Odin/Dallas RTC modules with integrated battery (WHL #107)

Have you ever desoldered one of those ancient RTC modules from an equally ancient PC mainboard?
There was a time in the 1990s where board manufacturers abandoned the old leaky NiCd buffering cells and instead of hopping onto the CR2032 lithium train. They used Dallas modules (back when Dallas was still Dallas and not Maxim…which also ceased to exist in 2021 when they were bought by Analog) that served as real time clocks and battery backed SRAM for some 100 bytes of BIOS settings.
Well yeah, these are terrible as the battery isn’t replaceable since it is moulded into the bulky case. […]

16th March 2025 16th March 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Important correction on Samsung 970 Evo Plus revisions (WHL #106F1)

“Houston, we got a problem….the fake news detector just went off!”

THE WHAT?

In all seriousness, my previous post contained a factual error. One that I discovered after spending my own money to specifically buy two 970 Evo Plus SSDs of the new revision. Two brand new ones to be precise (wouldn’t really call it NOS, but eBay is currently full of unopened late 2023 drives for very close to street prices, not sure what’s going on), so the seller only posted pictures of the package with fully intact seal. And when I opened it earlier this week…well, two “old” ones popped out. […]

2nd March 2025 3rd March 2025 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

The Samsung 970 Evo Plus – and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus (WHL #106)

! ! ! IMPORTANT: ALSO READ WHL #106F1 FOR A MAJOR CORRECTION ON PACKAGING. ! ! !

Quick PSA, as this isn’t common knowledge and I only stumbled upon it after purchasing FIVE disks for my future RAID array…: There are TWO revisions of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD!

Sadly, I’m too lazy to either wipe off my marker or digitally remove it, so it’s not too hard to spot the difference:

Well, the two drives in the center are the newer ones, despite having date codes 02/2022 and 10/2023, while the others were made in 08/2021 and 05/2023 (!). […]

17th February 2025 3rd March 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Mounting holes of the Netgear GS108v1 (WHL #105)

This week we have feel-good content for nerds and OCD people: The Netgear GS108 gigabit switch. The GS108v1 to be precise. Likely the first consumer gigabit switch from Netgear, and gigabit ethernet has been around for, uhh, 20 years now.

This brick with a chassis much wider than required for the ports alone: (and a maximum power draw of 2.5A at 5V, or 12.5W…)

Since we moved to a new building at work in the last two weeks, the entire office with all the R&D stuff needs to be rearranged and made to fit. One of the many puzzle pieces is some miniPC that is the master control unit for several downstream PCBs. […]

26th January 2025 26th January 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Car racing in stationary cars (#E25)

Well, it’s been a bit quiet here lately, as I went from very time-consuming car enjoyment at the very end of 2024 to very time-consuming car troubles at the very beginning of 2025. And while I can only share that the latter is FUCKING EXPENSIVE, I have a little more stuff on hand for the former. Since the battle for track times and fame in Beach Buggy Racing is currently flaring up in the German Tesla forum TFF, I thought taping a couple of runs would add value. So I went ahead and captured some…18 hours of it. To show off the best rounds (as there is very little content on Youtube), and to study things like item effects and the perfect racing lines (there’s none), and of course to compile dumb shit into funny videos. […]

12th January 2025 12th January 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Bosch (BSH) spare part packaging (#R24)

Hey Bosch!

Very recently, I repaired the induction cooktop of a former coworker. Bosch/Schott branded (PXV995DC1E?), large 90×50 field with 5+2 zones, somewhat on the more expensive side of things, but likely also available from the other BSH brands like Siemens, Neff, or Constructa. The fault was a partially unresponsive touchy-feely interface, and since those cooktops do not have separate hardware buttons and knobs, it’s a bit of a problem when more and more buttons die. Especially the one that turns everything on and off, but also heating on full throttle all the time isn’t very helpful. […]

8th December 2024 8th December 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Blueendless External SSD Hard Disk NVME Enclosure 10G Online Reading Writing Speed SSD Case For M.2 NVME SD Docking Station (WHL #104)

Ah, well, it’s December already, the time for some larger hardware changes (when people have some spare time in case things go wrong, which they often do – and some even have a higher budget at that time).

Storage. Once again.

So I was pondering about my options. Yeah, the 836 Supermicro case with its 16 LFF bays is terrific, and I like the options in terms of computing power and hard drives (including the cheapo options of “small, but very many”) very much. But it’s inconvenient to use when powering off after access, or terribly expensive when running it 24/7 (electricity is 0.3€/kWh!). […]

1st December 2024 2nd December 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Fluke product registration card (#E24)

Silly people doing silly things.

Today: Fluke product registration via snail mail.

In the dark ages of the Interwebs™, retail hardware often came with some registration post card. I think I never sent one in, but apparently this was how one would subscribe to real newsletters on colourful dead tree.

Five months ago, in a low-key effort to clean up the office for a) a cleaner office (duh!) and b) less junk around that needs to be sorted, thrown out or boxed before early January ’25 when the company moves to a new building, I sifted through stuff from a random rack. […]

17th November 2024 17th November 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Processing a gigabyte of data (#E23)

Processing a gigabyte of work data…at home.

So?

Everybody had log files of mundane server daemons that spilled over, what’s the big news on a gig of data?

Will he post pics of tiny USB drives and say “look what I found”?

Yeah. Kinda.

At work, we’re preparing to move to a new building, purpose-built to our specs. We’ve been in the old one for like 30+ years and there are still plenty of coworkers that started at this era. It won’t be as pretty as the current one and it absolutely will not have a view like this (horses not included during winter) – but it will feature enough space for offices and production areas. […]

27th October 2024 28th October 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Allit EuroPlus Flex assortment box label holders (#P45)

Once a more a simple 3D printing part. Today, that’ll go into one of the excellent yet affordable (10€-ish, depending on the size of the swappable containers) “EuroPlus Flex” assortment box made by Allit. One of those (yup, stolen right from the manufacturer):

Outer size of that specific product is fixed at 370mm x 295mm x 55mm, and the inside is, aside from the front part that integrates the handle, fully configurable. There are 1×1 boxes in red, 2×1 in yellow and 2×2 in blue. For really large items that still need to be inside a container, there are also 3×2 green and 4×2 gray ones (not shown here), but I tend to just stick them in there without a container. […]

13th October 2024 14th October 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment