Disqus comment system (#E17)

I just pulled the plug on the onboard WordPress comment system in favour of a Disqus plugin. While I’m not entirely sure if that is a good idea and will stay that way, the regular comment system is utterly broken in today’s internet. There’s not too many visitors to the site in general and registering for a comment is a hassle, but leaving the comment system open to any bot out there simply doesn’t cut it. Even with the former regulations in place, the spam-to-comment ratio was around 150:1, and the spam detection isn’t 100% accurate as well. […]

15th May 2022 16th May 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

ioBroker adapters and Raspberry Pi hardware pricing (#R14)

A quick service post for this week: RPis are pretty expensive nowadays because of “the chip shortage” (and people cashing in) – and maybe you don’t even need an upgrade when just running a couple of ioBroker things on your 1GB unit.

Well, I’ve upgraded my 3B+ from stretch to buster to bullseye earlier today, broke a few things (php8.0-mysql…not a database upgrade issue on ioBroker despite (null) values everywhere), changed swap size from 512M to 2G, and finally installed a docker image (why…) of teslamate. […]

24th April 2022 17th April 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

Flashlight comparison – Dimmable Triple XM-L2 vs USB rechargeable XPL HI (WHL #74)

China gadgets, finally :cool:

Both of these have been laying around for years now. Time for a review – we currently got a little bit of a snowy April, but mosquito season has already started and four of those bastards have made it inside my living room. No survivors :twisted: And of course, those flashlights can also be used for, you know, flashlight stuff. Finding things, not tripping over other things, sitting around with empty batteries and so on…

So, the contenders:

“Roxane X6 XPL HI 1850LM 650m Type-C Rechargeable LED Flashlight IPX7 Waterproof USB Charging 26650 Powerful Searchlight – Cool White”, bought from Banggood almost two years ago at 25,56€ including shipping. […]

10th April 2022 11th April 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

AMD Radeon R9 380 to Radeon RX 560 upgrade/downgrade remarks (WHL #73)

Groan, computer hardware again, please spare us… :mad:

Well, in this day and age of mismanagement, “chip shortage” and even war in Europe, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. I scored a graphics card on eBay (aftermath of my Covid quarantine) and I need to get rid of the old one as quickly as possible. As insane as GPU prices are nowadays, I don’t think a card that was released in June 2015 (close to fucking seven years ago) and that has a current market value still equal/higher than what I paid for in 2018 will ever go up in price again, ever. […]

27th March 2022 28th March 2022 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

NVMe boot on unsupported platforms via Clover (#P42)

A bit more background info on last week’s NVMe adapter board used on the incompatible Fujitsu D3348-B1 2011v3 platform.

The Clover boot manager has been around for quite some time now, and its predecessor is already well over a decade old. It once formed from the rEFIt boot loader back when Hackintoshs were the cool gadget to have, and it had an intermediate fork step with rEFInd (oh those EFI puns…). Thankfully I’m really late to the M.2 party (or any other SSD form factors other than 2.5″/3.5″, really) for hardware compatibility reasons, and so all the early adopter issues have been ironed out over the years. […]

13th March 2022 8th April 2022 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

SSD M.2 NVME to PCI-E 4.0 X4 Riser Card Replacement PCI-Express X4/X8/X16 M Key Adapter Card Computer Accessory (WHL #72)

More computer stuff this week, but with parts directly shipped from China.

With the somewhat recent upgrade from a socket 2011 to a 2011-3 desktop board, I also made the switch from Windows 7 to 10. Not that I like any of those, but more and more software will only work with the latter, and some specific tool that I wanted to try basically requires 10 or defaults into a non-hardware accelerated mode that is simply pointless to use. As I had a Win 10 diagnostics M.2 drive handy, that was my starting point.

Thing is – since I cheaped out on the board revision for a significant discount, it does not support v4 CPUs (which I’m fine with), and it also does not support NVMe booting (which would have been nice). […]

6th March 2022 6th March 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

Mellanox ConnectX-3 metal brackets (WHL #42F2)

No real content this week, just a quick PSA that metal brackets for the ConnectX-3 MCX311A-XCAT 10GbE cards are now available from Chinese sources at very reasonable prices.
The former 3D printed bracket(s) worked fine for more than three years, but always stood out and also required a longer screw due to the material thickness. Finally someone is selling these as metal parts – I don’t think they are original ones as they could be deburred a bit better, but as long as they fit, it’ll do. Available on eBay from multiple sellers already, mine was 4.39 USD including shipping and local 19% VAT. […]

20th February 2022 20th February 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

Samsung USB 3.1 Flash Drive BAR Plus MUF-256BE3/EU – further degradation(WHL #45F1)

Well here’s a first :lol:
I’m about to RMA a piece of hardware, and I needed performance data from when the thing was new. Probably got a screenshot from back then, but searching for it on a machine that is inconvenient to access…just search the interwebs instead. And so I did, and entered the Google image search, and found what I needed. Yeah, turns out I just found my very own website. :unsure:

So, here’s the culprit again:

It’s not used that often, currently holds 110GB of WSUS data and some deep learning test dataset, so almost half of the drive is empty and performance is getting worse. […]

6th February 2022 6th February 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

Samsung CLX-6200FX series RTC battery replacement (#P41)

Tutorial time! We don’t have a tutorial category yet? Well, it’ll be a project then…

Let’s just skip all the YouTube tutorial BS with two-minute intros on volume 9001 and thanking their sponsors entirely, and get to the point:

You got a Samsung CLX-6200FX series printer (6220 and 6250 – probably also their predecessors 6200, 6210 and 6240) that wants you to set the date and time on every power cycle, and you’re fed up with it? Great, Samsung wasn’t a dick about servicing, so here’s what you need:

* One new CR2023 3V lithium primary cell
* A small Philips or flat head screwdriver
* An ESD strap or a grounded piece of metal nearby
* The damn printer
* Enough space to access the back of the printer (no need to lift it)
* Ten minutes of free time

Same procedure by the way for adding or replacing extended memory, see below for details. […]

23rd January 2022 23rd January 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

Supermicro 815 1U case 2,5″ HDD and RAID card battery holder (#P40)

New year, new hardware. Given space (in general, as well as in this specific case) is limited, old hardware has to go. So it’s about time post this 3D printed thingy, since the related hardware is about to be sold.

Now, the Supermicro 815 case, CSE815, SC815 or whatever prefix is en vogue nowadays, is one of those 1U pizza boxes. Shout-out to Supermicro for using webp images on their website already – but sticking to 261 x 222 px resolution for the full-size file.

Anyway, these come in two dozen varieties plus the EOL ones, and all of them have four 3.5″ HDD hotplug caddies in the front and some 1 to 3 card slots in the back, since it is a tiny case at 1U or 44mm height regardless of the 19″ width. […]

9th January 2022 9th January 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment