Gadget shopping in China…is dead (#R7F1)

ICYMI: Some bullshit commission inside the EU has found that shops outside of the EU do not have to deal with the full force of European bullshit bureaucracy and have therefore a significant advantage over EU vendors – and therefore need to be punished to level the field. And to facilitate that, they implemented a 3€ customs fee for imported goods – starting July 1st, 2026. The fee applies to all parcels below a value 150€ (we had fees and taxes for those already in place before that), and to be specific, applies to every group of goods that have a distinct tariff number. […]

9th August 2026 10th August 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

VOVANE Electric Dust Blower, 150000RPM Air Duster Compressed Air Spray, 3-Speed Super Power Cordless Air Duster, Mini Blower Battery for PC Cleaning Kit, Keyboard, Car, Sofa (WHL #121)

This is puzzling.

Around two months ago, I bought one of these electric (cordless) air dusters. I do technically own some pressurized air equipment (14l tank, 12V pump and manual pump), but it’s always bulky and inconvenient to use. Since battery technology has advanced so much over the last couple of years…some nifty dude invented the server fan on a 18650. And aside from actually filling things up with a defined pressure, that’s basically good enough for most tasks that mainly consist of “dusting things off” needs. […]

26th July 2026 27th July 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Intenso High Speed Line 125GB update (WHL #117F1)

Tiny update on the USB drive with less-than-advertised capacity: I have now two replies in my mailbox, one from the manufacturer Intenso, one from the local Eichamt (Weights and measures office).

The manufacturer states, after a bit of bullshit concerning my “professional” use of this “home/SOHO” device (they know exactly that have replaced the excellent chipset with cheap crap, and now a week of use at the office is misuse and voids the warranty, degrades performance, blabla):

Diese fehlende Kapazität ist für ein Speichermedium (im Bereich Consumer Electronics) marktüblich.

[…]
12th July 2026 12th July 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

airnef and the Sony ILCE6100 (α6100) (WHL #120)

I’ve been thinking about a slight upgrade to my main camera, the Sony RX100M2. I got it quite a while ago, *checks blog post history*, in early 2019, and since it is a compact camera, it hasn’t been modified, despite the wide variety of tasks that I threw at it. It’s still decent for most jobs, it works most of the time (sometimes you gotta slap it back into action when the sensor reads garbage, and the mode wheel has been acting up lately), but e.g. on my 2 week trip to Xinzo de Limia, I thought about a backup device in case something happens, for whatever cause/reason. […]

28th June 2026 29th June 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Cdycam 3pcs/1bag PoE Splitter Power Over Ethernet 48V to 12V IEEE802.3af Standard Type 15W Power Supply Module For NonPoe Camera (WHL #119)

Here’s something that lasted just shy of five years – a PoE to 12V converter.

I just checked, I never wrote about these things…so here we go. Last week, the ESP32 in my living room stopped working. It does serve as a sensor station (temperature, humidity) for the DECT heater valve in the living room, and it also runs some LED stripes around the house, some of which are automated via iobroker, and some are activated by infrared sensors. They all can be changed over a simple web interface as well. Turns out: The ESP is fine, but the power supply, a PoE to 12V converter, is dead. […]

7th June 2026 7th June 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

Width 6mm to 17mm Self-adhesive EPDM Foaming Strips Self-adhesive Flat Square Strip Glued EPDM Foaming Sealing Strips (WHL #118)

Slot covers. Slot covers for aluminium extrusions. That’s the topic for today.

Just the other day I was thinking about sealing against a 2020 extrusion slot. In a sort-of air-tight way. And after tinkering and ordering a bunch of samples of things that could work, I had a second look into one of the options: This could work for pure looks as well.

You see, the classic 40×40 (or larger, like 40×80, 40×160 if you like it beefy) aluminium profiles have readily available sealing strips against dust. Depending on exact slot type (since there are a couple of manufacturers/specifications), the typical slot to cover is like 8mm wide and goes 14ish millimeters deep. […]

17th May 2026 17th May 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment

LabJack U6 Pro (and others) self-test script (#P53)

On the eternal quest of de-cluttering the living room, I picked up a bunch of stored “defective” LabJack units the other day. These are USB DAQ modules with generally very decent specs, in the case of the U6 Pro a 24bit (22bit effective) DAC with 14-port multiplexing (so 14 analogue ports, or 7 differential analogue ports), fixed 10µA and 200µA sources, two 12bit DACs, internal temperature compensation for temperature probes, 20 GPIOs and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff over the DA15 and DC37 Sub-D ports. All of them were discarded with AIN failure…and that didn’t add up. […]

3rd May 2026 4th May 2026 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

Intenso High Speed Line 128GB (WHL #117)

At work, we tend to use those godawful USB thumb drives that generally fall into two categories:

  • Ancient (and therefore tiny in capacity)
  • Cheap marketing giveaways (and therefore dog slow)

    Some even cover both bases and were the slow, crappy type ten or even fifteen years ago – and they have our own logo printed on them, because they were surplus items whenever the company logo changed.

    Sure, that happens for a lot of companies, but it’s fucking annoying, it’s embarrassing to operate in such a way, and it just wastes company time.

[…]
19th April 2026 20th April 2026 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Tesla Model S Thermal Controller (#P52F1)

Aaaanother Tesla blog entry, yawn…

This is a follow-up to #P52, the grounding stud issue of the legacy Model S. Technically, as of yesterday, all Model S are legacy cars, Tesla axed both S and X and just sells off remaining inventory. Sad to see it go…

So, with the power issue resolved, this THC_w0105 coolant low warning still showed up basically immediately and never really went away. The coolant reservoir is still filled to spec, so nothing is leaking, but the sensor reading is garbage. I visited the Heilbronn service center, and they confirmed that the sensor upon power cycling just reads garbage, but they didn’t have one in stock. […]

5th April 2026 5th April 2026 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Tesla × atg (#E28)

Quick change of plans for today: Tesla uploaded a short video to Youtube this morning called TERAFAB.

While it’s not exactly going viral at 200k views within 20 hours, it’s doing reasonably well given Tesla has 2.9 million subscribers as of now. Clearly, there’s room for more.

The interesting part (for me) however is 0:37. Out of all the Tesla and SpaceX products and factory equipment shown, there’s something that is NOT made by Tesla. Not shown for a terribly long time and also unlabelled, but it does stand out:

That is a purchased machine. […]

22nd March 2026 23rd March 2026 By Bzzz In No Comment