

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

After my previous PC bursting into flames when I changed my input voltage to 120v on the power supply my dad never bought me one again this happened when I was aged 12. I was so much in love with computers that I would visit my friends who had ones at home and not leave till their moms asks me to. I remember collecting my lunch money and buying a Pentium 4 mb for dog cheap at a local store and as soon as I plugged in the mb short-circuited and died (I had the other parts as I was scavenging the junk yard for them). I'll never forget the moment I burst into tears seeing my hopes for a PC dieing. So after all the years passing when I was 16 I spent my whole summer vacation working in a construction site doing so much heavy work. There were days that my body couldn't bear and I just fell but somehow by the end of that summer I managed to collect enough money to assemble this 3rd gen dual-core. This is my baby. I'm using it till this date.
**Sorry about the bad English

Pop (onomatopoeia) : The sound your managed gigabit switch makes when you accidentally plug it into the power supply of your 48-volt power-over-Ethernet switch instead of its usual 9-volt supply.

Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...

I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.

Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".

Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").

First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.

I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...

Fuck China.

Fuck the U.S. government.

Fuck the UK and Australia and all the other governments for taking advantage of the crisis of the last two years to get more power and money for their elites.

Fuck them all for starting COVID with their unsanctioned and unethical “gain of function” lab experiments and creating so much chaos that nobody really has a chance anymore at living the life they had dreamed of or so carefully planned for.

Fuck them for the out of control spending and money printing and inflation and even messing around with trying to regulate and tax crypto so we don’t have any kind of escape valve to live a normal, happy life.

Because of them, I can’t even enjoy my time off work. Even if I could plan a vacation that wouldn’t have to be canceled due to an outbreak or resultant supply chain issues, I can’t travel without severe restrictions that make it miserable and not worth the trouble.

Fuck them for making everyone into stupid monkeys fighting over opinions about data that is incomplete, misunderstood, misrepresented, or downright fixed toward a specific pharma-fascist authoritarian outcome.

And fuck them especially for being hypocrites and going to parties and generally not following their own rules they made for us when they think we’re not watching, and then persecuting and prosecuting us when we dare do the same.

Fuck ‘em all. I’m so done.

Fuck yeah!! The power supply that I've been working on since last week is all cleaned up and back in action 😁😁😁

I "love" the smell of broken power supply right at the morning 🙃

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Pro-tip #526:
Do NOT short your power supply.

My laptop started making faint high-pitched noises - I hope I misheard and it's actually just some coil singing inside the power-supply and not one of the disks/something else - also, I seem to have dropped 4GB of RAM suddenly where there should be 8GB.

(Also, I should really wipe the messed up dual-boot still residing on disk from last semester and replace it by a fresh arch-only install. (No time and joy in debugging that right now.) Probably something for tomorrow evening.)

The device is ~8 years old by now and starting to fall apart - nothing duct tape can't fix - but I'm somewhat worried about the rest right now. D:

Meh, I really need that laptop during the next two weeks, I just hope the hardware doesn't die on me in the meantime because I can't wait for an order to arrive, let alone afford some cheap replacement.

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

*receives an old business laptop as payment for refurbishing another one*

Hmm, this thing doesn't have a charger with it.. looks like it's taking 18.5V.. my HP laptop's charger supplies that but its barrel connector doesn't fit 🤔

Regular users: oh dear now I have to buy a charger with a fitting connector for this.. where do I even start?!
Me: Well I guess I could just remove the charging port and solder some wires straight into the board instead 🤔

But that voltage.. my HP laptop's charger is still in use and I don't really want to fuck around with that one.

Regular users: oh dear oh dear, shouldn't I just throw this laptop away?
Me: well I guess that I could just use one of the rails of my upgraded lab bench power supply for it?

Lab electronics saving the day, every day, time and time again.. fuck yeah 😎

Looks like /dev/body got tainted.. nasal memory leaks all over the place 😷

$ kill -9 $(pidof cold)
... Nothing.
$ sudo !!
I said kill the fucking cold!!! Y u no listen to your admin?! 😠
> User condor is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEE!!!! 😣😣😣
I just want to finish my goddamn power supply project, instead of getting bed-ridden by a cold, and running through paper towels like there's no tomorrow 😭

So I just received this second DSP5005 DC-DC programmable power supply. Time to make an enclosure for the thing!! 3 power supplies totaling at around 1kW, and 2 variables connected to the 50V 10A one, through external banana wires (I want all of this to be modular). No biggie, take measurements for the AC-DC supplies, add in the variables on the front, and cut it out.

So, I went and did just that. Now my 500W (50V 10A) supply is a bit larger than the others, and it's got a fan. So I figured, well then probably my 24V 8.3A (200W) and 12V 15A (180W) supplies could use some cooling as well. But how am I going to achieve passive cooling without a spacing between the supplies?! So I thought of some spacer design. It had to be out of wood, and I had some 4mm MDF and some IKEA parts around. So, 4mm MDF for the plate and 8mm wood spacers from IKEA for the spacing. And some super glue to hold it all together.

Weighing my power supplies against a 1l bottle of milk, it seems like my power supplies are ~500g. Great, so the top spacer would take 500g and the bottom one 1kg + the weight of the top spacer.

I ended up building one plate with 6 spacers in it yesterday, until I got too tired. Then I placed my entire weight against it, 20kg at least. It didn't budge. Pretty good for something that's only designed to withstand a 1kg load!!

So, I made something good with only a 10x18cm piece of MDF, some garbage from IKEA, and most importantly a bit of a brain. Something that can handle 20x its designed load no problem. Manufacturers, is it really right to produce shit when I can beat your manufacturing processes big time without an assembly line?!

This Chinesium power supply looks disgusting 😷 I have no idea what shit this manufacturer put their hands into when they built this piece of garbage (that nonetheless works without blowing up, go figure) but it's all sticky 😐 I want to clean it up before putting it into a new enclosure, but I don't have an ultrasonic cleaner and don't really feel like desoldering all the components and giving it a washing. Are there any other cleaning options that are inexpensive and don't damage the components or the solder joints? Pure alcohol perhaps?

When working with hardware some mistakes can be literally painful. Thankfully this was all during undergrad and I'm only around computer hardware now lol.

>Misprogrammed a software kill switch so a sensor that should not have been sending data was actually sending data which caused the system to activate a piston that went WHAM! into the face of a teammate working on replacing some part of it...

>Misprogrammed a controller so it drew too much power from the supply and the puny supply wires literally burst into flame and fell across my arm.

>Spun a 9000rpm CNC spindle the wrong way and caused an attached screw to go rocketing upwards instead of downwards and almost break the (pretty expensive) thing (uh...we were trying to use it as a power screwdriver essentially but I set the rpm to about 100x what I wanted and the direction wrong so yeah).

>Switched a -1 with a +1 in a robot's control system sending it careening into a teammate's leg... let's just say mecanum wheels are paaaainful.

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

I took this contract and made the suggestion that we backup to the cloud and create a private repo on GIT. Client said no, local should be fine, they don't want someone stealing their code. I said okay fine.
AC just went out in the server room and they apparently had a leak from the AC to the power supply which they happened to put on top of the rack servers and switches. I'm surprised that place didn't catch fire, might be to early to call it.
All this on a Friday and we were 2 weeks away from launch party.
Not my fault, I clearly said we backup to cloud and use GIT on private repo.

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

Power supply explosive party.
First time I saw two capacitors explode,hit the fan, melt the fan, get stuck there from the generated heat and blow every thing

When you realize graphite is conductive and you have a 300W power supply...

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

LabVIEW.

Because WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK should you want to use a visual programming language in a professional environment and pay for it.

(Other than: the manufacturer of your measurement device/power supply/electronic load/etc. has already provided a LabVIEW module so you just have, you know, 'click' your program together and be done.

No, we won't give you the documentation on how to do it properly without that piece of crap or even give you code snippets.

(If you don't feel the urge to shoot yourself in the foot, you have obviously too much time on your hands and could simply be reading the interface definitions for that particular interface. At least it's standardized, d'uh.)

Oh, and you want a lightweight application? Here comes the runtime environment! A big clunky ... thing you'll need now to start up even a simple measure-and-log-data-thing.

Well, OK, it works for the occasional Measure-and-Log-Thing. If you don't need the data too fast.

If you want to do something a bit more complex, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to debug it for you afterwards because that colourful entanglement of wires and connections and blocks is a DAMN HUGE MESS and trying to understand how it works feels like defusing a bomb in a shitty action movie.)

Never again.

Got my first soldering project working. Looks trash and horribly done but it does power the RPI from my 3d printers power supply using a buck converter to drop the voltage

Thankfully I got 2 pack of the usb c breakout boards. The first attempt is horribly mangled 😅😅😅 did i mention i suck. Lol

A plain computer illiterate guy rings tech support to report that his computer is faulty.

Tech: What's the problem?

User: There is smoke coming out of the power supply.

Tech: (keeps quiet for the moment)

Tech: You'll need a new power supply.

User: No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files.

Tech: Sir, the power supply is faulty. You'll need to replace it.

User: No way! Someone told me that I just needed to change the startup and it will fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the command.

Tech support: 10 minutes later, the User is still adamant that he is right. The tech is frustrated and fed up.

Tech support: (hush hush)

Tech: Sorry, Sir. We don't normally tell our customers this, but there is an undocumented DOS command that will fix the problem.

User: I knew it!

Tech: Just add the line LOAD NOSMOKE <nosmoke> at the end of the CONFIG.SYS. Let me know how it goes.

10 minutes later.

User: It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking.

Tech: Well, what version of DOS are you using?

User: MS-DOS 6.22.

Tech: That's your problem there. That version of DOS didn't come with NOSMOKE. Contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch that will give you the file. Let me know how it goes.

1 hour later.

User: I need a new power supply.

Tech: How did you come to that conclusion?

Tech: (hush hush)

User: Well, I rang Microsoft and told him about what you said, and he started asking questions about the make of the power supply.

Tech: Then what did he say?

User: He told me that my power supply isn't compatible with NOSMOKE.

Hey guys.
Today's Project: 400W power supply.
2x12V, 2x5V, 1x3.3V

Zebra tc51 with a price tag of 1299.99usd. No power supply, no cable, 720p screen, snapdragon 650 soc. This is the RED camera in android 🤦‍♂️

It cost me 6$ to have a big ass keyboard, that weighs a fuck ton thanx to the metal back plate, to have it couried 800km.

It cost 12$ to courier a fucking raspberry pi from the same city... what the actual fucking fuck. And to make it worse i had to pay double shipping cause i had to order the power supply from another site causr site A only had stock of pi's and site B only had stock of power supplies...

fuck my city needs more imported goods vendors

A customer brought in an older, beat-up machine and told us it wasn't booting. We noticed that his power supply was damaged, but checked it in for other diagnostics.

I found out he had a corrupted operating system, but with everything else on the computer, I didn't recommend fixing the computer.

Now, for reference, this is a Windows 7 computer with 10GB of RAM. But it also has a bent side-panel, the front-panel is hanging on by a thread, and it would also need the new power supply -- all of which would be over $200 USD.

When I finally relayed this info to him over the phone, we started talking about the system.

Him: So what do you think?

Me: I mean, this computer has some good specs, but with the damage, I wouldn't recommend repairing the computer. Now, this is your computer and you are more than welcome to tell me to shove it, but I'd recommend replacing it. We're at the breaking point of doing whatever you want to do, and it's your money that you're spending, but in my professional opinion, I don't think it's worth saving.

Him: Well, okay. I'll come in later and see what options I have

"U have got a super high power supply", I said to my windows user friend. :P

...Aaaand it's built!
Couple problems though:
- The power supply has massive coil whine when the computer is shut down
- I can't seem to get a windows installation on my USB drive

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

Goddamnit I am an idiot. I just fried a microcontroller because I didnt have the right power supply and I used it anyway because fuck it, right? So now I am not a single step closer to the thing I was trying to do but I fucked up my hardware and it is a huge pain in the ass until I get a new one and figure out all the problems with it. Arghn

There's a side project that I wanted to finish for some time now:

I built a pipboy (from Fallout 3) for a close friend - 3D printed and colored the parts, made a preliminary setup.
But to this day, it's still missing a power supply and all the proper wiring. (Jumper cables ARE not.)
Apart from that, I probably want to replace the RPi in there for a slimmer version.
Development is all done, implementation needed.

Almost died few minutes ago. My laptop was plugged to power, while I was using it, for last one hour. Then power cut and my laptop went off too. I was really afraid. Just 9 months ago I purchased a new battery for my laptop. When power came back, and I restarted my laptop, to check status, it was saying "Plugged in. Not charging" on windows. Now I was in serious shock. "Fuck battery died again. This time so soon". Also no red light which reflects charging but white, which reflects "laptop running on direct supply". It gave me some indication when it stopped showing red light during charging for last couple of days

I removed the battery and reinserted it. Replugged the charger. Now it's charging. And red light is back

This makes me even more serious. As similar to this, is what happened with me last time battery died.

Now let's see whether my laptop battery is going to see this night or not. Next few hours are crucial

Currently taking apart a 25 year old scalextric power supply, trying to work out why one side isn't working. I'm thinking about buying a soldering iron, but can't see anything obviously wrong...

The default USB voltage hould have been specified to 6 instead of 5 volts.

Six (6) volts would allow for longer cables than five (5) volts do, since the spare voltage compensates for the resistance of cables. This is even more crucial for USB hubs. USB hubs are highly dependable upon these days due to laptop vendors dropping the number of USB ports down to two or even one. I am looking at you, Medion.

If several devices are connected to a USB hub, the voltage can quickly drop below 4.5 volts due to the resistance between the USB hub ports and the computer's USB port, causing some devices to restart themselves even if the computer's USB port is not over capacity. If it were over capacity, it would just regulate down its output voltage to prevent overcurrent.

Lithium-ion batteries need at least 4.3 volts arriving at the battery terminals to fully charge, and mobile devices are typically not equipped with a boost converter. Even if they were, they are rather inefficient, meaning they would produce significant heat and waste a power bank's energy. Other USB devices such as flash drives and peripherals might power off below 4.5 volts. However, 6 volts have solid 1.7 volts of margin to 4.3 volts, more than twice the margin of 0.7 volts that 5 volts have. On the way from the power supply to the end device, the voltage has to pass several barriers which weaken it, including the cable, connector endings, and the end device's internals such as the charging controller.

Sure, there are quick charging standards such as by Qualcomm and MediaTek which support elevating voltages to nine (9), twelve (12), and even twenty (20) volts. However, they require support by both the charger and mobile device. If six (6) volts were the default USB voltage, all devices would have been designed to accept this voltage, and longer cables could have been used anywhere. Obviously, all USB devices should be able to run on five volts as well.

Six volts would have been more stable, flexible, and reliable.

So many power supplies 😂

Hey guys.
This was my project for today.
Power supply, 5v USB 25A x2; 12V 10A x2; extra power standard cables to power HDDs and such.
Plus a sand paper whatever it's called :p

Ps: Need to know how to power it without the standart power supply, with cables direct to the brush motor pins. Anyone knows? Have arduinos, l293, easy shields, uln2003a... Would one of this work?

Hope you guys like my 🤪 ideas

Almost finished yet.. Yea the power supply is on the wrong side, but it looks way cooler! #BlueLED

Psu >> cheap, low running cost power supply

So... Gonna turn my first psu in a low cost power supply for my projects.
Found this beauty, only 250W and has the description of all wires with Amps...
Nice :D

How about this..
So a few months ago there's this guy
He coughed.
He did nothing else.
He did not cover his mouth.
He did not even do it in his elbow.
He just did it.
He did it at a fish market in china..
...
And now today as the world is grinding to a hault I just hope he is satisfied.
ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!

So anyway trapped at home. Nothing to do. Its cold today. Got to reduce the fan speeds on that rigs and bump the power a bit. There not so cold now :)

Ok on a serious note that coughing idiot is to blame for this cold.
One ICE AGE coming up. Global warming fans hold on to your chai. This one is a shocker..

So it turns out shutting down the world have caused CO2 levels to drop as cars dont drive and factories dont work and all the powerplants suddenly find people no longer want more power.
Thing is plantd are addaptive and they enlage the pores on the underside of thier leaves depending on the CO2 levels.
So the plants been running at 100% eat CO2 for a while now.
Then CO2 supply drop to lowest in 100 years.
Plants still eating CO2 at 100% so they did not get memmo yet. CO2 now getting used up faster than being made. Greenhouse no more.
Polar ice caps nows your turn.
First up south pole winter is coming your way.
It will freeze ice cap bigger than past 100 years. The ice will sit there making earth lobsided with all the ice on one end and none on the other .
Lobsided earth is a spinning ball
Lobsided balls change how they spin
The rotation of earh now affected by a cough.
In 6-8 months winter goes north.
CO2 all but eaten up by then. World still rather dead as the afternath is felt.
Northen poler cap freeze all the way to london again. First time in 5000 years.
All because of a bloody cough.

Its the end of the world as we know it and here i am waiting for unreal to complie just like usual..

So remember dont cough near others if someone cough near you then tel them to
Far cough

I found a cooler master atx with built in power for like half the price of a cm atx and a cm power supply yay

What's the most efficient motor driver for a small DC motor that I want to run off a 5V source for aurdino?

I previously had a L293D and it was inefficient as fuck, it got so hot that almost burnt my finger, (ran it from a 12V supply) and it dropped a good 2 volts from power supply to motor.

Is there a good enough off the shelf driver or do I have to make a H-bridge myself using MOFSETs?

I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.

Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.

Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.

When I was 7, my dad bought me a pc. (in 2007). It had some sort of pentium processor and 2 gb ram. I had that pc until I turned 18. We changed the power supply some ports and mouse / keyboard but that's it. I learned all the programming basics, design even animation on that pc. It would take days to render a simple 2D animation. When I finally got the chance to go to a university and move overseas, I bought my own pc. As a full fee paying student, I still couldn't afford the latest and the greatest tech. I somehow bought a core i7, and with 8 gb ram, no bells and whistles. And now I'm almost 21. So when my friends recommend me killer games, I'm sorry fam, call me maybe 10 years later.

Lots of electrical scrap and a power supply and so on.

My power supply project is almost completely done (it's in a working state but still needs some finishing touches) but I procrastinated with it for nearly 2 weeks. The reason being that the next step (making a side panel and soldering some 3600W AC lines to the ones inside of the unit) fucking sucks. I've done that soldering of 4 wires (3 inside lines, 1 coming in from the outside) before, and I honestly can't think of many things that I've cursed and sworn on as frantically as I did on this. This time of course being no different, plus some unstoppable coughing and stuffed nose, just because my body felt like acting up. Can't say that I had a good time.

But that's not really the point of this.. it's more about the procrastination part. It isn't really procrastination as in just being too lazy to get around doing something, is it? It's more like the reluctance to do something that you know is going to suck really bad. And even now I've only quarter-assed it (well probably half-assed, quarter-assed would've been the crocodile wires between the inner and outer AC lines.. just dangling on the floor, waiting for someone to step on.. beautifully dangerous, deadly almost.. just the way I like it :3)... Anyway, how do you get the "umpf" to do something that you really dislike and don't want to do, without waiting for 2 weeks to finally get around doing it?

Couldn’t get my Mac start once I closed the lid.
Didn’t realise it goes sleep automatically once the power supply disconnected 😂

IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!

One of my first rants was about my PC dying. I just fixed it today! Bought a new power supply because I was suspecting that that was the issue. Turns out I was just a moron and forgot to plug in the 12v ATX pins!

Still a good PSU purchase for whatever next rig I build. Long live my PC!

Anyone knows how to start a hard drive without power supply?
I'm hacking a few old disks and don't want to use a full power supply

[Question]
What type of amplifier circuit would I need to power a 60w 8ohm speaker or can you recommend any prebuilt amplifier boards ?

[TLDR;]
I spotted the below stuff while cleaning out my junk cupboard and thought it might be a fun side project to convert them into a portable bluetooth speaker since the earphones are shit anyway and I've always wanted to learn more about amplifiers.

The only question remaining is how to amplify the headphone output signal enough to power the speaker. I plan on either using cells from old laptop batteries or a motorbike battery as a power supply so input voltage would be roughly 10-12v.

The speaker is from a set I salvaged from an old 80's hifi and has excellent sound quality, would mounting the components inside it have a large negative effect on it's sound?

Also although I would prefer to make my own amplifier board as a learning experience the goal is to have a portable speaker with good sound quality... is this something I'm likely to get from my first attempt at an amplifier or should I rather get a ready made board?

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

Arduino + breadboard power supply MB102.
Noob question I know, but how do I connect the power supply to the arduino? 5v to 5v and GND to GND? Or vin? Or the other first pin above res?
Help?
@Condor

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but couldn' find the proper reddit about to get this combo so, I want to know if this runs Ubuntu Xenial and what kind of power supply do I need.

I'm planning to use for mining with minergate software and mine XMR.

What's your opinion?

Please slap me in the face... A week ago I remove my Linux partition on my main rig because I don't have a use for Linux on that system. But I forgot to deal with the bootloader.... Then a week after when I rebooted for whatever reason, I got a grub rescue (obviously). And I realized I had no hard drive with a rescue tool to boot on (I don't use optic drives). Took me 2 hours to find my sata2usb cable to recover an iso and put it on my utility hard drive... Then, when trying to set a proper bootloader, it listed all my disks, except the main SSD I wanted. Turns out, another hour later, I found that the power supply for that drive was a bit unplugged because I had to remove one of the drive to access it. All is running well now, but I wasted way too much time on that 😤

Ok, there is one good thing. I've reached 333 +1's. Thank you all guys!

Sooo... a few days ago my Power supply from my home pc died. It was a good one, but I don't know.. it just burned nearly..
Today I've received a new one.
Plugged everything in. PC runs - or not?? WTF! Windows (yeah, at home still Windows ) isn't booting anymore. Hardware changes detected. I think, through the broken Power supply something got damaged.. shit.. and know what - don't have any Backup. Shit. At least some important data is on another hdd, which hopefully is fine. Now I'm trying to rescue the data with another hdd installing a fresh Windows.

Whish me luck!

PS: No, the power supply wasn't from Samsung, even when it exploded nearly :P